...Jay did not acknowledge the resemblance considering his experience with stage lighting.

Well, I didn't want to put words in his mouth. It wasn't clear whether BigMo was simply describing its shape, or whether he was attempting to identify it. He didn't pursue the matter, so neither did I.

Track lighting and stage lighting are as different as they can be. Thankfully I have track lighting in my hallway, and it looks nothing like the stuff in the photo. That doesn't mean BigMo's track lighting looks like mine.

But I'm looking at the photo and I don't see "track lights" at all.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

That's good research, Kiwi. I went through the pictures here.
They trimmed the borders or something I'm guessing.

That's good research, Kiwi.

Thanks. In this case it's reverse-rorschaching. Turning track lights into ink blots.

(With apologies to Harald Kucharek for such blatant theft of his joke, though I did give him over 36 hours to say it first.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not convinced that the picture in my original post is ink blots. I just find it more pausible then lens flares.

They trimmed the borders or something I'm guessing.

Yes, I agree with you; LPI crops the edge noise out of their scans. The film is significantly wider than the image, and there is a 2 cm gap between frames. ALSJ uses the old JSC scans, and it looks like JSC just did a rough crop on all of them. The edge noise is still visible, as are the written annotations.

If you turn your photo upside down, the marks look like the top edge of a line of writing giving the photo ID. What I interpreted initially as the bottom of a stroke is actually the top of one, and it matches the way the letter "A" (as in ASxx-whatever) has been written on several of the other examples, with an initial downstroke followed by an arch.

Clearly the writing hypothesis is much more plausible than a random light leak. It is made all the more plausible by the ability to fit to the markings an annotation giving the photo ID number, in the handwriting of the archivist who made the other marks. In my mind it's pretty conclusive, but of course we should always remain open to any other possibilities.

This reminds me of a book a long time ago about a guy who found rocks in the U.S. that had marks on them resembling Irish ogham. Ogham is an ancient alphabet that uses the space above and below the baseline to equal advantage, allowing it to be written along the sharp edges of, say, square fenceposts using both the adjoining faces. Finding them in the U.S. is remarkable. Naturally this author's skeptics claimed he was just looking at marks made by plows and other tools -- i.e., random markings.

This reminds me a lot of this situation. Marks on rocks are unremarkable (no pun intended) just as specks and marks on photographs are unremarkable. By default you assume their cause is natural, or at best unintentional. But the author of this book was able to point out that the "plows" of one region of the country made marks in a certain ancient Irish dialect, while the "plows" on another region managed to leave marks in a different Irish dialect. In other words, if the marks can be shown to have such intellectual content -- i.e., form easily recognizable words or correlations to demography -- then it becomes less parsimonious to suppose the marks were accidental. Here our photographic marks correlate well to annotations we know were made, and specific specks correspond to specific portions of words we expect to see in the annotation. Hence the most parsimonious conclusion is that the marks not are random or unintended, but were made intentionally to label the photo.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I'll add my vote to the writing hypothesis. I took the photograph, enlarged the area in question and upped the contrast a little. It very much looks to me as if we have the tail end of a letter with a double downstroke at the left, an O in the middle and an almost complete W at the end on the right. This would give us (for example).

AOW, HOW, KOW, MOW, NOW, ROW, WOW.

I flipped the image as well, it could be an M followed by a partial A and the residue of a letter off-screen but I prefer the OW.

The more I look at the enlargement (both natural and contrast-enhanced), the more it looks like handwriting.

Turn it 180 degrees then compare the lettering with the other examples.

As I said way back, I reckon it's the top of the letters "AS" (upside down), most likely followed by 15. The two spots could be showing both ends of the top stroke of "5."

Very possible indeed. Could easily be AS as you say. The two dots could be almost anything (I note the NASA handwriting used the open-topped 4 that would also give two dots when inverted and almost-offscreen).

Since AS is the standard coding and we have documented examples of its use, I'll defer to your judgement on the interpretation. I think what is clear beyond any reasonable doubt now is that this is stray handwriting of some sort. There may be some argument over what the letters are, but I think we can be sure they are letters.