What could cause an anomaly like this ?

[MeanGreen]

I was trying to get a decent beam shot of my CNI GLP-532 250mW for my sale thread. This is one of the images I got. To me it looks like a floating sphere, and the sphere is in front of my exercise bike.

I was holding both the laser and the camera in my hand at the same time, and the beam was directed at my curtains.

 

[MeanGreen]

Here's a closer crop of the same image.

 

[hugo999999]

wow never seen that before, but i would probably put it down to the camera being overloaded and making artifacts

 

[aryntha]

no, it's just lens flare. Reflections between the multiple elements of the lens, and then back into the sensor. This just happens to be particularly well-centered lens flare.

 

[CDHDC]

Perhaps, your house is hauntedLOL

 

[Coherent Light]

It is one of the coolest Lens Flare Photographs I have ever seen. I would hang onto to it, and use it in one of the photo contests that pop up now and then.

 

[AJ_Dual]

Yes, it's lens flare, however the monochromatic nature of laser light also probably made that possible.

You can minimize it as much as possible, but any/all optical elements have SOME chromatic aberration, the same thing that makes a prism spread white light out into a spectrum. Each frequency has it's own index of refraction through a certain medium.

When taking photographs with a full spectrum source such as incandescent or sunlight, or even a multi-line source like a Xenon flash or flourescent light, the number of frequencies spread out means that even if a particular color is just right, there's so little of that one precise line, you never see the lens flare being "just so".

So even though there probably is 532nm light in sunlight or flash sources of light, the aperture is going to be way different anyway when taking those pictures.

With all that pure 532nm light, and it being the only you just hit a sweet spot in the refraction of the lenses where it all bounced in that neat circular interference pattern... (you can see some constructive/destructive waves in the circles as they progress inward too... neat!)

So it was a "perfect storm" of exposure, aperture, and a single line coherent light source providing all the illumination for the shot that caused it.

 

[chipdouglas]

an astroid.... watch from 15sec-27sec



michael

 

[Arayan]

In any case the final effect is nice