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That triangle discovered by Ilaria in the starry sky: was it perhaps a UFO?

There was something motionless there in the sky that, with regret, I could not observe directly as it was not present during the exhibition. Who knows how long it stayed there

By Marco BonomoPublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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Ilaria Cicerale is an Apulian girl fresh from a three-year degree (congratulations and good continuation of her studies to complete her university career) who has the hobby of photographing the stars. On one of these summer evenings, however, he set something special. He noticed it a few days later, but the emotion was equally strong. I leave to his story the explanation of what it is about: let's say that there is ... the scent of UFOs, and that is why he asks the blog visitors for an opinion.

It was July 29, an evening like any other, typically summer, hot and not windy. I still had in mind the crescent moon that I had immortalized with my smartphone the night before, so red and half hidden between the houses. At a certain point, around 10 pm, I thought it best to take a look at the stars, they fascinate me so much that I would stay hours to observe them, so I went to the terrace of my house and put my smartphone, a very common Huawei P Smart. 2018, facing the sky, on a simple clothesline, really useful when you don't have a mobile phone stand and need to control the controls on the screen. After having positioned everything in the right way, having checked if the camera lenses were clean or not, freed every surrounding area from objects, I observed the sky for a few more seconds, so clear and enchanting, and then started the long exposure with the "Light Painting" function, "Star trails / Star trails" mode.

Slowly, without touching the support, as if a child had just fallen asleep and you don't want to make any noise, I went back into the house. This shrewdness is the result of numerous errors that, even if I didn't want to, I caused: I have always liked taking long exposures to the sky but, many times, the photos were blurry with considerable loss of detail. Even the slightest movement of the support or the passage of a person near the camera in operation sent the processing work (long exposure) up to an hour or more in smoke. With the same foresight, almost reverence towards the starry sky, after about 20 minutes I approached my smartphone; the star trails had formed perfectly, they were clear even before stopping the long exposure. So, slowly, I stopped processing, with my heart racing when the process was completed. “It's done, I have my photo now!”, I thought. I look at it, I observe the trails from the strongest to the weakest, while I think that I have really captured many stars in one fell swoop, light years away, which for me shortly before were small more or less bright dots but which now materialize in something that I can look at and relate to at any time.

Photo by Ilaria Cicerale

This is the satisfaction, patience always pays off with good results. I look at the photo for a while longer, excited by what the space has in store for us, then I simply keep it in the phone archive, thinking of publishing it on Instagram shortly. And here, right in that photo, a detail escapes me, I only retrieve it on August 2 when I decided to do a bit of order among the photos taken (taking lots of photos and not arranging them in folders is like printing lots of photos and not pasting them in photo albums!). This tiny detail intrigued me as I zoomed in on the photograph taken. "What is that???" A small triangle, characterized by three main lights at the vertices in turn connected to each other by tiny lights, however only 2 sides were clearly visible, the other was missing: the apparent initial triangle assumed more than anything else an inverted V shape. In that precise instant a thousand thoughts crossed my mind: what exactly is it? It's a long exposure photo, why are those dots still? No, it can't be the dirty lens, it was clean, I had checked it before starting! A bug? Bright? Unless it's a firefly, but it looks so distant! Is it a reflection of lights? But in the place where the phone was placed there was very little! A thousand questions and a lot of disbelief. Never, after several long exposures that I had made, had I come across a similar situation.

Photo by Ilaria Cicerale

There was something motionless there in the sky that, with regret, I could not observe directly as it was not present during the exhibition. Who knows how long it stayed there ... For a few seconds? Only to disappear immediately after the stop at the exhibition? Mystery. I was curious to understand what had "disturbed" those very quiet stars, but at the same time also a bit of fear. Could it be a UFO? At that question I had a total emptiness in my mind. The thought that this thing was an unidentified object made me think a lot. I know very little about the alien world, as a child I was amazed by the videos shot all over the world, and broadcast on TV, of flying saucers, white spheres in the sky, mysterious lights in the dark. To the doubt about the identification of the "thing" is also added my basic preparation on space, on astrophotography which helped to increase my question marks. Surely someone more experienced than me would give their own opinion and solve most of my doubts. After all, mine is simply a passion, that for photography and the universe, which I have cultivated since I was a child and which I will certainly like to study well, like small clippings in the study of Business Economics.

fact or fiction
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About the Creator

Marco Bonomo

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/acchiappasogni/

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