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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 is because they want to keep all those alien gadgets to themselves. And think of all those nice spacebabes on Venus they would have to share with the rest of the world.
-- we're dressed in green, and we're feeling mean
They understand that they will never be able to convince the hardcore UFOlogists, but at the same time they recognize the fact that there are a lot of people going "Hey, whats up with that?"
The fringes will never be convinced, but responses like this and Phil Plait's BadAtromy.com will help to explain to the inquiring minds who's scientific literacy isn't what it should be.
The real question now is can some other independent group prove such UFO-ish artifacts can be created like the SOHO group claims. After all, it was once said that the moon was too bright for Hubble to image, but color tests were acknowleged to be done using clouds over Earth. Now we finally have publicly avaialble low-res moon images from Hubble.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
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
This is a brilliant scam, and I am quite impressed. Someone has finally figured out how to capitalize on the gullability of certain extremist UFO groups.
I've got proof that Elvis exists! I've got hundreds of photographs taken by an outside agency. I've scanned them all, and for the low-low price of $25 (USD), you can own a copy of the proof on CD. I'll let you see a few really low quality internet videos of them before you pay, but I promise you that blur in the corner is The King!
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hehe or an area in New York. Actually, There is a pretty good definition of this particular SOHO here.
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In answer to your comment: Yes, of course there is shielding to protect instrumentation...and it's not perfect. Cosmic rays are RAYS not particles, and it's entirely possible to a few to slip by. In fact, they do. As for a series of pictures, a CCD by definition can become saturated for a time; similar to your eye after looking at a bright object, then looking away. This could explain how one ray or packet of rays could cause this phenomena.
as an alien i find your comments offensive!
Take a look at this SOHO image! Not only is the Solar system crawling with UFOs, but they've also been concealing the fact that the Sun is mounted on a giant stick! Sure, they say the stick is just a shadow from a pylon in front of the camera, but we know the truth, don't we?
Now the real question is: whose stick is it? And are they likely to come back and probe us?
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.
Anyone who has seriously massaged data knows the dangers of 'wanting to believe' It is very hard to limit oneself to error correction and legitimate pattern enhancement. This is especially true when one is using off the shelf, not fully understood, tools. It is so easy to introduce artifacts that can be mistaken for reality.
This is exactly what happened to these images, the Man on the Moon image, Man on Mars image, and will continue to happen. People want to believe. They consider themselves cosmopolitan for their ability to accept improbable explanations, but forget the first step was to extinguish all possible conventional explanations, the first of which is systematic error.
The universe does not lie, but it is vague enough so we can easily lie to ourselves. It is as easy to create UFOs out of fuzzy images as it is to create animals out of passing clouds. We can not use either to prove or disprove the existence of anything.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Cosmic rays are RAYS not particles, and it's entirely possible to a few to slip by.
wrong:
cosmic ray
A stream of ionizing radiation of extraterrestrial origin, consisting chiefly of protons, alpha particles, and other atomic nuclei but including some high-energy electrons, that enters the atmosphere, collides with atomic nuclei, and produces secondary radiation, principally pions, muons, electrons, and gamma rays.
everything in moderation
The proliferation of video cameras along with the lack of recent corraborated sightings seems to show that UFOs are not visiting us now. How many people independently videotaped the WTC collapse? Yet there are no current, credible UFO videos. Did 'they' stop visiting in the 1950's? The only way to keep these hoaxes alive is to push them just beyond the sight of the masses. If everybody had a CCD telescope then the hoaxsters would have to resort to doctoring Hubble images to 'prove' their point.
word.
Gentlemen, it's safe to take off your tin foil hats now.
This UFO claim will put SOHO back in the news again. Without it, SOHO is not news worthy.
Same with the Moon Landing Hoax claims. There are teenagers who didn't know we even went to the moon. But since the hoax-program, NASA and its moon landing is a topic of TV discussion and NASA is news again.
Don't kid yourself NASA needs the hoaxer & UFO loonies, because without it, its just a big expensive agency that MTV generation doesn't know or care about.
Sure it has to reply to the moon-hoaxers and UFO spotters, but it gives NASA a great chance to show its footage on prime time TV.
On the other hand, there is always the question of where the line is between bias and fraud. If you believe and the evidence is inconclusive, then you might be guilty of bias. If you make up 'evidence', especially if it is contrary to existing evidence, and then try to sell it (no matter if it is mineral exploration data, or cosmic data), then that is a whole nother kettle of fish.
The bottom line is this: If there are ET's, and they are advanced enough to avoid detection on any large or credible scale, then they are surely aware of our capabilities (including SOHO and /.), and should have no problem continuing avoiding detection.
All this is just chatter to those who believe, and no evidence to the contrary will persuade them. Hundreds of millions of people worship gods that they cannot see, touch, or communicate with; others have turned this belief into a big, profitable business.
Shirtless woman joyrides in stolen police cruiser
Yes, the CHIPS may be shielded...
But if you shield the detector so that EM radiation can't get through, how can you use it to take pictures?.
In response to the point about it being in more than one single shot, they explained that because the SOHO sometimes sends incomplete data, and the proggy that puts it up on the web fills in the blanks from the last image.
HAHAH ... SOHO's "how to" on making UFO's kind of takes the doubt out about whether or not UFO-ish artifacts can be created ...
.. if you still don't believe it, perhaps you can explain away similar bad pixels that show up in particle-detector data at Fermilab or CERN as itty-bitty UFO's haunting the collider? Or maybe they're little angels taking the dead particles away to heaven?
...
I mean, if you really think a second independent group needs to "prove" that you can use photoshop to interpolate a bad pixel, then gimme some money and you've got yourself an article!
Hmm
Now I'd like to see *that* headline in UFO magazine
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
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.
The original picture before the "enhancement" looks more like a spacecraft to me. It looks like the original, constitution class, Enterprise, in orbit! The enhanced picture is obviously fake...it looks like flying saucers seen in TV shows.
Is this an undocumented time travel occurance where Kirk and crew visits 2001??
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
What really gets me is that the people searching for UFOs in the SOHO data obviously find that more exciting that the SOHO data... and that's tragic.
I mean, it takes some effort to follow the detailed science SOHO was designed to support, but the images alone should be worth looking at. Go look at this hotshot of four planets and the Sun's outer layers. Tell me you don't find that image awe-inspiring, or that you don't think the ability to get that image is among man's most impressive achievements.
(Yes, I'm a scientist by training, and do find this stuff genuinely awe-inspiring and have no time for those who refuse to learn and chase after UFOs. I never worked with SOHO, but I sat in a lab for three years across from someone who was doing a PhD on SOHO data. I was working on something much more boring for my PhD.)
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.
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."
If these people were interested in science, they'd have release the photos on their web page first, then issued the press releases. When they do it the other way around, it's not about science. It's about the £15.
Until pros get telescopes monitoring all of the sky all of the time at all wavelengths, yes. Most telescope fields of view are so small (depending on wavelength) that we miss a lot of transient phenomena. To some extent that's OK since astronomical timescales are notoriously long, but some things happen on faster timescales.
But this case is a bunch of nonastronomers using images taken by professional astronomers, who better understand the flaws in the images.
I wouldn't even dignify Euroseti as amateurs, since their selling SOHO images for 15 pounds REEKS of a scam. If you had found good evidence of ET, would you be trying to hawk it like that?
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
Whenever there's a big coronal mass ejection or solar flare, I always see pictures from SOHO on the local news. Heck, I've even seen them on Drudge. Space-related news still makes the news on a regular basis. To claim that NASA needs some controversy to get itself in the limelight is just incorrect.
Geez! These guys clearly don't have any clue, they don't even know that UFOs don't exhaust anything!
Because we humans are near the verge of destroying ourselves, the aliens have upped the pace of abductions. The problem is that they don't have enough "regular" saucers for the job, so they had to pull some of their older chemical-based-propulsion saucers out of mothball and get them working again. Thus, exhaust fumes.
Even aliens are not immune from boom and bust cycles. Hmmm. Maybe there is a market for abduction tracking software.
Table-ized A.I.
With all this nonsense about UFOs flying around, I'd like to point that there is something actually interesting on SOHO's LASCO C3 camera images right now. The comet Kudo-Fujikawa has entered the camera's field of view. See the "live" pictures at the SOHO site. The comet is entering from the top of the picture.
So you think Euroseti's claims are a bit far-fetched? Perhaps just an attempt to cash in? Well, in a long ranging scientific analysis of the images obtained by euroseti, we at bobjonesuniversityseti have revealed the TRUE nature of the "UFO's" in the SOHO images. Here is the proof!
That used to be true, but nowadays the LINEAR project picks up most of them. Amateur astronomers still account for a few a year, though. There are a lot of comets out there to be found.
These things always remind me of the "enhanced" pictures of the Loch Ness Monster's flipper. Believed 'em at the time, but hey, I was five.
p hs.html
To quote monster hunter Robert Rines, "This picture we enhanced and it shows a flipper some two to three feet across and six to eight feet long."
Debunked at: http://www.loch-ness.org/files/underwaterphotogra
What struck me while watching the video was that every instance of a "saucer shaped object" was very clearly viewed edge on. As is the case with images of galaxies, real space craft would be viewed from many different angles. The fact that each and every image is viewed edge on proves that they are not what they may look like.
It is very hard to analyze that if you don't know what has happened to the picture. The planet is easy enough, that's an over-exposed planet. The "exhaust fumes" is I guess what you're pointing at which is not straight. You would expect it to be straight if it is pixel bleeding, not if it is e.g. a cosmic ray. And if you look at it closely, you'll see that the streak consists of no more than 7-8 pixels, some in pairs, other alone on a line. What you're seeing there is actually the lines in the CCD, the image has been resampled to a resolution much greater than that of the detector, and then smoothed. I would say that a cosmic ray that has hit the detector in the vicinity of the planet. If you look at how many rays you would see during a sun storm, it is very unlikely that no cosmic would never be close to a planet in the field... Also, it is a very weak cosmic, it didn't even saturate the detector.
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