Man Making Long Exposure Night Sky Shot May Have Caught a UFO

© Provided by Exemplore

What is that thing?

The types of cameras available on the market these days allow nearly anyone to capture extraordinary pictures, even without training or expertise. Indeed, the lack of training can occasionally pose a problem. Like shopping-mall ultrasounds, in which people are sure their children are horribly malformed due to pictures being taken by techs with no ability to the highly technical images they were capturing, so those folks with iPhones and a little ingenuity may not be totally aware of what it is they are capturing in the sky when they point their cameras upward.

Take this person, who was playing around with the “long exposure” feature on their iPhone, and thinks they caught sight of a UFO. But what is it, really?

Click here to watch the video.

The object in the picture, an oblong shaped flash in the sky, lit from within by a line of several dim, almost purple lights, is certainly a rare sight in the sky. But the clue as to its real identity is that this was, indeed, a “long exposure” shot. If the shot was truly taken over a long period of time, wouldn’t a spacecraft have moved?

No, what this picture actually shows is the Lagoon Nebula, also known as Messier 8. It’s a large gas cloud within the Milky Way Galaxy, and though it is barely visible to the naked eye, with the help of binoculars, telescopes, or cell phones, can be an extraordinary sight in the night sky.

As a stellar nursery, the nebula is actively involved in birthing new stars, and those bright pink or purple lights seen within are the proto-star clusters and dark nebulae of condensing gas within the cloud.

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