Planet Sized Object Spotted Near Mercury

[KiwiElf]

I'm surprised this hasn't already been posted. ;)

DfZIrR9X80E

"UFO hunters claim to have spotted a planet sized alien spacecraft hovering next to Mercury.

The mysterious object appears in a video of a massive burst of energy, known as a coronal mass ejection, coming from the sun.

Analysis of the video shows an object which only becomes visible after the solar flare passes through an area of apparently empty space.

This, conspiracy theorists say, is proof of the existence of a huge alien spacecraft using a 'cloaking device'.

A Youtube video analyzing the discovery has received over 165,000 hits in just a few days as conspiracy theorists excitedly discuss their new 'discovery'.

The video's narrator, known as siniXster, is adamant he has found proof of intelligent life in outer space.

"Holy smokes. Look at that, that is definitely some sort of manufactured object. It's cylindrical on either side, it has a shape in the middle.

It definitely looks like a ship to me and it's very obviously cloaked." He says in the video commentary.

Experts aren't so quick to jump on the 'the-Death-Star-is-coming-to-get-us' bandwagon, however.

Nathan Rich from the United States Naval Research Laboratory says the mystery object is simply a digital hangover from an earlier image.

Dr Rich explained that to ensure the image of a solar flare stands out, researchers will compare the images with photos from the day before, then scrub out any objects that appear twice.

This process is simple with stationary objects like stars, Dr Rich explains, but more difficult with moving objects such as planets or asteroids.

"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image." Dr Rich told Space.com.

Speaking to The Daily Mail, astronomer Dr Heather Couper agrees.

"It's imaging processing that they haven't got their heads around. No way could it be an alien spaceship the size of Mercury because Mercury is the size of our moon and we would know about it."

But then she would say that, wouldn't she?


December 8, 2011, 3:32 pm
Source: Yahoo! New Zealand

[Leon]

Now yahoo news has posted it as well...

http://au.news.yahoo.com/video/sa/watch/27521859/8129039/

[mountain_jim]

Informative explanation here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45571392/ns/technology_and_science-science/


....
The question was meant rhetorically, but nonetheless, the video is curious, so we've put it to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) — the group that analyzes data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1), the telescopic camera that shot the new footage.

As you might suspect, there is a non-UFO explanation of the apparent flare-up near Mercury. According to Russ Howard, head scientist of the NRL group, and Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer, it is simply an artifact left over from the way raw HI-1 telescope data gets processed. Rather than a UFO mothership parked near Mercury, the bright spot is "where the planet was on the previous day," Rich told Life's Little Mysteries.

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Nathan Rich
This image shows the average light coming from Mercury and the surrounding region of space on Nov. 30 subtracted from the average light coming from the region on Dec. 1. On both days, the track of the planet creates two streaks. To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space — caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background — the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

This works great for objects far off in the distance, such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But it gets a little trickier when trying to account for nearer objects, particularly moving ones, like planets.

"When (this averaging process) is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich wrote in an email.

He noted that the bright spot disappears when the CME footage is reprocessed using pixel values from a different day — the day after the CME, for example — to remove background light, instead of pixel values from the previous day.

Those in favor of the bright spot being a cloaked UFO mothership rather than a data-processing artifact will surely point out that the spot in question is not round like the ghost of a planet, but rather sharp-edged like the Starship Enterprise.

And they have a point: A high-resolution image of the spot shows that it is composed of two roughly parallel lines. "The pixels which form the two parallel lines are where the circle from the planet and the bleeding pixels (cross-like features) overlap as it progresses across the field," Rich wrote. In other words, because Mercury moves over the course of each day, and because saturated pixels bleed light into adjacent pixels, an averaged image of Mercury from the previous day looks like two streaks, rather than an orb.

[Niobe]

Hi KiwiElf, It was posted earlier. I was looking for the thread and came across this one. Apparently folks aren't too interested.

[toad]

http://secchi.nrl.navy.mil/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.FAQ

[Aetheric Traveler]

Doink!


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