Location of Sighting: Pacific Ocean West of Mexico (Exact Location Unknown)
Date of Sighting: February 1, 2012
Time of Sighting: 9:10 PM Local Time
Description: Off the jogging track of the cruise ship I took a picture of the sunset and THIS is what appears blocking the sun. This is Unedited direct footage. Does Anyone have a clue? Flip video did not show this a moment earlier through the window, but did show it directly over the rail when there was nothing between me and the view?
Note: I believe that this is an artifact as the result of taking a video directly into the Sun. I have seen this before, but I don’t know for sure what causes it. The video is not shown as it shows no movement of the black object (camera artifact). A still image extracted from the video is shown.
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The sun causes over saturation of the camera sensor which forces the pixels to, in effect, turn off, resulting in a black spot.
Thanks very much for the explanation. I knew that the dark spot was a camera artifact, but I wasn’t sure of the details.