2014-08-23 - Greece - Disk

Green and purple lights over Central Greece for 7 nights.

I’d like to start by apologizing beforehand for any grammar mistakes, as English is not my native language (I’m Greek).

During our stay at my father in law’s vacation house in a village in central Greece (Euboea island), I took an interest in night photography (Milky way, constellations etc.) with out newly bought Sony A-5000 large sensor camera. To my wife’s request, I went to the other side of the house, with a beautiful view at the Aegean sea and the islands of Skiathos and Skopelos and took some night photos of the lights at the port of Skiathos.

The first 2 photos I took seemingly had a strong lens diffraction, at least it seemed this way from a glance at the 3 inch screen. So I continued taking night photos of the lights of Skiathos. When I got really bored and looked at the sky thinking “maybe a couple more photos of the milky way before sleep,” I saw over my head for about 3 seconds a black disk flying with no sound and going south, towards the village of St. Anna. When I started feeling my legs again, I remembered the 2 first “bad”photos and reviewed them again using the zoom rocket. I don’t really know what these lights are, but they kept appearing each night and I kept photographing them. As I am not a UFO or an X-files fan, I shrugged my shoulders and my life continued with nights out for dinner, walks, playing cards with friends, that is to say I didn’t spend much time sitting in the balcony and shooting in the dark until morning. But every night I devoted half to one hour to this strange occurrence.

Unfortunately as today (August 29) we had to leave and return to Athens, last night was the last photos I took, but I’m pretty sure the lights will continue as we speak. And since Internet access was limited in the village and we didn’t have a pc, we could only do this here in Athens.

I send to you by email 5 photos (including the first 2 I mention above), but I have over a hundred, most of them the same (i was shooting with the '3 images continuously' mode) and some not really impressive. Some of them are a bit out of focus or maybe a little shaken, most of them were taken with the camera sitting on the top of the wall balcony of the house and trying to lift the view by wedging under the camera the neck hanging cord or the lens protector etc.

I would also like to mention that the lights were not visible by the eye, every image was taken with a 10 seconds shutter speed or more, so as you can understand, I was shooting at nothing, hoping that the lights would appear on the screen. I also experimented by taking a couple of images with a 2.5 seconds shutter speed and the lights got really dark. I have also taken some of the last images using RAW together with jpeg, in a hope to prove that the photos are not manipulated in any way. If you think that these images are worth considering, I would be happy to send to you more or all of them, as well as any relevant information i can.

Thank you for your time! ((name deleted))


((NUFORC Note: Confirmed to be lens flares. PD))