As the season changes from summer to autumn, Pig's Mystery Jars tend to droop and go dormant. In terms of the sprouts, that is. But the real goblin activity, the fungi and slime molds and microscopic organisms are just getting ready to party for the holidays.

In early October, Pig and I were scrutinizing our jar farm and noticed one jar suddenly contained some extremely tiny blue specks that almost seemed impossibly radiant, piercing. I got my phone and took maximum-zoom photos that revealed little patches of electric blue fungi with white uppermost tips. At first we were convinced we had some bioluminescent fungi but after a little research we learned that the vast majority of bioluminescent fungi glow green. There *are* some blue ones, and in fact they are extremely tiny (one of them is the tiniest mushroom known to science) but they are not normally found in North America. The leading contender we found has only been seen in Japan.

Still, anything is possible. Fungi is one of the most under-studied critters in the kingdom, and who's to say it didn't end up in a shipment from a Japanese restaurant supply company? Or who's to say we didn't discover some new, previously unknown fungus? (New ones are, in fact, being found every week)

But, as it turned out, what we had was not bioluminescent fungi but something just as cool: biofluorescent fungi. We're still not sure what kind, and who knows, maybe we *have* hit upon something new.

In trying to photograph the fungi in total darkness, however, we made an interesting discovery. The resultant pictures were of course pitch black, but when I lightened them 200% the outline of the blue fungus was clearly visible when other prominent nearby details were not. From this we surmised that it *was* indeed putting off an extremely weak faint glow in the dark.

Intrigued, we did further experiments. At night, in a dark room, in the completely dark closet, with my phone completely covered so that not even it was generating any stray light, we continued to get interesting images of the fungus, and soon found other tiny points of it scattered around the jar as well. With comparison, we could easily see these phenomena were not random ISO noise because they recurred identically in photo after photo.

When you take a photo in absolute darkness (there's actually no such thing) and notice a slight illumination, your camera sensor is capturing faint, invisible light sources or creating image artifacts through high sensitivity settings. In low light digital cameras automatically crank up their sensitivity, known as ISO. The camera amplifies the tiny electronic signals captured by the sensor to make the image visible.

Human eyes are remarkably adaptable, but camera sensors, especially paired with long exposures, can accumulate light over time in ways our eyes cannot. When the shutter stays open longer (long exposure), it allows the sensor to collect photons over seconds instead of fractions of a second. The camera pools together light from even the microscopic or ambient sources. What looks like "absolute darkness" to you is actually filled with stray photons that the camera collects and stacks.

If you are using a smartphone, the device isn't just taking one picture; it is taking a burst of multiple images. The phone's software uses computational algorithms to align the images, stack them, discard the noise, and mathematically boost the brightest pixels. This artificially brightens the faint contrast differences in the dark, pulling an illuminated subject out of what seemed like total blackness.

Camera sensors are naturally sensitive to light wavelengths outside the human visible spectrum, particularly infrared (IR) light. While your eyes see pitch black, your phone or digital camera sensor can easily detect this IR light when it's in "night mode". This, too, is a major contributor to what gets dismissed as "random noise". Some cameras and smartphones are better at it than others; mine seems merely average.

Pixels in digital camera sensors can occasionally spontaneously "leak" electrons, a physical phenomenon known as "Dark Current." Even in total darkness, thermal energy within the sensor itself causes electrons to randomly liberate themselves and accumulate inside a pixel's potential well. Because the camera's image processor cannot distinguish these electrons that it emitted itself from actual photoelectrons generated by light, it registers them in the image.

Heat causes atoms in the silicon substrate to vibrate. This kinetic energy occasionally kicks electrons out of the valence band and into the conduction band without any light input. Dark current is cumulative. While entirely unnoticeable in the average snapshot, it accumulates over very long exposure times (like in astrophotography.) This is why astrophotography cameras and scientific imaging systems utilize heavy cooling mechanisms to drastically minimize spontaneous stray electrons that confuse the Bayer Filter Array.

To be honest with you, I didn't know any of this until yesterday. I never really gave much thought to the inner workings of a digital phone camera until this fungus led me there. But now that my eyes are open, I can envision an entire new field of Telecrylical research based upon it.

So what we have here are three distinct but related forms of photography: one is the dedicated attempt to use my phone's "night mode" to capture any trace of light emanating from our dirt jars, and another is the result of the realization that it is actually possible to photograph quantum particles (photons, photoelectrons, muons) with a mere phone. The third involves the aesthetic acceptance of ISO digital noise that appears in the background of total-darkness images, much like the "cosmic microwave background" that fills the universe.

We do not believe the "random noise" is purely random, but even if it were, like tea leaves or any other pattern, it can be used for divination. Any phenomenon related to the soil in the jars we regard as goblin activity, so therefore all of this has been an exercise in photographing traces of that activity (even as the goblins themselves probably cannot be photographed, at least not with a conventional camera.)

The first image below is an extreme close-up of a bit of the digital noise from one of the goblinographs. The divinatory power of these patterns struck me like a bolt from the blue when I saw it, because it was hauntingly reminiscent of a photo I'd taken just two days earlier. One man's pareidolia is another man's prophecy, but I think the second image speaks for itself.

And so the new science of GOBLINOGRAPHY is born.

Whether you believe in the goblins or not (they believe in *you*, Jack, so you'd better catch up) these photographs are actual pictures of things that exist, or existed at the moment the button was pressed. They are graphical readings of the IR waves in the vicinity at that second. They are digitally enhanced detections of quantum particles. They are your camera's earnest attempt to draw out whatever light sources, however microscopic and however mysterious, were there to be seen.

I find all of this fascinating. But then I am easily fascinated.

Cosmic rays and Delta rays can also be captured with an ordinary smartphone camera.These rays from space crash into the upper atmosphere, creating a massive cascade of billions of subatomic particles raining down at nearly the speed of light, and at any given time they are passing right through your home. If your phone happens to be caught in a dense part of this invisible downpour, multiple particles can pierce the camera sensor at the exact same fraction of a second. This leaves a scattered pattern of random dots across a single frame, though this requires a highly energetic atmospheric event to register multiple distinct hits at once on a sensor as small as a smartphone camera. The above image is of a single cosmic ray collision (the white object.) The little blue glob is unknown, probably residue of goblin activity. The image below is an artifact caused by a Delta ray (the red object.) As for that big purple thing, who knows. This is part of what makes Goblinography such an intriguing field of study. Every precaution was taken to shut out all light pollution and yet there it is. Like the Casimir experiments that led to the mysterious Zero-point energy under the floorboards of reality, once you make sure you have an area in which nothing can get in, and then something DOES, you know you're into something special.

There's high weirdness going on down there, kids, and we're, as always, on the casefile. There are many other odd experiments you can do with a smartphone camera, such as catching the infrared beam from your TV set's remote control. This and others will be covered here later, and in our forthcoming book, THE TELECRYLIC TECHNICAL MANUAL!