Photographer captures ultra-rare red ring of light over Italy | Hacker News Reader

Photographer captures ultra-rare red ring of light over Italy

petapixel.com

412 pointswalterbell81 comments

That looks terrific. Another unusual but equally beautiful event, also hard to see and record are the so called: "gigantic jets". It was previously discussed in HN in this thread: https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/10/25/close-encounter-w...

Beautiful indeed.

So interesting facts about that camera.

Most cameras have an IR Cut filter which acts to block IR light from the camera. This prevents IR light from flooding the sensor giving the image a red hue.

For astro photography IR light is useful. Hydrogen gas in nebulas can emit IR light. The human eye can't see it, but the camera sensor (without the IR Cut filter) can, and will be sensed as red light.

If one adds a visible light filter to the front of the camera, then the camera can take images of IR spectrum only.

Nikon and Canon both sell cameras without the IR Cut filter. Also third parties have been able to remove the IR Cut filter on existing camera bodies.

It works even on cheap webcams. Remove the piece of blue glass and replace it with the black plastic that covers the ir leds from an old remote.

I did it back enough in the day that I used a negative from getting pictures developed. I think I got the idea in Hardware Hacking Projects.

I did the same too, but funnily enough I stumbled upon it by accident when I was trying to find things that pass IR through but not visible light (like coke, sunglasses, ink etc.) using my Sony camera with nightvision mode. I was on a quest to get "x-ray vision".

I have one where I just removed the filter and added some IR led's for my 3d printer cam, that way I don't need visible light and the room can stay dark if I need it to be.

Phone cameras can often see into the IR spectrum, but by now most of them are able to deal with that properly to make the images look normal. I remember some 3MPix phone camera from like 2008 that created strong purple coloring for example with camp fires, especially if you took images of the embers (also with BBQs if done with charcoal). Just hold an IR remote and press a button on it and see if your phone sees the IR LED light up. My current smartphone sees it clearly. No idea how far into IR the A7s sensor without the IR filter goes; with IR filter it barely registers my IR remote (I have an unmodified A7s). It also depends on the glass/lens.

You can also buy Raspberry Pi cameras in the "NoIR" version that comes without the short pass filter, or do an easy DIY conversion in the case of the RPi HQ camera.

> ELVE stands for Emissions of Light and Very Low-Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.

It's a shame they didn't go with the full acronym, EOLAVLFPDTEPS.

Rolls off the tongue.

Was that a neighboring mountain to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano?

No, i think it was a third cousin of Amenhotep.

Shout out to the photographer who shot this. Lots of preparation going into something that was there for only a few seconds (and might not have shown up at all).

I wonder how many times they tried and failed to get the shot before. Assuming they had to try several times, good for them for sticking with it.

a few milliseconds!

And this is a still from a video they shot at 25 frames per second or one frame every 40 milliseconds. Very lucky indeed!

The frame captures what happens during those 40 milliseconds though. It's not as if it needed an instantaneous match.

Also depends on how much time there is between shots. Could have easily been missed there

That's not how exposure works. Typically shutter would be open 50% of frame length, maybe even more considering it's nighttime.

Yes, but typically the camera is not set to 51,200 ISO. I can't browse Instagram or Facebook without an account, and I can't figure out how to navigate his website, so I don't know how to check.

It is an A7s. Released in mid 2014, 12MPix resolution at FullFrame (36x24mm), FSI (front side illuminated), so large and very sensitive pixels. ISOs can be ramped up to 400k, but from my experience ISO 50k is about the limit if you want to avoid the image quality dropping through the floor. So this setting actually makes a lot of sense if you have to deal with video at these light levels.

Physical explanation: “One bolt was so strong, it generated an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The red ring marks the spot where the EMP hit Earth’s ionosphere. Normal lightning bolts carry 10 to 30 kilo-ampères of current; this bolt was about 10 times stronger than normal.”

I think they're so intense they generate weak gamma ray bursts:

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/rhessi_tgf....

> "TGFs [terrestrial gamma-ray flashes] have been associated with lightning strikes and may be related to red sprites and blue jets, side effects of thunderstorms that occur in the upper atmosphere and are typically only visible with high-altitude aircraft and satellites. The exact relationship between all these events is still unclear, though."

>ionosphere

All praise and glory to our protective ionosphere!

What would we do without it ..

Clearly the work of Jupiter. In all seriousness, this is the kind of thing that I imagine would have have been seen by the ancient Italians/Romans as the work of Jupiter or another one of the gods.

Only if they could see infrared

Could be ChatGPT showing that it’s upset over being banned. /s

Wikipedia: ELVES - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper-atmospheric_lightning#El...

> Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources

If you go by that acronym, the singular form of ELVES should be also ELVES, not ELVE, as in the article (plus using ELVE destroys a perfectly good acronym, because the singular form of Elves is Elf).

Ahhh they meant ELVLF PEPS. Why didn't they say so in the first place?

You can't imagine my frustration at the thought of everyone debating a circle of red light that I am unable to see. It's a pain in the ass to be colorblind.

Have you tried browser extensions like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/let-s-get-col... that adjust colors on the fly? I've had a couple of coworkers who benefited from it.

Wow, I had no idea this existed. These are huge and last so short. I'm surprised at the reach of these.

That scale on the map seems off to me, a non expert. It’s in the ionosphere but still I can’t believe it actually spanned the width of Italy…

It being so high up in the ionosphere makes it difficult to comprehend the size and distance of the ring. Visually, it's hard to gauge its position, both vertically and latitudinally.

the scale did blow my mind as well, I just did an extememly rough calc with the picture/ map

distance to the back of the ring is approx 441km, the ionisphere is 300km high giving the angle to the back of the circle to be around 34deg

with the front being 144km - giving an approx angle of 64deg high up

which kinda of fits the picture

Amazing! Would this have been visible to the naked eye?

It doesn’t sound like it

> Therefore, unlike sprites, which, on rare occasions can be seen by the naked eye, elves cannot. If one could see an elf, it would probably look like a giant, expanding ring—about 300 miles across--emanating from a point 60-65 miles in altitude and expanding outward

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/po...

I think technically yes, but it only lasts for a millisecond.

I wonder if the light is strong enough to imprint the retina so that your brain could perceive it despite the very small duration

Probably not, since it's mostly in infrared to begin with. It's not clear to me how visible it would be to the naked eye.

> “With normal cameras, they are difficult to photograph,” he says. “The light they emit is very low and in the infrared where the sensors cannot see. I use a camera without the normal IR Cut filter so it also sees the infrared band well.”

Fails to mention that the human eye can only see visible light waves. Infrared light has longer wavelengths and lower energy than visible light and cannot be seen with the human eye.

Whenever I see things like this – rare cloud formations, lights in the sky, etc – I always wonder what people thought was happening years ago.

This particular phenomenon is not visible to the human eye - its in the infra red and only manifests itself for a few milliseconds

What do isolated tribes think when they see Starlinks and other orbiting detritus ?

I found a larger image: https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/elgeya/68107732/1776018/1776...

And an otherworldly craft came sputtering through the transdimensional portal.

And in it is a Portal Dasher who is just zipping down to pick up a pizza for his hungry alien bros whose craft is cloaked in a geostationary orbit. They have the sad assignment to monitor and report home on the state of our technology down here. So far they continue to love the pizza from Italy, the BBQ brisket or ribs from Texas or Mississippi, anything from a food stand in Thailand or Vietnam, and they avoid the Swedish surstromming because the first and only time they tried it they had a hard time getting that smell out of their craft.

I don't understand how does he knows where to point the camera at, before the event occurs?

The photographer was following the storms and taking videos while pointing at one.

Still, it is a rare event and he had a camera without the IR filter set up to capture this particular phenomenon. So, either a lot of luck or a lot of dedication.

Inspired by the article I looked up how to convert my camera for IR photography and of course immediately I'm in DPreview forums.

RIP! There will be no other place after Amazon kills it.

It sounds as if the ring is actually infrared, not red, which means it would be invisible to the naked eye.

That map does not look correct. How could he be photographing through that much atmosphere?

Same way we can photograph the moon through all the atmosphere?

third impact

Wait, so it is not visible to the naked eye?

Only an Italian papparazzi can do that

Did anyone say "Mysterons"?

Don't want to say aliens but... ALIENS</guy with funny hair>

I think this means Italy has suffered a general hardware error and now we have to wrap it in a towel to try to get it to boot again.

(For the younger HN reader ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems)

I remember taking apart an Xbox with RRoD to find that all the solders had disintegrated. Reflowing may have helped but I just sold it to GameStop instead

The simulation runners got angry with the banning of ChatGPT in Italy as it risks diverting from the most fun universe-simulation mainline and have started to send signals to get us back on track.

It doesn't say in Wikipedia, what is the towel for?

If I recall, the theory was that wrapping your 360 in a towel and turning it on would heat it up so much that whatever microfractures in solder joints that may have been causing the RROD problem would temporarily bond together again and make your Xbox usable for a time.

It issue was with brittle solder on the boards and wrapping it in a towel and turning it on would allow it to get hot enough to (hopefully) re-flow broken connections.

The towel insulated the Xbox and remelted the BGA.

If you let it run wrapped in a towel it would sometimes temporarily fix it

Are we sure this is not AI generated?

Nope, no more AI in Italy, at least that's what our government decided. And no more English too.

Garante della Privacy decided that, not the government.

You mean openai decided

Are you equating English to ai?

https://www.thelocal.it/20230404/anglomania-why-italys-gover...

Have you read the legislation?

I think they're equating a different sentence talking about something different.

Thanks for mansplaining!

Ah Jesus, expect another angel to show up at any moment

Angel's, no. I think the Pope is summoning Satan again.

I was going for a bad Evangelion joke.

How bad is it that one of my first thoughts was "This is a MidJourney / DALL-E embellishment"?

Not AI, you can tell because it doesn't have creepy fingers.

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