Photographing at night in dark conditions requires long exposures. This causes moving MLs to be recorded as "light tracks" instead of looking like the ball of moving light you might see if you were present when the photograph was made. MLs do not always move so some of the images are not light tracks. Length of the light tracks depends on many variables including how far away the light was located, how fast it was moving, and the length of the time exposure which is influenced by how bright the light may have been and the extent of available moon light. In general, there is usually no convenient way to know how far distant a light might be because the observer has no information regarding the brightness. MLs are sometimes as bright as train lights making them appear to be closer to the observer than they actually are. We determine distance by taking cross bearings from automated night cameras.
Because MLs are rare, automated night cameras have been used to obtain more information on when and where MLs are making their appearance. A total of eight or nine automated cameras run every night (see Methods page). To minimize the amount of video that must be reviewed, night cameras are operated at low resolution. They also have little or no magnification in order to maximize coverage. Night cameras have adjustable light intensity settings and individual frames are stacked to accumulate light before saving to hard drives. This image stacking is another way to achieve time exposures and all of this is done to acquire as much background terrain as possible because that background terrain is helpful when it comes to distinguishing between ranch trucks and MLs. Photographs and video that are black and white were made by night camera systems.
The best ML images are those that were made on-site using color DSLR cameras equipped with telescopic lenses. Many of the following images were made that way and they include details not possible with night monitoring stations alone. One DSLR camera has been modified so that it is able to record infrared wave lengths in addition to visible wave lengths. This camera is able to see surrounding heat and ML activities not otherwise visible. Pictures made by this camera may include reddish looking terrain and show red ML surrounds. The image above is an example ML that shows a heat trail not visible to my eyes. However, conventional cameras sometimes show MLs with red surrounds as well, so not all the red is infrared in the images below. Some of the images below include "rainbow-like" patterns. These rainbow patterns are generated by use of diffraction gratings that contain thousands of tiny triangles to parse the light by frequency. The resultant rainbows show the ML's spectral signature.
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