Quote:
Originally Posted by hotspur
Thanks to all those people that examined the full res pics i sent them,
I have had some feed back after experienced people have examined
them,and its comforting to know that it is a meteor,and not a star trail,
or a hot pixel.
I hope others can enjoy this "lucky shot".
all the best,Chris
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Well, since you're claiming it to be real I'll post the stuff that says it isn't...
A quick examination has revealed that this is unfortunately not a meteor.
I assume you were using a bright star to focus the camera, this is normal practice.
I assume that you then slewed to the target (NGC253?).
The bright spots are clearly hot pixels. They are 4x4 squares, which is typical of Bayer colour CCDs (as the CCD has to interpret the GRGB matrix).
The bright spot in the centre is a star, I assume again it's the one you were focussing on. I think you may have opened the shutter, told the scope to slew to the target and then closed it some 9 seconds later. This will leave a bright spot in the centre, where you were focussing, trailing off (with increasing speed by the look of it, do you have a GEM?). Also present in the image are multiple non-parallel streaks that start at one edge and make it through to another, this is caused by the scope slewing in both RA and Dec, these are stars moving through the frame. The fact that none of them stop means the shutter closed before the mount had stopped.
The bright spots also don't have a gaussian profile, which they should due to the atmosphere. The second and third jpgs confirm this. As you can see, you adjust the black level up and the spots don't change shape (like the star in the middle). They just disappear or stay the same (depends on the pixel value), try this one for yourself in Photoshop.
Cheers
Stuart