What is this? - Page 2

dpastern (Dave Pastern) · #21 25-10-2009, 04:16 PM

It's probably one of the old ones messaging you and wanting you to be their servant. Probably Azathoth. ;-)

Dave

bartman (Bart) · #22 25-10-2009, 05:03 PM

You mentioned something about a roof nearby; I recently got on the to of my place of work's roof and tried to take some shots of the Full Moon.
I rested the camera ( for a 1sec exp) on a ledge and the roof angles down from that ledge.
When I took the shots - no matter what FL or focusing- I got two ghost images.
I put it down to the reflection of the roof (tiles).
Maybe it was a piece of glass (or something like that ) that acted as a prism and reflected from the roof from a car or something like that.

My $0.02
Bartman

rat156 · #23 25-10-2009, 05:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bartman

You mentioned something about a roof nearby; I recently got on the to of my place of work's roof and tried to take some shots of the Full Moon.
I rested the camera ( for a 1sec exp) on a ledge and the roof angles down from that ledge.
When I took the shots - no matter what FL or focusing- I got two ghost images.
I put it down to the reflection of the roof (tiles).
Maybe it was a piece of glass (or something like that ) that acted as a prism and reflected from the roof from a car or something like that.

My $0.02
Bartman

Light only travels in straight lines (unless a mini black hole is near my place, have they turned the LHC back on yet?), so the car would have to be higher than the roofline. Haven't seen any DeLorean's about either, with or without flux capacitors.

C'mon there has to be a logical solution to this...

Cheers
Stuart

wasyoungonce (Brendan) · #24 26-10-2009, 08:46 AM

Its a Stargate worm hole!

Edit:

One thing I did note was that the green diffuse dot is elongated like an ellipse with the major axis pretty much in line with the centre of the camera lens.

Thus it's more likely a reflection artefact of stray light.

Meh..my 2cents worth.

renormalised (Carl) · #25 26-10-2009, 10:39 AM

Quote:

C'mon there has to be a logical solution to this...

Maybe it was the "bugs from upstairs" <queue Twilight Zone theme>

Or, it's a real life episode from "The Outer Limits"

Seriously, I still think it's a green laser...it fits the profile. Who knows what it was reflecting off, but that's what it looks like.

sjastro · #26 26-10-2009, 01:18 PM

It's probably nothing more but an intense cosmic ray hit.

The fact that there are no "squiggly lines" which is a characteristic of a cosmic ray hits indicates, the hit is perpendicular to the plane of the detector.

The intense white region is due to signal saturation which has flowed into adjacent pixels. The green colour of the adjacent area is due to the Bayer matrix, where 50% of a pixel is covered by the green filter that also acts the dominant or luminance filter.

I've had monster cosmic ray hits covering quite a few pixels when taking dark frames inside my fridge.

Regards

Steven

renormalised (Carl) · #27 26-10-2009, 01:25 PM

That's also a possibility....you can never tell for sure what it may have been. Maybe we'll never know...just chalk this up to a lucky shot.

DavidU (Dave) · #28 26-10-2009, 01:32 PM

I hadn't thought of that one.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sjastro

It's probably nothing more but an intense cosmic ray hit.

The fact that there are no "squiggly lines" which is a characteristic of a cosmic ray hits indicates, the hit is perpendicular to the plane of the detector.

The intense white region is due to signal saturation which has flowed into adjacent pixels. The green colour of the adjacent area is due to the Bayer matrix, where 50% of a pixel is covered by the green filter that also acts the dominant or luminance filter.

I've had monster cosmic ray hits covering quite a few pixels when taking dark frames inside my fridge.

Regards

Steven

tlgerdes (Trevor) · #29 26-10-2009, 01:46 PM

It's The Green Lantern returning to earth

ngcles · #30 26-10-2009, 02:05 PM

Hi Stuart & All,

Maybe, just maybe it is Nibiru??

It does look very mono to me too and in colour, suspiciously like a green laser. But what did it reflect off? To be that bright in the image it would have to be close to the ground.

Probably too bright to be an internal reflection within the lens unless it came from an extremely bright light-source. Possible.

Cosmic Ray hit? It would have to be one mother of a particle that made it all the way through the atmosphere. Couldn't rule that out but very, very unlikely.

Could it be a head-on meteor? Meteors (particularly the big-uns) sometimes have a greenish hue because of either 1) Copper content and/or 2) ionisation of Oxygen (ie OIII) as they burn-up explode in the upper atmosphere.

The colour is about right (but probably a shade too light a green) for that but again, it looks awfully monochromatic and about mag -8 or -9 -- very, very bright.

GRB? For the optical afterglow to be that bright it would have to be pretty nearby and it'd be all over the scientific world today as the brightest GRB (in Gamma Rays) ever seen -- probably by several orders of magnitude. Swift would have picked it up. Can rule that one out I think.

I'd put the position approximately at RA 03 33 40 Dec -34 21 00. There are no even remotely close galaxies at that point. The closest Fornax member (excluding undiscovered ultra LSB dwarfs) is about 30 arcminutes away IC 335.

So what is it? Dunno -- but almost certainly has a mundane explanation.

Green laser is my bet at this stage as it is the "least unlikely".

Best,

Les D

Lost In Space (Blake) · #31 26-10-2009, 05:03 PM

Definitely a strange picture.

It looks ALOT like a laser pointer to me (not ruling out other possible causes).

Here is a pic of a green laser I found:

http://www.mvktech.net/images/review...green_bg_1.jpg

A refraction perhaps? I'm not sure. The green light in the actual photo does seem to have a ringed pattern around it though.

My advice is to go out again one night and set everything up the same way it was when the photo was taken, position the telescope the same again, and see if you can find any explanations.

Moon (James) · #32 26-10-2009, 05:40 PM

I had to hack out the green bits to get it to plate solve.
http://live.astrometry.net/status.ph...00910-83320316

Nice wide FOV (73 degrees)

Edit: Looking closely the image with annotations is distorted - eg canopus.

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #33 26-10-2009, 08:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rat156

Light only travels in straight lines (unless a mini black hole is near my place, have they turned the LHC back on yet?), so the car would have to be higher than the roofline. Haven't seen any DeLorean's about either, with or without flux capacitors.

C'mon there has to be a logical solution to this...

Cheers
Stuart

Ahhh, not strictly true as intense gravity from galaxies can "bend" light from background galaxies a la gravitational lensing (Einstein's Cross) but, to be sure, this is over a looooooooooooooooooooooong distance...

You might be right though... it COULD be "the Libyans" looking for their missing plutonium....THAT was green??? eh? whatdya think?

Great Scott...........this is heavy!

Cheers

Chris

rat156 · #34 26-10-2009, 10:44 PM

Maybe it's the celestial teapot!

email to Richard Dawkins on the way, I'm sure I'll get a response...

Cheers
Stuart

P.S. my bet is a signal for upon high to back "the Sportsman" on Saturday ( 31.10 & 7.80) $10 EW paid for the pergola I built on the weekend, woo hoo!

Kal (Andrew) · #35 26-10-2009, 11:31 PM

I'd have to go for cosmic ray. This page has a sample of cosmic rays on a CCD, and I can see some similarities with the pics on this page as well.

Our quiet sun is letting in more cosmic rays at the moment as well source

bartman (Bart) · #36 27-10-2009, 02:36 AM

It could possibly be a Klingon Phaser / torpedo( they are green) that you might have captured like one of those in a Star Trek Time Warp Saving the Planet episodes..........NO DISRESPECTING THE STAR TREK COMMUNITY !

Seriously, you could be the first to capture -by accident- something like that.....

And to be honest, I believe something like this will or has happened....and we just haven't acknowledged that fact......no not a KWB but an alien "Hello we are here" kinda morse code laser light source do-hickey thing-a-ma-gig
Maybe......

So in other words you might be the first to pick up an alien ' hello ' Beacon!....

Bartman

circumpolar (Matt) · #37 27-10-2009, 06:16 AM

My guess is a Cosmic Ray hit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ngcles

Cosmic Ray hit? It would have to be one mother of a particle that made it all the way through the atmosphere. Couldn't rule that out but very, very unlikely.
Les D

It happens all the time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Screwdriverone

Ahhh, not strictly true as intense gravity from galaxies can "bend" light from background galaxies a la gravitational lensing (Einstein's Cross) but, to be sure, this is over a looooooooooooooooooooooong distance...

Chris

Nitpick.........
As a Surveyor in training I can tell you that all light bends when passing through any medium other then a vaccum. We use EDM's (Electromagnetic Distance Measure) all day long and whenever a long measurement is taken the curve in the light path must be taken into account.

ngcles · #38 27-10-2009, 06:37 PM

Hi Matt & All,

Quote:

Originally Posted by circumpolar

My guess is a Cosmic Ray hit. It happens all the time.

Yes of course it does -- no doubt about that.

I'm no expert on this sort of stuff by any means but look at the image again. If this is a hit, it has produced a flash in the CCD in the order of 100 to 1000 times brighter than Rigel in a 30 second exposure. Rigel is one of the brightest stars in the sky -- a "zeroith" magnitude star.

All the cosmic ray hits I've seen in images are very small comparable to faint or very faint stars. It would appear this one has produced a flash in the order of 20-25 (stellar) magnitudes brighter than your average cosmic ray hit -- which I'd reckon implies either an extremely energetic one ... or, invoking Occam's razor, more likely that it's not a cosmic ray hit.

Best,

Les D

Kal (Andrew) · #39 27-10-2009, 08:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ngcles

All the cosmic ray hits I've seen in images are very small comparable to faint or very faint stars. It would appear this one has produced a flash in the order of 20-25 (stellar) magnitudes brighter than your average cosmic ray hit -- which I'd reckon implies either an extremely energetic one ... or, invoking Occam's razor, more likely that it's not a cosmic ray hit.

From what I can research, the Highest Observed Cosmic Ray Energy is the Fly's Eye Event, about 320 EeV = 3 x 10^20 GeV. Considering CERN only accelerates lead nuclei to around 574Tev, this would be 6x10^15 more energetic than those nuclei!

sjastro · #40 27-10-2009, 08:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ngcles

Hi Matt & All,

Yes of course it does -- no doubt about that.

I'm no expert on this sort of stuff by any means but look at the image again. If this is a hit, it has produced a flash in the CCD in the order of 100 to 1000 times brighter than Rigel in a 30 second exposure. Rigel is one of the brightest stars in the sky -- a "zeroith" magnitude star.

All the cosmic ray hits I've seen in images are very small comparable to faint or very faint stars. It would appear this one has produced a flash in the order of 20-25 (stellar) magnitudes brighter than your average cosmic ray hit -- which I'd reckon implies either an extremely energetic one ... or, invoking Occam's razor, more likely that it's not a cosmic ray hit.

Best,

Les D

You're not comparing apples with apples. You are converting photons from Rigel into a signal. Cosmic rays on the other hand are mostly composed of protons.

You can't make direct comparisons on the basis of magnitudes.

Regards

Steven