[finnman69]

No way is this a close up of the space shuttle....wrong shape. 'Tail' is way to wide proportionally to the width of the main fuselage.

Camera distortion from the camera iris..

Camera iris.

Check out this thread

[_Jim]

It's becoming obvious that a lot of these people have never worked a good TTL (through the lens) viewer, SLR (single lens reflex) camera ... and experienced the wide range of *distortions*/anomolies that can be seen while looking at various scenes and occasionally getting out-of-focus images ...

I guess it's a learned talent or skill - being able to quickly separate a camera anomoly from a real, bona-fide image ... it *also* helps to view the highest quality full motion picture video available - and not a lot of this 'reconstituted' MPEG and RealVideo stuff that often employ 'lossy compression' techniques ...

[r9etb]

No way is this a close up of the space shuttle....wrong shape. 'Tail' is way to wide proportionally to the width of the main fuselage.

I disagree. The entire image is certainly distorted "wide," but this does indeed look like it's the body of the Shuttle, seen from behind.

The darker rectangle, right in the middle, looks to be the body flap. The rounded area at the bottom is the nose, and of course the grayish triangular shape below the white blob would be the wings-to-nose, as seen from below. The black spots on the white "side bulges" look to be the OMS nozzles.

It's worth noting that the "body flap" looks broken on the right hand side.

The vehicle does seem to be traveling sideways at this point, as the "smoke" is trailing off to the right. If this is truly the case, then it would not be at all surprising for the tail to have come off by this point.

The main engines are not visible here -- either they're white-hot, gone, or simply obscured by plasma. They my have been torn off at or about the same time as the tail.

At this point there doesn't seem to be any obvious damage to the left wing, but it does appear to be "shorter." This could be an optical trick.

I think this particular video is going to be enhanced to the hilt, and eventually they may be able to spot something with it.

Personally, though, I think they're going to get most of their answers from telemetry.

[Erasmus]

If this video was taken by WFAA, the photo of the camera iris does not show the kind of iris in use.

In a professional camera, the iris is a diaphragm contained within the lens, and is composed of several (at least 5) blades, which maintain a near circular aperture under all settings.