How about that the optics of the camera and the recording medium can see air changes, such as water vapour, that the human eye can't?

Are you suggesting that our esteemed moderator is a medium?

No

Good. I think she's of well above medium quality, as moderators go.

That's really weird.

Did you ever consider ringing the city to dig up the house's history?

When we lived in our previous house, I decided to do some digging on it's past just because I was curious. When I rang the city, the guy was like oh why do you want to know? And I explained I was just interested. And he replied that he regularly gets calls from people who are convinced their homes are haunted and want to find out the history of said homes. So I was like, and do you ever figure out why they are haunted, and he said that sometimes they can.

Crazy. And not the response I was expecting.

I've heard that dust can cause those "orb" effects, but is water vapour recorded by cameras when not visible to humans? Wouldn't that cause greyed out pictures nearly all the time when it's humid? Good suggestion though, especially as the hot tub is there, and the "smoke"is right above it.

When shiown by the bounce of a flash? There could be dust in the air too. I take pictures every day using something that can't be seen and it seems logical to me that there was something natural there not visible to the eye.

Any brainy people on the forum that can say whether this "ghost" could be vapour from the hot tub, invisible to the human eye but visible to the camera?

That puts my brain in its place.

There is dust in the air which we don't normally see but when a beam of sunlight shines through curtains we can see them. Swirling. I don't know if flash was used in this photo but it reflects off particles and will record them.

There would have been convection currents in the air above the hot tub water, this would also explain the swirly effect.

A highly recommended location.

I should check. I have the technology

Oops! I didn't mean it like that!


I am interested to know if water vapour which may be invisible to the eye can be detected and recorded with a digital camera...

Water vapour in the gas phase, no. A slight mist of condensed water vapour, or other small particles suspended in air, might well scatter light from a flash, therefore becoming visible in a photo, (although we don't know if a flash was used to obtain the subject image).

Prediction: Siouxie's next post on this thread will be "it wasn't".

You are quite correct, it wasn't, lol, we had a string of small lamplights on the old washing line which was going down from the house to the end of the back garden, which provided 'ambient' light so a flash wasn't necessary.

If it helps, the 1st photo is the photo taken just before the original one posted - you can see 'what ever it is' starting to form but it's higher up than in the original photo. In the original photo it appears to have sunk downwards -which defeats the supposition that it is steam/vapour as we all know that vapour+heat generally rises.

Nobody was smoking and there was no steam visible from the hot tub.

(Facial features removed to protect privacy).

FYI, yes, it was a digital camera

You know what my job is. I am bound by all sorts of thingies always to tell the truth.

Dust particles in the atmosphere don't do Rayleigh scattering (because the wavelength of the light has to be comparable to the size of the scattering particle). Molecules, O2 & N2 mostly, do Lord Rayleigh's scattering.

Particles do Mie scattering.

Moreover the colour of a polluted sky near the horizon is largely due to NO2 in the polluted air.

Just as we don't know whether a flash was used, we aren't certain whether a digital camera was used.

Back in the day of film in cameras, a UV filter was handy to prevent overload of the blue end of the film response curve: digital cameras have an inherently different response and using a UV filter is pointless. Except maybe to prevent scratching.