Markopolo
(Tourist)
03/10/08 02:22 PM
Re: UFO streaks, or am I just crazy...?!?!

You're not crazy, and it's not a UFO. As andocalrision said, there are many kinds of artifacts on the GE imagery that are explainable in a variety of non-paranormal ways.

In your example, notice that the Northern part of the line is somewhat fainter than the Southern part. Notice also that the line is uniformly green in color. Professional telescopes use filters to record a single wavelenth of light or multiple filters to record several wavelengths. Green is the color which human eyesight is most sensitive to, so it's likely that a green filter was used to take this image, but the object itself may have been white in color. All other colors except green would be filtered out.

Now consider that a short, straight line on an astronomical image is extremely common. There are huge numbers of satellites, Earth-orbiting debris, meteors, and even jet airplanes which create these (unwanted) lines on astronomical images. In fact, sometimes an astronomical research project is delayed because the required imagery is ruined by an (Earthly) object passing between the observer and the object being observed. A meteor strike typically starts faint, grows in brightness, then fades away. Your linear object starts faint, grows in brightness, then may have exited the field of view of the camera recording the image. My guess is a small meteorite hit the Earth's atmosphere during the exposure of this particular image. Remember that astronomical images are exposed for very long periods of time, hours even, so they gather up all kinds of spurious light.

If you continue to browse around Google Sky, you'll see many more of these kinds of blips. We're not being invaded, at least not by straight green lines.



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