Yellow Squares

The cosmos at our fingertips.
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M@
Asternaut
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Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 1:50 pm

Yellow Squares

Post by M@ » Thu Sep 23, 2004 3:09 pm

I can't find a description of what the yellow squares on the images mean. Is it some sort of "are of interest" based on deltas in the images or something? That must be really hard to calibrate if it is!

M@

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RJN
Baffled Boffin
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Joined: Sat Jul 24, 2004 1:58 pm
Location: Michigan Tech

Post by RJN » Thu Sep 23, 2004 3:32 pm

Hi M@,

Thanks for asking. The yellow squares are areas where an unexpected transient has been automatically detected by the Night Sky Live software. Most of these transients are just cosmic rays that hit the CCD detector directly and so are not real astronomical objects. Other "transients" might occur soon after a new Night Sky Live camera comes online and the transient detection software has not yet been calibrated. Sometimes, in this case, the box will occur around a star.

As the transient detection software, written by Lior Shamir, becomes increasingly mature, the boxes will hopefully point out mostly real astronomical transients, such as meteors, a comet, a star that has undergone some sort of explosion, a nova, an optical counterpart to a gamma-ray burst, or even if we are really lucky, a supernova!

- RJN

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