In the City of Dancing Lights

The sky across the bay was a certain shade of summer twilight, and the lights in the downtown core had begun to wink on as the velvet of the night enveloped the city. After dinner, I decided to go run a few errands and take a detour to one of the bridges in the area, so I could experiment with night-time photography.

In particular, I wanted to test the long exposure effects available in my Pixel 7. I haven’t played around much with long exposure, so this was a great opportunity. Nothing odd about a grown man taking pictures on a bridge. Indeed, the bridge had been recently beautified and narrowfied so that pedestrians can enjoy the breathtaking views.

As I made my way there, I tested the long exposure effect on a bus on the opposite lane (flash off). I waited for the vehicle to approach, and then I began to record. I got the timing wrong, so I took another one. I liked the second one better. You can see that the effect stops halfway, where the camera automatically cuts off the exposure with neat results.

I walked further up the bridge, taking some interesting shots along the way. The horizon was dimly lit and mysterious bands of clouds rippled in the sky.

That party boat is lit

Looking down, I saw runners, who wore headlamps, trotting along the seawall. I pointed the camera with the long exposure setting, and it actually created a nice light trail effect.

Here you can see the normal shot without the light trails. It's automatically taken by the camera along with the long exposure results.

As it grew darker, I turned the camera towards oncoming traffic. It was difficult trying to get a shot of the lights and the city in the background. So, I experimented for a little while, and then growing bored, I went home.

Nothing out of the ordinary so far. Just a man on a bridge taking photographs to entertain and populate a global blockchain.

But then things took a mildly interesting turn.

When I got home and processed the images, I noticed that in one of the images I had taken, there were lights hovering above the mountains in the distance, perhaps above the ocean.

Mysterious lights in the sky above Vancouver, BC

What could they be? The most obvious answer is that they're reflections on the camera either of passing cars or the street lamps overhead. If they're light reflections on the camera, then this is the first time it has happened, and though it seems odd to me, one can never say never.

These are cropped up images in true and enhanced colours of the lights.

Zoom in to see the metallic spherical shape of the second one from the left

Are there any clues to resolve this mystery?

As I mentioned, the camera takes two images, a normal and a long exposure shot. As it turned out, the photo with the mysterious lights was the normal exposure image, so how did the lights behave with the long exposure effect applied?

I reckoned that if the lights were the reflected headlights from passing cars, then they would show light trails similar to the ones on the bridge along the horizontal plane. Below is the long exposure shot. Notice the light trails along the bridge and those of the 'lights in the sky'.

Cropping up the image for a closer look and playing around with the colours, we get the following results.

While the lights show streaking indicative of movement, it is not horizontal but vertical within a small area as if they're hovering there, or so it seems to my untrained eye.

It is possible that the lights are reflections from the street lamps along the bridge. They may appear to streak because of the movement of my body as I try to hold the camera steady for the long exposure. If that’s the case, then how come the actual street lights, and every other stable source of light, do not show streaking as a result of unsteady motion? Perhaps, one could reason, only reflections do that.

Cue the suspense music

I'm certain there's a prosaic explanation for these mysterious objects. They could even be real drones preparing to entertain us all with their programmed areal acrobatics. Maybe they are weather balloons, though I've never heard of those being released in such a manner. Perhaps they're government crafts spraying us with nanobots for shady purposes. The point is we do not need to entertain the idea of little green men from another star system to explain this likely photographic aberration.

But let us entertain for a moment, the possibility that those lights are real and out of this world (or from beneath the oceans as some US politicians believe). What could they possibly be doing hovering above our fair city in plain view? Though I admit I did not see them with my own eyes, I’m sure that if they were aliens, they didn’t travel across space-time for the breathtaking views.

So what is their mission?

I will leave you with one last image that was taken around the same time as the “UFOs”. As a disclaimer, I'm not saying that aliens from the Orion constellation are modifying our weather to suit their aquatic purposes, all I'm saying is the sky looked mighty suspicious that evening.

Curiously, as I finished writing this post, I noticed that there also appear to be mysterious points of lights in the first image that I took from a different location that evening and which is the cover image for this post.

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Images by @litguru