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SOHO Strikes Back

Posted by michael on from the luke-i-am-your-father dept.

Nick Lightfoot writes "As seen on /. several days ago, Euroseti is holding a conference to show off it's collection of pictures of 'UFOs' taken by SOHO cameras. SOHO has released a response page to show how a cosmic ray or other similar ccd artifact could be mistaken for a UFO, especially after the image has been enhanced. After watching Euroseti's video featuring some of the images, I was able to identify one of the 'UFO' images as a comet, and several others looked like they were just planets. Hopefully they will release some images on the web soon so I taking take a closer look at them without having to buy their £15 cd."

3 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Article is misleading by Andy_R · · Score: 4, Informative

    The SOHO page *actually* shows how a 'flying saucer' can be faked by manipulating their data, NOT how the original data can be 'mistaken' for a UFO.

    --
    A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  2. Thank you! by J.+J.+Ramsey · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was wondering when Slashdot itself would post a link rebutting Euroseti's pseudoscience. What's a wonder to me is that Slashdot didn't update the article by adding a link to here when this comment pointed it out.

  3. USAF UFO detector network by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative
    The U.S. Air Force has operated a large scale UFO detector network since about 1980, the Ground Based-Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System. It was built to identify flying objects launched by the USSR, but it does much more. Two 1-meter computer-controlled telescopes at each site scan the skies for anything bigger than a basketball. The three sites (Diego Garcia, Maui, and Arizona) are run by the USAF 24th Space Wing. Most of the sky is scanned several times every night.

    Since the USSR wound down, GEODSS has also been used for finding near-earth asteroids. A few objects show up every month. Here's the list for December, 2002.

    MIT's Lincoln Labs also operates an automated skywatch.

    Here's an image from GEODSS. The objects that show as streaks are moving relative to the starfield.

    If it's out there, one of these systems will pick it up within a few days.