Well, it shouldn’t take long for all the various conspiracy theory buffs to start jumping all over this one —
A San Francisco amateur astronomer who photographs the space shuttles whenever their orbits carry them over the Bay Area has captured five strange and provocative images of the shuttle Columbia just as it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere before dawn Saturday.
The pictures, taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle’s passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.
I think the thing that bugs me the most about this is that even though NASA has set up a page for people to upload images and video that they may have taken during the shuttle disaster, rather than do that (or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe in addition to that), this guy decided to run to the media and stir up a little controversy. \<grumble>I guess everyone needs their fifteen minutes of fame, deserved or not.\</grumble>