SGHA Research ~ Photograph analysis ~ DSC01550

A digital image can be treated as a data set to extract information. This is the information that we extracted from a digital photograph taken during a investigation at the St. Nicholas hotel. The photograph was shown to the team just after the picture was taken, before the investigation was concluded. The photographs taken before and after were normal in appearance. The timeline of pictures is displayed below.

The investigator in 1551 is obscured by the "shadow" in 1550. No other investigators were present in the area when the photograph was taken.

Infrared Analysis When an IR pass filter is applied to the photograph, the outline of the "shadow is seen better than in the original photograph. The darker regions would represent cooler sections within the photograph. The amount of thermal emission from the darker areas are dependant on their size, their emission and their temperature. Gauging from the temperatures of the surrounding structures, it is estimated that the darker areas of the "shadow" are 15 to 20 degrees cooler than the surrounding ambient air temperature. It should be noted that the estimate of temperature variance is based solely upon the analysis of the photograph.

A digital image can be treated as a data set to extract information. Each pixel's intensity value is a measure of how much energy was used to generate it within the band of spectrum used to produce the image. The sum of the pixel intensities is a measure of the total energy used to create the whole image. The Sesmimetric value of the "shadow" is estimated at around 10 and up to 120 in certain areas. This is a odd measurement because it would almost seem as if the "shadow" was absorbing energy. However, this might also explain why the camera did not detect any returned light (Focal length 35mm).

RGB scaling (Figure 2) was performed to attempt to define the edges of the shadow. It appears to be consisted of six separate colors with particle emissions on it's fringes. The simulated spectrum (Figure 3) shows that it is probably consisted of two main frequencies.

Bandpass filters (figures 4 and 5) were applied to try and isolate the specific frequency the shadow may be in. It lies too deep in the darker regions to successfully identify.

Figure 6. Surface plot of photograph.

The surface plot of the photograph does show that the shadow has some areas of depth and appears to be three dimensional.

Hypothesis

The element of this picture that may be consistent with our hypotheses is that the object appears to be absorbing light (energy). However a lack of data during the taking of this picture and immediately afterwards prevents any detailed analysis of how the object might be doing that.