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Originally posted by SaviorComplex
Originally posted by IceColdPro
This guy is a scapegoat for Nasa. He was using crude methods to obtain access to their computers, furthermore, it is NASA's responsibility to ensure they have a secure system! When he described how he obtained access it seemed like the fault lies solely with Nasa for not having a good IT security team.
If you break into someone's home and steal something, whether that person locked their door or not is irrelevant. The same principle applies here. He committed a crime, which he admits to.
You're completely wrong. Hacking into another computer is a crime. Hacking a government computer is a federal crime.
Yeah it's a silly mistake not to secure a computer, that's a given.
Nope because your no one! Sorry but that's the truth. To suggest hacking you're computer is the same level of offense as hacking a government computer is misguided.
He searched for the truth in a knowingly illegal way. However I agree about the damage. The only real damage was to NASA's ego.
Originally posted by internos
There's nothing wrong in what you say, and your account is mostly correct: but basically, there is not conspiracy as well: the same stuff works the same way, presently, regarding soho: the point is to know WHAT soho is, how it does work, who runs it, why, how, its targets, its instruments, its general purpose, the origin, meaning, purpose of the filters applied to soho imageering and a lot of stuff more, but on top of that is to realize that soho is NOT a camera, soho is an observatory using scientific instruments and producing scientific data. To take an image from soho and claim it to be anomalous without having even the least knowledge of how that stuff works, is like I, (I am completely ignorant in biology), would take some microscopic image and claim that i see aliens creatures all over because what i see "looks strange".
Originally posted by jeff.behnke
...And I still don't know what I'm looking at when I see this picture:
Originally posted by IceColdPro
SO WHAT?! Nasa does illegal things also,
Originally posted by jeff.behnke
Well, I wouldn't say it made me think of aliens, but in the e-mail exchanges between me and NASA, they tended to find two anomalies (or what I would call an anomaly) as well.
1) Why did the image disappear from their servers? They said they didn't know. Given, they eventually found the image in question on some backup server, but when I sent them a further e-mail asking them for the images around the one that went missing, my communication was cut off. Pthh. I guess I was burning up too much tax payer dollars Hours of what I would call image snapshots were missing that day! I figured if you could observe the snapshots around this one, you would have a better idea of what you are looking at and how it built up and diminished.
2) The e-mail was forwarded internally with a change of my subject line. The new subject read: "Was this a comet?" The response to which was no, it was not any comet that they knew about. And finally, their response to me was, "So what is it? I have no idea, but the word 'slinky' comes to mind."
To me, I had no idea what the image was because I'm no expert--I just wanted to know why it went missing because I found it intriguing since the system seemed to be fairly automated, and finally when something interesting comes along, whoops! all those images are gone. Their response was, yes, it is an anomaly that it went missing, and further, the image is anomalous because we (NASA) do not know what it is. They didn't say, "Oh yeah, SOHO hiccupped like it always does and crashed some data and made a wormhole type thing." They said they didn't know. And I still don't know what I'm looking at when I see this picture:
Planets: These always look very strange in LASCO images, because they're so bright that the image blooms, and the CCD pixels bleed along the readout rows. Some people try to claim that they're flying saucers, based on their appearance. I've also heard the claim that they're previously unknown Saturn-like planets with rings around them. You can see what I'm talking about on this SOHO Hot Shot page.
Cosmic rays: High energy particles from the solar wind, and from the galaxy as a whole, whip around the SOHO spacecraft and interact with the detectors. These produce spots and streaks on the detector ranging from a single pixel, to large streaks that span a large fraction of the image. These are most evident during a solar storm, as can be seen on this Hot Shot page, but are always present at some level. I know that some people have claimed that they've seen spacecraft-looking things that seem to be moving around, but which are obviously cosmic rays when examined by an experienced observer. People see a cosmic ray at one location in one image, and then another random cosmic ray hit nearby in the next image, and claim they're both the same thing moving between frames.
Sometimes you'll see a cosmic ray seem to persist in the web images for two or more frames. This is because we lose a certain percentage of the data coming down from the spacecraft. In LASCO such losses appear as square blocks in the image. The software which puts the images up on the web will fill in these blocks from the last good image, and if there's a cosmic ray in that block from the previous image, it will appear in this image as well. The way to check for this is to look at the raw data files, which are also available on the web through the SOHO catalog interface.
Software glitches: Occasionally we'll have some problems with the software which produce the images for the web, and strange artifacts will appear in the data. These glitches are usually corrected within a few days. In fact, we had a couple of instances of that recently.
Detector defects: There are defects which appear in the cameras from time to time, sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent. I remember seeing a web site which claimed that strange lights were hovering over the lower left limb of the Sun in EIT images, and thought to myself "You only just noticed that?". Those defects have been around forever, and were seen in the lab even before SOHO was launched.
Debris: Small pieces of aging insulation on the outside of the spacecraft, dust particles, micrometeorites etc can show up in pictures. Visit the LASCO Debris Lists and Images page for more details.
On the general subject of UFO claims from SOHO images, one should be aware that a lot of the supposed UFO pictures taken by SOHO have been modified by the proponents. For example, looking at the image that is distributed with the news release for the upcoming UFO conference, it's obvious that the picture is taken from a tiny number of pixels in the camera, and then passed through some kind of smoothing filter to make it look like a craft with rounded edges. They should at least have the courage to show the actual data, and not something which has been manipulated in Photoshop. In the example above, where the original image was "revealed" through the timestamp, we have shown how easy it can be to manipulate pictures into showing UFO-like features.
That all said, it should be noted that we do see objects moving in SOHO images. Over 500 comets have been discovered in SOHO images, most by amateurs using LASCO data which have been downloaded from the web. That's more comets than from any other observatory, either from the ground or in space. People are looking for moving objects in these pictures all the time, and are highly motivated to find them. None of them have ever turned out to be anything other than comets.More about comets observed by SOHO on this SOHO Hot Shot page..
This is a list of LASCO images marred by streaks which are
interpreted to be dust or debris near the telescope aperture.
The images listed here may be a subset of the total number of images
affected by these defects. Anyone finding suspicious streaks not
already noted in this listing is asked to transmit that information
to Gareth Lawrence ([email protected]) or to Kevin Schenk
([email protected]).
22-Sep-1999-17:42-C3
Broad track in S. Dark in center, with bright edges and strange circular patterns. Brightest at edge of occulter, where track ends.