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Originally posted by Copernicus
reply to post by mikesingh
And Occam's razor says that the simplest explanation is often the correct one, so this is obviously a CCD glitch.
Thread debunked, nothing to see here folks!
(yes, this is sarcasm)
What are those flying saucer-shaped objects in the LASCO images?
The "funny-looking spheroid" is a typical response of the SOHO LASCO coronagraph CCD detector to an object (planet or bright star) of small angular extent but so bright that it saturates the CCD camera so that "bleeding" occurs along pixel rows. There is a bright horizontal streak on either side of the image, because the charge leaks easier along the direction in which the CCD image is read out by the associated electronics. .....
....If you point a video camera at a very bright source (say, the Sun), the image "blooms" or brightens all over --- there are so many electrons produced in the pixels corresponding to the bright source that they spill over into adjacent rows and column, perhaps over the entire detector. Better CCD's will "bleed" only along the fast readout direction (a single row), and perhaps a few adjacent rows. ....
....A few of the LASCO images that have appeared on the "extraterrestrial" Web sites show much larger and brighter, but still saucer-like features. These images are in fact obtained with the instrument door closed, but with an incorrectly long exposure. The big "saucers" result from massive pixel bleeding along every row of the detector containing part of the image of the "opal," or small diffusing lens, in the instrument door, that is used for obtaining calibration data.
If your correspondents still prefer to believe that the pixel-bled images of planets or bright stars are something else, ask them why the extended part of the "saucers" (i.e., the pixel bleeding) always occurs in the same direction relative to the image --- even when the spacecraft is rolled relative to its normal orientation relative to the Sun.