Don't the rod thingies have a kind of rippling arrangement along their side, a bit like some eels ?
Allegedly...
YouTube AcrobatTV of 'sky rods' in Arabia
These seem to present a 'multihumped screw thread'....a reductionist explanation would favour an image artefact resulting from a large winged insect flypast being deceptively-captured by inadvertant interpolation between the biomechanical wing flapping periodicity and digital videocamera shutter-speeds/sampling rates. This is sometimes referred to in imaging technology as aliasing...
I would much prefer an inter-dimensional paraphotonic sprite, but I'm not holding my breath....
Yes, it's a Raspberry Pi Zero W with the official camera module attached.
That's absolutely excellent (and your technical perspicacity is genuinely-impressive) but surely you'd hardly describe such a developmental / experimental conglom to be a conventional image capture device?
And before I or anyone else thinks that such a synthesis might usefully be
more optically-perceptive than a....camera, surely a Pi Zero is one of these incredibly-decluttered minimalist IoT SBCs-the-size-of-a-matchbox? I'm going to guess (and, as you know, I'm not cheating by checking) that this single board computer may not exactly be awash with lots of RAM (ie if it glitches during any proper processing process....expectedly) resulting, quite possibly, in flawed outputs, well....kind of quite-like these pictures.
But: you're sort-of alluding to the fact you've thought of that already.
Coincidently: I've seen over the last few days for the first time in my life a natural phenomenon which *in some ways* is reminiscent of the sky-rod effect (albeit in miniature)...and I do mean, subjectively, tiny very-horizontal rods just visible not too far above the ground. That's a big clue to what it was I actually seeing (I'm not yet going to say what it was that I was seeing....you can all have a guess, and I will tell my story later).