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Comment by pps | Hacker News Reader

I, on the other hand, don't understand why people assume that all photos should be great looking. I own Samsung Galaxy S9+ and the quick close photos it takes are very good, but when I want to focus on something that is 20 meters apart it looks bad. Pictures taken at night are super bad. I know that there are some magnificent smartphones in the wild, but I doubt most people have them... Obviously people want to believe and will post grainy looking things as UFOs, but in reality it's also not that easy to make good, sharp photo or video for objects from further away.

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Nobody assumes all photos should be great looking, but if there were really spacecraft or aircraft of foreign origin, wouldn't you expect the occasional high-quality image or video of it?

Instead we only see blurry UFO images, because all images that aren't blurry turn out to show mundane things.

No I wouldn't expect that. Assuming these things could be real (the only thing I could even imagine would be some form of a probe without live being on board) how many of them could be flying here? There are only a couple of thousands reported sightings a year - even if some of them would be real (which I don't believe) it's obvious to me that the chance that a real alien spaceship is captured on high-quality image/video is super small and this is not an argument for them not being real, there are much better and honest ways to disbelieve that (mainly knowing some physics and how big are the distances between star systems).

US navy surface vessels have state of the art electro-optical sensors capable of taking very detailed photos and videos of airborne and surface targets.

These are used for both SAR and for target identification purposes you don’t want to blow up another civilian aircraft or a fishing vessel by mistaking it for with a military target.

I don’t know exactly what the US is running but sensors from other countries I’ve seen are capable of reading the tail number of a passenger jet from a substantial distance.

These sensors are also thermally stabilized and corrected for atmospheric disturbances as much as possible, and usually capable of visual spectrum + NIR and NUV to provide even higher fidelity.

If these sightings around carrier battle groups and fleets are indeed so common we should have pretty decent evidence of what these things are.

If that's true, that's another reason to not believe in US army engagement into that topic. Some of the released videos are easy to debunk (like the "pyramid ufo" which in reality is bokeh effect as proven by Mick West https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest/videos and others) and are still being considered as unexplained by US army or whoever did this recent UFO report.

These are the sort of sensors that are on surface vessels https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30057/u-s-warships-hav...

These systems are powerful and precise enough to be used for fine grained targeting, in fact in many cases the guns of the ship and the CIWS systems will be guided with electro optical sensors rather than radar.

Radar picks things up, the ElOp system then interrogates the target, ranges it with with a laser which provides much higher precision than radar range finding and if need be guns go brrrttt…

All right. For some reason they didn't use that before - maybe it wasn't available at the time, or maybe they are using that, but they deliberately want to spread disinformation. Anyway, we'll see how it will go with this linked project, it's privately funded and it will require new research, so there is no harm in doing that, only new opportunities.

Keep in mind that DSLRs were sold in huge numbers, and many come with great telephoto or zoom lenses.

Why is it that nobody has ever obtained an in-focus picture of a mysterious flying craft?

I mean, I would understand if a significant proportion were out-of-focus, or a tiny dot due to distance. But... never? Ever ever? Not one? Not in the history of the human race? With billions of phone cameras in pockets? Hundreds of millions of "proper" cameras out there, and at least a few million high-end DSLRs with decent glass attached?

Makes it seem like UFOs are the invisible dragon in my garage, if you know what I mean...

I suggest grabbing a random DSLR with decent glass and trying to capture a bird in flight against the sky. Most of the time not even the species will be discernable. People with no prior experience photographing birds will have a hard time taking anything that is not blurry. It is actually not that easy even tracking something in flight through the viewfinder, especially at long focal lengths. Shaking, focus / depth of field, dynamic range, sensor noise and exposure time all work against you.

So I would be extremely suspicious of sharp clear properly exposed pictures of UFOs.

Birds are much harder to take pictures of than a UFO would, though. They are flying only a few meters above you, therefore having much higher and less predictable angular velocity, as well as requiring more lens movement to focus compared to infinity.

I can take clear pictures of airplanes flying ~400m above me without any issues.

I shoot birds in flight as a hobby. It takes some skill, but it's not _that_ hard. And a bird taking up 1/4 of your FOV is close enough that you have to focus on it. A plane/UFO taking up 1/4 of your FOV is much further away, and you can just pre-set your focus at 'infinity'. >1% of UFO photos should definitely be taken with good equipment by someone who knows how to use it.

With my DSLR I took many zoomed photos of airplanes over passing (not landing). The pictures were clear, you could see many details.

Can you upload a few to imgur and link them?

(I don't think you are lying, but it's nice to see an example. Also I strongly like "pics or it didn't happen".)

I'm not the GP however I do the same, and even as a fairly lousy photographer I'm able to get photos where you can usually see some reasonable detail. Here are some examples: https://imgur.com/a/Nr5NIgt

All shot on a Canon 1100D with a 75-300mm zoom lens, using manual focus with the "full auto" mode for controlling aperture, shutter time etc. Usually I am leaning out of a window or standing in my garden to capture these shots.

As you can see, none of these images are particularly "good": the subjects in the first three images are underexposed due to their dark colouring against a light background, some are slightly out of focus, some show evidence of dirt or other marks on the camera sensor, yet you can still make out various details on all of them. One would imagine that if there were an equivalent photo of an actual "alien" UFO, it would be on the front page of newspapers across the world.

Nice!

(One trick that I use for family photos is to use a delay of 1 second, to avoid the movement when I press the shutter. (It's not useful when there are kids. One second later they are in another room.))

I've been meaning to pick up a shutter release accessory for a while now since the 1100D only has 10s shutter delay in automatic modes, or 2s delay in the manual modes. Fortunately the movement when pressing the shutter button isn't much of a problem for these type of shots as the camera + lens is weighty and quite well balanced.

I'm from Mick West "camp" ( https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest/videos ) - you don't need to try argue with me that UFOs are not aliens, BUT "there are billions of phone cameras" is simply a bad argument IMO. My phone is quite old now, but still is way above what most people in the world have, and I know that I wouldn't be able to make good photo of something on the sky, because I tried (wasn't supposed to be UFOs of course). I'm sure there are ways to do good photos for objects from distance with this and even weaker phones, but I, like most people, didn't invest my time into it. Also - let's be honest - you see your supersharp, ideal photo/video of weird spaceship-like object from some random human with great camera: would you really believe it's real? I know I wouldn't, it's just to easy to fake things.

It's not that easy though. First you have to rule out the night cases, and then it's not that easy to catch a moving object with your phone in the focus.

But I do agree with your sentiment.

Phone cameras are not built to take clear pictures of objects miles away from you.

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