This photo (right) was taken by my neighbour in Tucson, Arizona, facing west at sunset. What is the peculiar light phenomenon?
鈥� The mysterious light in the photo appears to be that of a relatively small, out-of-focus object close to the lens, which has been caught by the flash of the camera. We know it isn鈥檛 a shaft of light from the sun for a number of reasons: the reddish sun is over on the far left of the photo, beneath the light; the cloud is too thick to have a hole in it; and the angle of the light is wrong.
鈥淭he cloud is too thick to have a hole, and the angle is wrong. The light shaft is not coming from the sun鈥�
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The scene is relatively dim, and with an automatic camera the lens would be wide open and the flash automatically chosen. The illuminated object is probably darkish and angled towards the camera 鈥� you can see perspective, or , at work as the object appears to narrow towards the right, the end farthest from the lens. I can get a nearly identical effect by holding an angled toothpick close to a camera lens in a similar situation.
David Shelton, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
鈥� The bright light is an orb: a small object so close to the camera lens that it appears as an out-of-focus disc rather than as a point. These can be seen in photographs when they are close to a camera鈥檚 flash.
It is clear that a flash was used, otherwise the foreground wouldn鈥檛 be so bright, and that the object is moving, which is why it looks like a streak. The fading part of the streak corresponds to the fading of the flash, showing that the object is moving down and to the right. The size of the orb is related to its distance from the lens, its brightness and the total amount of light reflected. As the orb is bright, the object must have been fairly large and reflective.
Given the direction of its motion and the dark clouds, the most obvious possibility is a raindrop in a strong wind, maybe one of the first drops of a storm. Just above the central bush there is another suspiciously bright dot, which could be another raindrop, a little farther away but still out of focus.
Jan Willem Nienhuys, Waalre, The Netherlands