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Originally posted by ZELDAR
Totally fake, here is the link to the real picture. sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov...
You can also find it on the SOHO website.
Originally posted by ZELDAR
Totally fake, here is the link to the real picture. sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov...
You can also find it on the SOHO website.
Originally posted by witness63
Originally posted by Yissachar1
Intriguing
But no doubt Phage will debunk it any time now..
I hope it is UFO, but it will probably be something more mundaneedit on 10-10-2010 by Yissachar1 because: typo
I have no idea what hold this Phage character has on most of the posters here or why he is considered some kind of authority on every subject whose pronouncements are like the voice of God coming down from Mount Sinai.
It doesn't take much digging around for alternative information to prove that a lot of what he says is dubious at best.
In any case, I have been able to do so on a number of occasions so I don't regard him as being ten feet tall or some kind of infallible Pope of ATS.
That said, I have seen a lot of these SOHO pictures and others like them and have never really heard any kind of credible explanation for them. As far as I know, they remain unknown.
Ever since launch, there's been a number of people who've claimed to have seen flying saucers and other esoteric objects in SOHO images. Although some of these supposed pictures of UFOs can seem quite intriguing, they have always turned out to have a quite ordinary cause when examined by experienced SOHO scientists. In recent days, we've been receiving so many questions and claims that we'd like to set the record straight: We've never seen anything that even suggests that there are UFOs "out there".
In the past we've been accused of "covering up" UFO evidence when we present our explanations, and of "refusing to comment" (or "clamming up") when we give up on somebody who won't accept our explanations. While we don't expect to convince everybody, we hope that this page (and links herein) can provide some information for the curious who want to investigate the claims on their own.
Most commonly, UFO claims are due to perfectly natural flaws or artifacts in our publicly available data. Quoting from one of the replies sent by a SOHO scientist in response to a question from the public
The most common sources of UFO claims are: Planets, Cosmic rays, Software glitches, Detector defects
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.
CCD stands for charge-coupled detector, and refers to a silicon chip, usually a centimeter or two across, divided into a grid of cells, each of which acts like a small photomultiplier in that an incoming photon knocks loose one or more electrons. The electrons are "read out" by row (fast direction) and column (slow direction), the current converted to a digital signal, and each cell or picture element ("pixel") thus assigned a digital value proportional to the the number of incoming photons in that pixel (the brightness of the part of the image falling on that pixel). This is the same kind of detector as is used in a hand-held video camera, though until recently, the analog-to-digital conversion was left out in consumer devices.
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.
The LASCO and EIT CCD cameras include "anti-bleed" electronics which limit the pixel bleeding around bright sources to less than the full row (and usually no adjacent rows). In the case of a marginally too-bright object, the pixel bleeding will be only a few pixels in either direction along the fast readout direction. Thus, the "flying saucer" images.
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.