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SOHO Strikes Back
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."
It might be some dynamic physical or electric behaviour in the CCD or optics. The hardware is a few years old, after all, in extreme conditions. Might be water condensating on lenses, might be reflections from ice crystals, might be obscure electric charge dynamics on the CCD.
SOHO is located in one of the 5 Lagrange points where it stays at same relative position with both Earth and Sun. Since this is an exceptional point, some space garbage such as rocks or space suit gloves might get stuck in the vicinity of the (unstable) point for some time.
UFOs, as flown by some extra-terrestial intelligent beings, might generally be rather small objects. Space is big. SOHO's cameras do not have extremely good resolution and any visible object would have to be either enormous, very bright, or somewhat close to SOHO (and Earth), but between SOHO and Sun. Somehow that wouldn't seem to make much sense.
Similar bright objects have not been observed from Earth based observatories, which would mean that it's a local phenomenom to SOHO. This would hint towards the first two possibilities above.
Sorry, I usually am pretty good with that rule, but it must have slipped my mind last night.
what sig?