Starship Asterisk*

Excellent work! Good experiment!

Someone will still think your image could show a contrail...

Oh, I get it-- the bug's NAME is CONTRAIL. That must be the source of confusion! And he's into astronomy... that must be it.

PpUrDoDoIfNG


Well done!

All right!

Everyone say their peace now-- can we resolve this before the end of page 100?

I think not 8)

I can't wait to see APOD update.

Been enjoying watching the flexing of so much intellectual muscle (and some flab too).

Dan

Just 6 pages to go!


Come on people, let's hear your every little thought and idea!


Resistance is futile!

It's too bad that the Heaven's Above site doesn't do an all sky map for the Iridium flares as it does the regular satellites. Then we might be able to see when it came out of the shadow.

After some searching on Heaven's Above, found it! The lower streak is caused by the Hubble Space Telescope! See here: http://www.heavens-above.com/PassDetails.asp?Size=600&SatID=20580&lat=19.817&lng=-155.46&alt=9&loc=Mauna+Kea&TZ=UCT10&Date=38195.6178454973 (Sorry, the im...

Also, generally the abrupt nature of the flare has to do with the satellite coming out of the earth's shadow. Did not verify if this is the case here, but I expect that it's true for this "meteor".

I would say that what we're seeing is an Iridium flare. I looked it up on Heaven's Above and it looks like from Tel Aviv there occured an Iridium flare expected from Iridium 45 at magnitude 6 at the time of the image exposure: http://www.heavens-above.com/iridium.asp?lat=32.067&lng=34.767&al...

Has anyone checked to see if the color of the flash coincides with that expected from a sodium lamp flash?

We could probably eliminate/support the "light explode" theory with one quick color analysis!

I think we've come down to the conclusion that it's either a bug in the image or a lamp exploding. We all need to contact the author of the photograph in order to get more info regarding the state of the lamp, which as implied on the APOD page "The light pole near the flash has been inspected a...

Just found this website-- more fuel for the bug theory. http://www.cloudbait.com/science/darwin.html http://www.cloudbait.com/science/darwin_diff.jpg From his difference image, the line caused by the bug does appear to get wider as you move to upper left. And the line isn't perfectly linear. This im...

OK, after looking at the image in photoshop the linear artifact is way too linear to be caused by the flight of the "bug". This doesn't eliminate the bug theory. The linear artifact MUST be caused by some sort of shadow!!! Also, I'm revising my previous conclusion that the light pole is re...

Could someone post an online poll somewhere where we all could take a vote on this and get some statistics? Voting options: 1) Contrail shadow 2) Light exploding 3) Meteor 4) CCD artifact 5) Bug 6) Flash artifact 7) Lightning 8) Lens artifact 9) Write-in candidate Hoax and film artifact are not reas...