Oddity

I was checking the results of a photo junket from a few days ago when I came across an unusual image.

That glowing, floating thingy was not there when I shot the photo.  At least, I didn't see it at the time.  Did I simply fail to notice it?  That's certainly not out of the question, but since, when I took the shot I was going for those ominous-looking small tunnels at the base of the structure, and the thing, whether it was a lens flare or some reflection on the metal wall, is very close to the tunnels, it's very unlikely that I would not have noticed something that big and obvious, not to mention odd.  Still, my first thought was it was some unusual sort of lens flare or maybe some internal structure within the camera reflecting itself onto the image.  I then remembered there was another shot of the same view, taken just before the shot above, that I deleted from the photo library without bothering to download, so I went and recovered it from the deleted image storage for comparison.

It was there in the other photo too, except in a truncated version.  I suppose the orientation switch from portrait to landscape might be called upon to explain the change in shape, but that would not explain why the glitch remains in more or less in the same fixed position relative to the background structure -- as lens flares are very sensitive to even small movements of the camera -- nor why its own orientation stays the same in both pictures;  if it's a reflection off some internal mechanism within the camera, shouldn't it change position, or disappear, or at the very minimum, turn with the camera?

So then... was it something that was objectively there, independent of the camera, but not visible to the naked eye?  I expanded the images and turned up the contrast, sharpness, etc. in the hope of discovering something, but there really wasn't much else to see beyond the mere fact of its being there.  That rainbow trail in the first detail shot does make me suspect it could be some very unsual type of lens flare, but I don't know -- I looked up lens flares and other glitches and artifacts in shots taken by other people using the same make and model of smart phone as mine, but none of them even came close to resembling these.  And the glitch does not show up in any of the many other shots taken on the same day (nor, of course, in the thousands and thousands of other shots taken with the same camera over the past few years).

Related post:  Mysterious Floating/Flying Object