What are these C shaped objects near Orion???

I was looking for some more information on the Gliese 581 system while i suddenly stumbeld on this:


Its a picture i found on Skymap.org . It shows the objects in question with the locations where they have been found.

Does anybody have a idea what this is? I really don't have a clue....

Interesting find, look like string. Anyway, Phage what are these things please?

Space is giving us alot to do these days.

Interesting, reminds me of this thread:

Giant space ships headed towards earth?

They are flaws in the scans of the original Palomar Sky Survey photographic plates. Dust particles probably.

ever heard of space serpents?

reply to post by Phage
uhm , I was thinking the same thing at first but i can't explain the strange shapes .
why does dust show up shaped like that in those pics??

reply to post by DutchBigBoy

Those things claimed to be seen in our upper atmosphere????

Cause if they were serpents they would be huge...

reply to post by Spartannic

What shape do you expect dust and fibers to have?

Looks like the security hairs used in american currency. Even have red and blue ones.
So much for hoaxing these pics.

reply to post by Phage
I don't really know. Maybe you could tell me why dust shows up in that shape?

Originally posted by Cole DeSteele
Looks like the security hairs used in American currency. Even have red and blue ones.
So much for hoaxing these pics.

I think you are right. They are "government approved" pics of space.

reply to post by Spartannic


You made such a nice presentation, complete with coordinates, that I'm kind of embarrassed to tell you that the answer is that it's just dust on the original negatives.

The photographs used on sites like Skymap and GoogleSky and others were taken from sky surveys done in the 1970s. Instead of using film, (which can bend and distort) astronomers back then took photos on high-quality glass plates.

They also took two photos of each chunk of sky - one with a red filter, and one with a blue filter. The individual plates were black-and-white for better resolution, sensitivity and contrast. On the red-filter plates, the redish stars (like Betelgeuse) would show brighter. On the blue-filter plates, the bluish stars (like Rigel) would show up better. Yellow & white stars (like Procyon) show-up about the same on both plates. Approximate color reprductions could be made by combining the two images (like you see on Skymap).

The catch is that since the plates are physical things, there is often dust or lint one one plate or the other. When the color reproductions get made, the lint on the the blue plate shows-up blue, and the crud on the red plate show-up red.

These days I suppose they could just photoshop-out such obvious flaws, but if they did, then conspiracy nuts on ATS would scream that the image was retouched to hide Nibiru or Nazi space stations or alien harvester fleets or some-such...

Originally posted by Phage
They are flaws in the scans of the original Palomar Sky Survey photographic plates. Dust particles probably.

STOP KILLING SANTA CLAUS!!!





(incidently, I agree...poor scanning...you find it all over google sky..poke around and you can see all sorts of crap like that)

reply to post by Saint Exupery

Thx for the explanation fellow seeker of truth...

Uhm you don't happen to know where to find a video or some pics who could explain the way those things were used? I mean the glass plates and do you know how the dust gets on the pics? Is it on the optics or does the dust create somekinda optical illusion?

I think their scope has worms they have a pill for that you know

I think phage hit the head on the nail

reply to post by hillbilly4rent
jup he sure did. as soon as he posted i kinda trusted that was the right answer . But hey the post of Saint Exupery made me even more curious on how the process involving the glass plates work.If only someone found a video ...

reply to post by Spartannic


There's more to research than looking at a computer. Most of what I learned I gleaned from touring observatories - Palomar, Mount Wilson, Kitt Peak, Stewart, Mount Hopkins & Lowell Observatory.

First, a quick primer on pre-digital photography. I'll describe black-and-white because it is easier and more relevant, since that's what astronomers use. They would start with a glass plate covered with very fine-grained silver-nitrate crystals, which were sensitive to light. When exposed to light and then washed with a chemical developer, the exposed grains would turn dark. The more light they were exposed to, the darker the crystals would turn. Thus, in the resulting image, all the things that were bright show-up as black, while those areas that were not exposed to light were clear - A negative image.

To make a positive image, they would either project the negative image onto a fresh plate or piece of photographic paper, or place the negative directly on the fresh surface and shine a light through it (the latter process is called making a "contact print"). The light shines unimpeded through the clear areas of the negative and exposes the fresh surface. The dark areas of the negative block the light and thus those areas of the fresh surface do not get exposed. When the fresh plate/paper is developed, it shows a positive image.

The plates were clean when they were removed from the wrapper and installed at the focal plane of the telescope. After they were exposed, removed and developed as photographic negatives, they looked like clear glass squares with black specks & smudges - the reversed images of stars & nebulae.

To make positive reproductions, i.e. pictures that show white stars on a black background, they would take the plate out of storage, wipe it off and loaded it onto a device that projected the negative image onto another photographic plate or peice of photo-sensitive paper. When developed, the black specks show-up as white stars on the new image. Now then, if there was any dust or lint on the negative, that would block the light from reaching the fresh surface, leaving a white image of them on the positive reproductions. This is how such artifacts sneak into the official record.

Hope this helps.