Starship Asterisk*

What is the star-like point which is seemingly in front of the lower edge of the moon? it is clearly visible in the zoomed in larger version, but can even be seen from the main site pic. Anyone have input on that?

Skywise wrote:What is the star-like point which is seemingly in front of the lower edge of the moon? it is clearly visible in the zoomed in larger version, but can even be seen from the main site pic. Anyone have input on that?

Oh yes... so it is.
Strange.
It can't be a star so I reckon it's either a bit of shiny space hardware or a small group of pixels that has gone awry.[/b]

Yes, I noticed that too. I guess if it was a star it would have been included in the description. But that was my first thought as well

I wouldn't think it could be a star as the pinpoint of light is inside the moon (if you were to picture it as a full moon). I'd have to go with a satellite or other man-made debris catching the sunlight

Is it just me, or does it look like it has a contrail below it?

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070320.html
I had to magnify to see it. I can't make out what it is; but it doesn't look like a star to me.
Orin

I investigated this dot further and found a 2nd image from ISS which was take n shortly after this one .
It clearly show the dot again !! so not a bad pixel to me!

For me it could be a UFO

check out those and comment to my post please
this is the APOD one
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/p ... rame=54329

this is the following one with again this dot
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/p ... rame=54330

Yes I can see it in the other picture as well! It looks like it might be a little lower in the second picture. I wonder if that could mean its moving. Is there any way to determine the altitude of the photo. How high does ISS orbit? Would it be able to see an aircraft? I'm sure there are some artificial sattelites in NEO but I think most are further out (could be wrong about that).

You're right about the dot being in the second image, but if you compare the two the dot is much closer to the cloud tops and as ll294 pointed out the apparent straight line leading to it is shorter, and although it is still inside the diameter of the Moon, it is very near the bottom limb.

ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54329.JPG

ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54330.JPG

Clearly not a star. My guess is a man-made satellite of some sort. Expanding the pixels shows that it is larger than one pixel and quite "blue" (hence fairly far away).

Hello folks,

Nice to see I'm not the only one who noticed the object

I downloaded the image from
ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54329.JPG
and after inverting the colors, enhancing contrast and zooming in I clearly
recognized a contrail below the object, so it has to be a plane, I think.
Funny that it seems to rise up to the moon from this perspective...

regards,
Mary

I am at work today and I don't have the software available to me to look at this any closer. The logical explanation would be a satellite. I will be chacking back to see if there are any new developments

Echelon wrote:I investigated this dot further and found a 2nd image from ISS which was take n shortly after this one .
It clearly show the dot again !! so not a bad pixel to me!

For me it could be a UFO

check out those and comment to my post please
this is the APOD one

Good work finding the second picture. I guess since we don't know what it is, and it's clearly not on the ground, it would be a UFO.

I'm trying to figure based on the angles if it could be a high-flying plane. It appears roughly the same altitude as the ISS, but shooting so low across the horizon with a 400 mm telephoto lens could be skewing my perspective.

I'd say a satellite is most likely, with the perceived trail being some kind of artifact. If you look at the angle of the sun (based on the cloud and moon lighting), it would have to be inclined obliquely to catch a glint off a flat surface.

The moon is half a degree across and the motion between the two pictures appears to be a third of that, so it moved 1/6 of a degree. The EXIF data for the photos show the times as:
GMT: 2006:07:20 08:28:58
GMT: 2006:07:20 08:28:59
so whatever it was is moving at a decent clip. That also suggests a satellite. If it was a plane moving at 500 miles per hour directly perpendicular to the view, it would only be a mile or two away, which would be impossible. If it's a satellite, it's probably around 50 miles away.

A meteor also occurred to me, but the perceived tail is very faint compared to the body. If so, it could be up to a couple hundred miles away.

Here's a little about the ISS,

I'm curious, what drove the decision to place the ISS in its current altitude range (~220 statute miles, iirc)? Is it simply a tradeoff between atmospheric drag and ability to deliver payload? Placing the station in a 300+ mile high orbit, like that of the Hubble, would certainly reduce drag and hence reduce the number of reboosts needed. On the other hand, NASA already suffered a significant hit by putting the station in a 51.6 degree inclination orbit, and I'm guessing that reaching a higher orbit of that inclination would not be feasible without cutting payload capacity significantly. Would the space station have been placed higher had it been in a 28.5 degree inclination orbit? Also, I forget, how high can a manned station go before radiation exposure becomes unacceptable? I assume it's wherever the inner Van Allen belt starts...

In reply to:

because it has to be serviced by the russian's who launch from baikonur... in fact Mir was on the same altitude/inclination.


To elaborate a bit, it's because it has to be serviced by Soyuz rockets from Baikonur and Shuttles from Florida. The altitude is actually lower than what the Russians would prefer. It's more efficient to get to ISS from Baikonur (which is at 51 degrees north latitude, and it's not a coincidence that that's the same as the ISS's orbital inclination) so they can afford to fly a bit higher into that inclination. If the ISS is higher, it doesn't need to be reboosted as often. For this reason, while the Shuttle was unavailable for the last two years, they pushed the ISS into a higher orbit, out of the Shuttle's reach. They allowed it to drop back down in time for STS-114, of course.

So the orbit is basically the best compromise between Soyuz rockets from Baikonur and Shuttles from KSC.

The Russians actually originally intended Mir-2 (the core of which ultimately became Zvezda, during its greatly extended planning phase) to be in an orbit which Shuttles cannot achieve. It would've been a polar orbit, serviceable by Soyuz rockets launched from the far north site of Plesetsk. This was intended to resolve the problem of renting space from a foreign country after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of Kazakhstan. But for a variety of reasons this never became a reality.

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Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh

= = =

The bright spot that looks like it is inside the diameter of the Moon, may not actually be inside it. The Moon may oblate just enough to miss it, by atmospheric diffraction. It might be Venus. Tho it does look suspiciously like some kind of man-made object, plane or satellite. How far away is a real difficult row to hoe.

Its dirt on the lense
I did put both frames into an animated gif with 1 sec frame rate and the dot just stays right i nthe middle of the screen. This proofs to me its
SPACE FLY SHIT on the lense

alllasss , nothing this time
If one wants the gif to see i can send it right away
Regards
Echelon

PS people keep looking

It's at pixel 1137/818 (from upper left) in both frames. Seems too much of a coincidence to be external. It is bluish and the intensity is quite different in the 2 frames and the adjacent pixels (reflecting the same object) are also somewhat different so it isn't a single defective pixel.

Are there any other pictures from this camera at about the same time?

This observation makes the question of the faint "contrail" interesting too.

Now back to your regularly scheduled viewing ...

There's a ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54328.JPG currently available too. It's in that image as well. I bet there must be some more but I'm not going to search for them, now that it's obvious what it must be.

For a while I thought it could also be something small coming off the orbiter, I believe this is not uncommon.

BTW, there are more specs like this in these images if you look for them.

Could it possibly be a reflection in the window from a light somewhere inside the ISS? I know when I take photos out of a hotel window, I get this kind of effect from the lamp being on, usually on a larger scale, but it does look rather similar.

It's a bad pixel on the camera.
1136,818.

I found the same flaw at the same place on

ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54677.JPG

This image also shows the mysterious "contrail" going straight towards the bottom of the picture from the spot at 1137/818. There are more than a few other spots as well.

The fact that this defect exends to adjacent pixels and some "light" is detected (or at least read from these pixels) makes me suspect microscopic space dust. I'm sure NASA is quite aware of this issue.

I wonder how old these cameras are and how exposed they are to space.

kovil said:

The bright spot that looks like it is inside the diameter of the Moon, may not actually be inside it. The Moon may oblate just enough to miss it, by atmospheric diffraction. It might be Venus. Tho it does look suspiciously like some kind of man-made object, plane or satellite. How far away is a real difficult row to hoe.[/

quote]

I agree. Moving at 17,500 mph, diffraction of Venus would "drop" the planet in line with the station's path of travel well before the Moon's movement is detected.

dlw wrote:I found the same flaw at the same place on

ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54677.JPG

This image also shows the mysterious "contrail" going straight towards the bottom of the picture from the spot at 1137/818. There are more than a few other spots as well.

The fact that this defect exends to adjacent pixels and some "light" is detected (or at least read from these pixels) makes me suspect microscopic space dust. I'm sure NASA is quite aware of this issue.

I wonder how old these cameras are and how exposed they are to space.

Wow. Good work. For those who haven't looked at the picture, this one is straight down at a stretch of desert, but as promised, the bright spot is there, in the exact same spot. I zoomed in and found the aberration is a bright pixel with overflow into the pixels next to it, plus a faint vertical line extending from the bad pixel to the bottom of the image.

dlw wrote:

I found the same flaw at the same place on

ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -54677.JPG

This image also shows the mysterious "contrail" going straight towards the bottom of the picture from the spot at 1137/818. There are more than a few other spots as well.

Cool, dlw!
I found another picture: ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -56495.JPG
which shows the same pixel flaw at exactly the same position and here you can see
without any contrast enhancements that the contrail-like stripe is running from x = 817 down to 2006!

Ok, forget my plane thesis and thank you for enlightment

Mary

errr.. y, not x ...

mary wrote: I found another picture: ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS013 ... -56495.JPG
which shows the same pixel flaw at exactly the same position and here you can see
without any contrast enhancements that the contrail-like stripe is running from x = 817 down to 2006!

Interesting. The above image has a similar, even more dramatic "spot" at 1413/1215. The stripe below it is very clear and extends to the bottom of the image.

The fact that these "stripes" are precisely on a line of pixels leads me to think it has something to do with how the sensor is scanned when an image is recorded. Perhaps once the scan hits the very bright pixel, the intensity converter for that column becomes biased and doesn't recover quickly enough.