Light Could Be Alien Spaceship, Experts Say

[ChrisBoardman]

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3986191/Giant-Death-Star-spotted-in-space.html

it is in the sun though...

A GIANT object spotted by astronomers near the planet Mercury could be an alien SPACESHIP, UFO hunters claimed today.

The round 'craft' is as big as a planet and appeared from nowhere in images captured by a Nasa telescope.

The Heliospheric Imager-1 telescope was taking pictures of a coronal ejection, a giant eruption, from the sun when the mysterious 'ship' turned up in a series of shots

More than 240,000 YouTube fans have seen a clip compiled of the images.

User siniXster uploaded the video.

He said: "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked."

Nasa has said the object was created because of the way images were processed.

 

[Bigphoot2]

Looks a bit like the Enterprise surrounded by some unknown form of energy

 

[Anome]

He said: "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked."

Not very well if it shows up in photographs.

 

[eburacum]

Light could be alien spaceship, experts say

No, the experts don't say that; the YouTube nerks say that. The experts say it is an artefact of the way these images are processed, and they are right.

 

[eburacum]

Here's a more comprehensive explantion;
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/my ... 43870.html

Of course, there's another scientifically sanctioned explanation for the curious images, though we're not certain that skeptics and UFO enthusiasts such as SiniXster will endorse it. Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries put the question to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). They're the people who analyze data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1)--better known in this context as the camera that shot the footage in question.

Head NRL group scientist Russ Howard and lead ground systems engineer Nathan Rich say the mysterious object is in fact Mercury itself. And what we're seeing in the footage is the equivalent of Mercury's wake, "where the planet was on the previous day," as it travels through the solar system on its natural gravitational path:

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

The analysts say the practice works even better when applied to far-off objects such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But for moving objects, especially planets, the process is a little more complicated. And making matters even trickier is Mercury's staus as the closest planet to the sun.

"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich explained in an email.

 

[ChrisBoardman]

There would be logistical problems with building a craft as big as a planet. Laregly, the planet would not have enough raw materials to support its manufacture, and its gravity weight would probably affect the orbit path of the planet.

 

[GNC]

Here was me hoping Vulcan had finally reappeared...