tisdag 16 augusti 2011

Ahh, the 8.16.11 (aka Jupiter) video

Damn, it's like being addicted...

The Mauna Kea CFH telescope is seeing the moon (not sun) and the stars pointed out in the video are part of Pegasus and Aquarius. I see them as a big peaked bird taking dumps:

And the old faithful Your Sky :

And finally the proof that what we've been seeing in those hard focused, jerky shots lately is really Jupiter :

Your Sky has (as usual) a perfect match regarding time of day and the star pattern.
And if you look for yourself you'll see that in the middle after the green/cyanish 1h-2h line and the red one crosses you have the moon.


Warning: Cheap shot below .

So if this isn't video proof that "the evil empire" is coming to destroy us I don't know what...

måndag 15 augusti 2011

Quick comment on the 8.14.11 video

The brown dwarf CNN report is from back in Feb. : http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/15/scientists-telescope-hunt-massive-hidden-object-in-space and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/up-telescope-search-begins-for-giant-new-planet-2213119.html

This is the old Tyche planet that two astronomers think we might have in the Oort cloud. The theory has some things working for it and some against.
No proof either way has been found in the Wise data as of yet.

lördag 13 augusti 2011

Info on the 8.13.11 video

I'lll probably update this with some more stuff later. Probably...

The object at 2:35 in the video (and the subsequent still image) looks an awful lot like the stripes of Jupiter, but without knowing the time and POV it's impossible to find out for sure.

The pentagon/3D cube and weird star seen at 6:38 is the Scorpius constelllation.
Which is, coincidentally, the same constellation that just went past STEREO Ahead.

View from http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/




Corrections of the 8.12.11 video

OK, I wasn't going to do any more but what the heck...

So, to begin with Neumayer has three webcams and you need to enter the right URL so see the one overlooking the station. Here you can select which one you want : http://www.awi.de/NM_WebCam/
The one in this video is the roof camera pointing south.


The object at 7:20 is the moon and sets perfectly correctly from right to left:

View from http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/
The pentagon at 6:35 is the constellation Puppis (remember we're looking south here):
View from http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/


At 41:20 there's the question if the white thing to the left is the radar dome the other webcam is mounted on and if the black thing to the right is "one of the other Neymauer stations". First, I don't think Neumayer I and II exists anymore since they were replaced by III, according to the Neumayer webpage.
Second, remember that the radar-cam is overlooking the north side of the station and the roof-cam is poining south, so there's no way the roof-cam can see the webcam-dome. As for what the image really shows I have no idea atm. The left rectangle is probably a container.


So, to the question of why the sun rises and sets at different time at the stations.
If we're looking at where they are placed on the pole it's really easy to see why the sun rises in Davis at about 4:00 and at Neumayer at about 10:00 (from http://www.weatherimages.org/latlonsun.html )

Noone questions why the sun rises 3 hours later in Los Angeles compared to New York and they're both in the USA...

Oh, and the reason Neumayer seems to have 12 hours worth of light (and it's actually only 10 if you look at the time in the video, from about 7:40 to 17:50) is that the camera switches from day vision (color) to light sensitive night vision (black/white), making the faint morning and evening light look much brighter that it really is. If you factor in the civil twilight and the fact that light is seen even after and before this (especially with a night vision camera) you see that the 10 hours is probably correct.

Update 8.13.11:
The stationary "star" over Davis at 25:40 has been at the exact same place since we first was shown images from that station, so it's most certainly a bum pixel in the camera.
Either that or Davis is fact District 9 :)

The bright light at 26:30 is the moon.

Surise IS at 01:08 at Casey.

torsdag 11 augusti 2011

Over and out for the blog

If you have read through these posts and still think
that the videos are correct, there's little point in my work.

If you have read through these posts and realized
that the videos aren't correct, my work is done.

If you have read through these posts and confirmed what you already knew,
that the videos weren't correct, my work wasn't really needed.

So unless I get specific requests about something in particular...

...my work here is done.

Correcting the 8.11.11 video

Hello Neumayer again.

At 2:05 we're told that stars don't move - not in minutes. But what we're seeing is movement over tens of minutes.
The star in question is the same Fomalhaut we remember from earlier and if we
compare a superimposition of Neumayer from 17:40 to 18:40 to one from YourSky over the same time we, once again, see a perfect match.
And at 18:40 on YourSky we also see Diptha which makes an appearence at 2:59 in the video


View from http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/


At 4:00 we're told that this "looks like the mini dipper - but on the other hand it doesn't".
Absolutely right - it's Lepus with the behind of our old canine friend to the right.
We also see the radar dome shadow again 
View from http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/

And, sure enough, if we turn the YourSky "camera" around by changing the Azimuth from South-East to North-West we see the moon causing the radar dome to cast a shadow.
View from http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/


At 6:16 we're told that the sun shoudn't be out at 9:50 in the morning.
http://www.weatherimages.org/latlonsun.html tells us it should - in fact we're only three minutes from acctual sunrise :)

We also get a great shot of the spotlight on the leftmost leg of the station, the one that supposedly was a sun or star

At 8:40 and 9:10 we notice that the small bright objects of interest over the roof only appear when the spotlight is cranked, causing lens flares.

So, to the butterfly at 10:20. There's no way this :

can be said to be the same as this :

At 27:20 it's totally impossible to see the four distinct objects in each row, no matter how much we use our minds...

Not to mention that the brightest objects on the lower left and upper right all of a sudden, after supposedly hanging together in the same formation (below) since the first picture back in January or whatever, in three days suddenly move almost past each other.




onsdag 10 augusti 2011

Quick comments on the 8.10.11 video

Ok, these are basically the same artifacts as before (and do see foghaze's excellent video) except this time we clearly see the moons face in the blue reflection, further proving that it is just a reflection, and we also get to see some additional flares and reflections.

As is said at about 13:03 it's "very hard to adjust" the camera and binoculars to see the extra objects.
Now if these were real things in the sky you should just be able to point the camera up there and see it, right? There's no adjusting needed to see the white moon.
Why would you have to find the exact angle between the camera and binoculars to see the other things? Well, simply because the light has to hit the lenses in the right way for the reflection to appear.

At the beginning of the video the blue moon is really close to the real (white) one.

Then all of a sudden it's dropped down the equivalence of its entire diameter :

So what happened in those 25 seconds?
There was a switch in which one of the binocular eyes the camera's looking through.

If the object was really behind the moon those 2 inches (or something) wouldn't make it move a bit. But the viewing angle has changed and so does the reflection.
If you're good at angular mathematics you can probably prove that those inches fit the diameter drop perfectly.

At the end we can see the upper brownish reflection shake with every small movement of the camera, once again proving that the object is caused by something in the camera.



tisdag 9 augusti 2011

Correcting older Neumayer stuff

Here's a backlogg if the things noticed on the Neumayer webcam in earlier videos.
This will probably be updated if/when I remember other older things.

The mysterious planet :
The mysterious planet was something supposedly following the sun. As can be shown through YourSky the "sun" in this image (2011-07-14 17:00) is is actually the moon.

The "planet" was clearly seen to the left in the image at 18:00 :


But as you can see in the following images it could be seen transparent in front of the station during an hour before ending up in the 18:00 spot :



So it's nothing more than a reflection of the moon in the camera lens.

The radiation suits.
This image has caused some speculation :

YouTuber foghaze thinks in this video that it is indeed radiation suites to protect them from the earlier coronal mass ejection of the sun. As he found out, there were auroras (and thus much ionic radiation) over Antarctica at that exact date.

I'm not entirely sure though. This is an image from http://www.maydealing.com/2312/products/96075,heat-insulation-suit showing a firefighter's suite, something very similar to what they're wearing :

So my main theory right now is that those three guys were actually doing a fire drill.
Fires happen, even in Antarctica, and you need to have guys on the station able to put it out. It's not as if you just can pick up the phone and dial 911.

As for their pointing, I think it's something they just made for the camera; what are the odds that all three of them just happened to stand and point at exactly the second the webcam took the shot. It only does that once every ten minutes...
Also when was the last time you saw three guys pointing at the same time? One or two, maybe, but not three or more.

The mysterious round shadow
As noticed on the Facts blog the camera is sitting in front of a radar dome. And that's what's causing the shadow:

The reason it's not visible sometimes and changes in size and appearence is that it's illuminated by the moon, and as that goes through its phases the crescent moon isn't bright enough to cast any shadows. You can easily verify that it's the moon by going to YourSky and change the Azimuth to North-West (180° from the South-East the webcam is looking).


Correcting the SOHO part of the 8.7.11 video

The reason Venus isn't traveling in a stright line, but is actually rising in the SOHO images, can be a bit tricky to understand.

The key part is to know (or google :) that Venus' orbit is inclined a bit over 3° when compared to the earths. This means that when we're looking at it's orbit it will sometimes rise and sometimes dip. This is also complicated some more by the fact that Venus and the earth are orbiting around the sun at different speeds so we keep seeing changing angles.

The image below is made by superimposing three SOHO images from 2000, showing the entering, "centering" and exiting of Venus and as we can see, it did rise a bit even back then (the white dots below the line are Jupiter and Saturn from the oldest image) :


As we can see in this superimposed image from a simulation of July 19 and Aug 8 at the gunn site, the angle Venus is traveling in today fits the acctual SOHO superimposition at the bottom very well :
For each image above I rotated the view to keep earth in the middle of the sun



So we can see that it shrinks like Venus and travels like Venus.
That can only mean one thing - It's a duck!




måndag 8 augusti 2011

Correcting the Neumayer parts of the 8.7.11 video

For the lat/long and other facts about Neumayer see my Facts about Neumayer post.

Auroras are often ocurring near the poles and can last very long : "Undulating ribbons of light may shimmer in the sky for hours"

At 24:25 it's mentioned that there's something very bright in the left 
corner of the image, causing the auroras. That is absolutely right -
it is the sun, and as we know the Aurora Borealis/Australis is caused by
charged particles hitting the earths magnetic field.
Now if you go to the Horizon Views at YourSky and enter 2011-08-06 07:20:00 the sun isn't up!
That's because a couple of things :
  • it's the sensitive night vision view of the webcam we're seeing so the amount of light is highly exaggerated
  • sunrise is when the disk touches the horizon and with the low inclination of the sun at the poles in winter, the sun stays just below for a long time. 
At 10:30 UTC it's up - which brings us to the rising of the crescent moon at 24:45 in the video :  If you enter the Neumayer values at http://aom.giss.nasa.gov/moonloc.html you see that the moon rises at about 7:00
Since the sun is to the left of the moon, and the reflection of the sun rays
is what's causing the moon to shine, the left part of the moon should be lit; just as in the images.

One thing missed in the video is that at 25:40 you can see them sending off one of the weather/ozon/whatnot-balloons.

At 26:20 there's a strange bright object in the sky. Well as you can see in the comparison between the (slightly enhanced) webcam shot and what YourSky says it's clear that it's Fomalhaut - according to Wiki "one of the brightest stars in the sky"







The reason the Radar Dome shadow hasn't been seen lately (as mentioned at 27:00) is that the moon has just been a sliver and not able to produce shadows. If you go to YourSky, enter 21:40 and change the Azimuth to NW instead of SE you're in essence looking at what's behind the webcam - and there's the moon. And as we've seen it's now going on half moon so there is enough light to produce shadows. In the coming weeks they will be even more pronounced.

At 28:45 there seems to be some misunderstanding of how lens flares work.
There is a strong lightsource (since it's the night vision it doesn't have to bee that bright. And at 29:50 we do see it in day vision) on the "beacon" and the reflection it makes in the lens causes the flare. There's nothing up and off to the right causing anything.

At 29:30 that's Sirius and to the right above we see the "triangular ship" aka dogs-ass we saw in the 8.1.11 blog. I'll leave it up to the reader to go to YourSky and prove it.

Facts about Neumayer

Since we're going to go over a bunch of new and old stuff from the Neumayer Startion in the coming blogs I'd like to state some facts here so I don't have to go over them every time.

  • Pronounciation : Say the phrase "annoy my earth", remove the beginning "ah" and the last "th" and you'll get NOY-MY-ERR. That's how you pronounce Neumayer.
  • Location : It's lat/long is 70°39' S, 08°15' W.
  • Camera position and direction : As stated on http://www.awi.de/NM_WebCam the webcam is placed on the communications radom and is pointed at the north side of the base. So it's essentially looking south-east.
    When there's enough light it runs in normal mode (color) and if not it runs in a very light sensitive night vision (black/white) mode. (Update:) The distance between night and day sensors in the camera is also responsible for the jump in the image when it switches (or it could possibly be a different camera for night/day).
  • Daylight : Since it's about as far away from the acctual pole as you can get on Antarctica it does have some hours of light even in the winter.
  • Timezone : The camera images are presented as UTC and the station seems to use UTC as well. 
  • Other : They do send up sime "UFO:s" on their own, like ozoneprobes and other weather related balloons.
An overview of the station looks like this :
 This is a slightly cropped image from http://onorbit.com/node/789


We can clearly see the "communications radom" (RAdar DOMe), where the webcamera is located, and the "garage port" in the ground that takes you inte the nether regions of the station.

A couple of links with more info and images :
Google images also has lots of good ones.

    lördag 6 augusti 2011

    Sun up/down at Davis and Mawson stations

    In the "911! 8.5.11" video Ursu says that  the sun rises and sets at the wrong time at Davis and Mawson stations.

    Now this is indeed easy to get wrong. I put up an explanation for Mawson yesterday that made sense for sunrise at Mawson but when I started doing the same for Davis and, for completeness sake, looked at the sunset it didn't fit.

    The reason it's easy to get wrong is that we are dealing with both local time vs UTC and the problem of knowing exacly when sunrise and sunset occur. They are defined as "the times when the upper edge of the disk of the Sun is on the horizon" and in Antarctica in the winter the sun is just below the horizon for a very long time before it actually rises above, and in that time it still gives off enough indirect light to make the precise timing of the "horizon-breach" difficult to see (especially when the webcam doesn't particularly track the sunrise/set).

    But what we can do, however, is measure the time between when it just about becomes bright and when it just about becomes dark and use that to find out at what time noon is.

    First thing to know is that the stills at the respective site are timestamped in that stations local time (this also means that the easiest way to match sun up/down to the times given at timeanddate is to just look at the stills). However if you download that image you can see that the filename is the UTC time, so for Mawson the file might be called M1108061327s.jpg and show 6:27 pm (which is 18:27 mil time). So from that we can deduce that Mawson time is UTC+5h. Doing the same for Davis reveals a 7h difference.
    The video time is also presented in UTC.

    In these images from the Mawson video we see that the light starts to show at about 03:00UTC and is gone by about 13:00UTC (1:00pm) :


    So the time span is 10h, indicating that noon should be at 10/2 + 03:00 = 08:00UTC
    Since we know Mawson time is UTC+5, Mawson noon should occur at 8+5 = 13:00 local time and if we look at the timeanddate site for solar noon at Mawson it's 12:55 local time. Perfect fit.

    The current video images from Davis makes it a bit harder to discern exact time, since it's clody right now, but there seems to be light between about 02:30UTC and 11:30UTC


    The time span here is 9h, so noon should occur at 9/2 + 02:30 = 07:00UTC.
    Add the seven hours UTC-local difference and you'll end up with 14:00 local time. Timeanddate says 13:55 .

    So we see that there's nothing mysterious in the sunrise and sunset times on neither Davis nor Mawson.

    fredag 5 augusti 2011

    Australia's second moon - Ursu's 911! 8.5.11

    This image from weeklyworldnews.com is presented as an evidence that there is a second moon in the sky
    Now, I took the to the moon to right in the image above, rotated it -80°, stretched it somewhat and made it grey-scale. Apart from my result not being stretched exactly the right way, what makes my manipulated image below different from the one to the left above?


    So my point is : since I could so easily create one of the moons above from the other, isn't it extremely likely that the "acctual" image is manipulated in the exact same way?
    And if you download the original image and look at the Exif-information you see this :




    So the photo is taken Aug 26 2010 and edited in Photoshop. Case closed.

    Update Aug 6 2011:
    This is apparently a recurring post as it was published in Aug 2010 in the Frank Lake Report along with news that Fidel Castro hopped a raft to America, Michelle Obama being pregnant in Jan 2011 (she should be due about now then) and lets not forget about Tuna Boy...