iceman asks a good question,the photo is full frame,as is,no doctoring
except low res to put on site.from a few replies;it appears normal for
meteors to have "wiggly" tails,
So,if it appears that i had camera going for the nine seconds,turned it off and in that very last few mini seconds captured the meteor,(and centered it so well)
it may be "accidental excellence",but it does look cool!
I also wasn't questioning what you thought you have captured, for all I know it may be real. I just don't think it is what you think.
Let me address the issues I have with the picture
1. The trail brightening to a ball. If you look at the other pictures posted in this thread, this is what I would expect to see from a meteor trail, a progressive brightening until the meteor has burnt up. Yours doesn't look like this.
2. The other (non trailing) stars. Are very small for a 100mm scope and DSLR combo. I suggest that they may be hot pixels. Do you have a dark frame for the camera? Or they are dim stars and the data isn't stretched enough to show the trailing effect.
3. The wiggly tail. Agreed that meteors may spiral when they reach the atmosphere and encounter gas at different densities, but really the gas trail should be straight as in every other picture of meteors I've seen. Sorry but it looks like the mount moved and there was a bright star in the frame.
4. Your witnesses. I'm sure that you saw a meteor, and that it was roughly in the right place, but to know what your scope is seeing at the time you'd have to be peering through another. Which means it's impossible for you to have observed it naked eye. Your witnesses really can't tell exactly where your scope is pointing, the FOV of a 100mm scope is tiny.
I really hope it's real, because it'd be a great capture, but I'm unconvinced.
Post the raw data to an FTP type site so we can all have a look.
I would have to say in my short lived experience, that there is ALOT of junk / meteors coming in at any point in time.
Although I do agree this is a one in a million shot, it is more than possible given the showering we constantly receive.
Check this shot, 3 frames of 30secs. Two burnup's captured... This goes on all the time everywhere. Only a matter of time till someone captures some good shots...
Could well be an error etc. I hope it is not though...
Last edited by Lumen Miner; 25-08-2009 at 06:26 PM.
i.e when i turned camera off after nine second frame,it took a another
nine second dark,and automatically sutracted any noise.
The stars are stars,it a fluke shot
I am sending Dennis Simmons a disc with full res copy,of it ,and
the two long exposure pics.
I can send any once else who doubts this photo,a full res pic
I am dismayed of the negativity,that some people have shown.
It's not negativity, it's simple skepticism. When you claim something it has to stand up to scrutiny, if it passes, then it can be taken as factual until someone else comes up with a better explanation. It's not personal, it's the way scientific discoveries are validated.
I'm sorry if that offends you, but I am a scientist, so I suppose I'm used to having my results questioned. Water off the proverbial ducks back for me.
As I said I'll be happy to confirm your picture if you send me the full res image, use the link above and PM me for my email.
It's not negativity, it's simple skepticism. When you claim something it has to stand up to scrutiny, if it passes, then it can be taken as factual until someone else comes up with a better explanation. It's not personal, it's the way scientific discoveries are validated.
I'm sorry if that offends you, but I am a scientist, so I suppose I'm used to having my results questioned. Water off the proverbial ducks back for me.
As I said I'll be happy to confirm your picture if you send me the full res image, use the link above and PM me for my email.
Cheers
Stuart
Stuart,
I can appreciate where you are coming from, I really can. Ultimatley it would be of a scientific purpose, to qualify an image as plausible. However given the arena we are conducting such analysis within, it seems almost tainted to be on the side of scepticism. I as I believe you, have indicated our doubts, unless convinced otherwise. Getting back to the "arena", perhaps we should not thus excruciate answers to the upmost, yet be qualified with saying "Well done".
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
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.
I would have to agree with Stuart after this comprehensive analysis and speculation as to what may have occurred, as disappointing as this explanation would be for Chris.
1)there was no bright star i was focusing at the time,i had allredy done
this earlier in the evening,
2)i had just taken a long exp,and was continuing-the scoped
hadnt just recently slewed to target,i had guiding too,which
elimimnates "star trail"
3) the camera had ICNR going,this eliminates pixel nonsense.
I have to ask why i should continue to havt to prove all of my
post,
I have joined many forums,and never had the problems that i do on this
one,i have had other experinced astronomers look at this photo,and they have not had any issues,
Finally,and this is the last comment i will make on my photo,as i have a life away from the internet.
I was there at the time,i know that everything was operating as it should,i got some ten minutes exp of objeccts around the same time
and really had no problems with gear that night.
I certainly dont think i will bother putting any more posts on this site
if they have to be subjected to the same scutiny as N.T.S.B
investigation,i noticed this forum has "favourites" i havent noticed this in
other forums,if one of the "favourites" nhad of posted this pic,they
would not have had the headaxches,they would have been told
to enter it in David Malin awards,and proberbly won too.
Coming from someone who has also taken a picture of a meteor through a telescope I know what you are going through right now. You feel amazingly good for what you have done (seeing a shooting star gets you 1 wish. photographing it through a telescope? that's got to be at least 100 wishes). At the same time you have people telling you its not real. I dealt with the same thing with my picture. There is overwhelming evidence that my picture is in fact a meteor and not a plane, but some people still want to believe what they want to believe.
I looked at your picture and I don't understand how one star could have trails but not all the others. I'm a novice but that explanation doesn't make sense to me. Congratulations on doing this. I know what it feels like to be doubted.
Stuart, my picture is a little different of a situation because 1) the mason dixon meteor was a very big fireball/bolide, it lit up the entire sky brighter than the full moon and made a sonic boom 2) the distance in my picture was roughly 16.5 miles away at 12km altitude after the moment of fragmentation. Most meteors are the size of a grain of rice and burn out at 100km altitude. I'm not an expert about astro photos and I really don't understand your technical explanation, mostly because I'm not familiar with the procedures you reference.
I'm not trying to get in the middle of a debate being this is my first post and everything. I'm just trying to add a little info about the picture that was referenced on this post.
Coming from someone who has also taken a picture of a meteor through a telescope I know what you are going through right now. You feel amazingly good for what you have done (seeing a shooting star gets you 1 wish. photographing it through a telescope? that's got to be at least 100 wishes). At the same time you have people telling you its not real. I dealt with the same thing with my picture. There is overwhelming evidence that my picture is in fact a meteor and not a plane, but some people still want to believe what they want to believe.
The difference between the two photographs is huge, your's is what I would expect from any meteor. OK your's was a big one and fragmented on it's way into the atmosphere, if you look closely at the trails they seem to be divergent from top to bottom, this is what you would expect from a large rock exploding, even though there is an amount of energy imparted sideways (to diverge the fragments) the overwhelming amount of momentum is still in a straight line on the original path. There are a couple of very small fragments that seem to die out on the sides as well.
Even though Chris' would be much smaller and wouldn't have fragmented I would still expect to see a straight tail. This is not the case. If it's small and simply burnt up in the atmosphere, why is there a ball at the end? Did it stop? Did it explode? Even if it exploded then there would be smaller fragments that continued on and formed fainter trails, you can't stop something moving that fast without it hitting something very solid (like the ground). It doesn't make sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikesAstro
I looked at your picture and I don't understand how one star could have trails but not all the others. I'm a novice but that explanation doesn't make sense to me. Congratulations on doing this. I know what it feels like to be doubted.
Quite simply the other "stars" are not stars. If you look at your photo, or indeed any photo of the night sky the stars are an even distribution from very faint to very bright, these "stars" don't have this distribution, they seem to be on or off at very high pixel counts. These are hot pixels, ask any astrophotographer. I have asked Chris to do some tests with his equipment and send me the results. I have received nothing yet, so I can't say definitively that this is the case, but it is much more likely than not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikesAstro
Stuart, my picture is a little different of a situation because 1) the mason dixon meteor was a very big fireball/bolide, it lit up the entire sky brighter than the full moon and made a sonic boom 2) the distance in my picture was roughly 16.5 miles away at 12km altitude after the moment of fragmentation. Most meteors are the size of a grain of rice and burn out at 100km altitude. I'm not an expert about astro photos and I really don't understand your technical explanation, mostly because I'm not familiar with the procedures you reference.
To a telescope 16.5 miles (26.4 km) is the same as 100 km, you are at infinite focus. Agreed Chris' meteor (I don't doubt that he saw one) would have been smaller, so fainter, but the size of the plasma streak from the heated air would have been similar. Given that I don't know what sort of scope camera combo you were using it would be hard to tell what the image scale would have been. I could do some maths, but there would be too many assumptions to make it worthwhile.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikesAstro
I'm not trying to get in the middle of a debate being this is my first post and everything. I'm just trying to add a little info about the picture that was referenced on this post.
Hey, I don't mind debating the subject, I don't mind being corrected, but you have to have some evidence.
The facts as I see them are;
1) Chris and others saw a meteor.
2) Chris was taking photos at the time.
3) Chris' telescope was pointing in or around the right direction.
4) Chris got a frame back from the camera that wasn't what he was expecting.
Chris has put these facts together and came to the conclusion that he photographed a meteor. This is a valid assumption, but the photograph doesn't fit the evidence or known properties of meteors.
My explanation of the photograph, doesn't take situation into account, i.e. I didn't see him taking photos, nor did I see the meteor. I simply tried to fit his photograph to other known causes. From a close look at the photo, there are other streaks in frame, these aren't divergent, so that leads me to suspect that something was moving during the exposure. Knowing how mounts move (I have observed the EQ range slew from target to target), they start of slowly, then speed up to the slew speed, then slow down as they approach. If Chris was centred on a star for focus purposes (common practice), then slewed the scope to the target (NGC253 in this case) it would produce a bright spot in the middle (where the star was staionary) then a wiggly line moving off frame (periodic error of the drives). As the telescope slewed towards the target it would have encountered other stars, these would be recorded on the CCD of the camera, which it has done, but the trails would not be in the same direction as the initial trail as the scope slews in RA and Dec at the same time and usually not at the same rate unless it's got a long way to go. These we observe in Chris' photo as the dimmer trails moving through the frame. If the shutter closed during the slew then the approach to the target would not be recorded. If the shutter remained open then I would expect a set of stars to trail into frame and then slowly brighten (as the mount slows down) and finally stop. NGC253 has some bright stars around it , two very bright ones, and a characteristic asterism of four foreground stars over the top of the galaxy, these aren't in Chris' picture.
I'm happy to continue the debate, but I need more evidence that this is a meteor. Chris seems to have been upset by this, which is I understand, but he is claiming something almost unique, so his hypothesis must stand up to scrutiny.
Call me a non-believer if you like, but that won't convince me, only proper evidence.
