Antares in Google Sky...

I recently browsed Youtube for UFO videos, when I saw this video:

In case it doesn't work: www.youtube.com...

I've checked this in Google Earth and www.google.com... myself, and it is correct. But for me, I got the "UFO" in the lower left corner of the star. Not in the upper right like in the video.
Any thoughts of what it could be?

Is this some kind of photo anomaly, or is Antares the home star of an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization?

reply to post by aalien

Any thoughts of what it could be?

It's about 2/3 of .01 degrees of the night sky, Antaras is .2, so if it's at roughly the same distance it would be about 3.33% the width of Antares, which would make it roughly 26.4 solar radius'.

If it's a spaceship, it's a spaceship a little over 11 billion miles long.

I would guess that the majority of what we're seeing is not an object, but rather a glow effect. For example, if you look closely at Antares itself, you'll notice that it's surrounded by an strong "glowy" effect with a width fully equal to an entire radius of the star itself. Then if you zoom out, you'll see that there's a visible cloud fully 2/3 the distance to Messier object 4, and encompassing HD14860, IC4606, 22 Sco, IC4605, and NGC6144. That cloud has a width nearly 13.5 times the diameter of Antares itself. But...I suspect that it's not really a "cloud" so much as normal interstellar dust reflecting EM radiation from Antares.

The cameras used to take these pictures are probably not visible-light cameras. The majority of the green you're seeing is probably a similar glow rather than an object itself.

As to what the object itself is...to make an informed guess we'd have to figure out what sort of spectrum was used by the camera, but if I were to venture an uninformed guess...assuming that it's actually an object instead of a camera artifact, I might guess that it's a planet. Keep in mind that we're looking at a two dimensional picture. There's no way to know the distance of the object from us relative to the distance to Antares.

I got the "UFO" in the lower left corner of the star.
Not in the upper right like in the video.

You can rotate the view in google earth with the little "N" symbol on the circle in the upper right.



[edit on 19-11-2009 by LordBucket]

I was going to say the same thing, except I would have said:
"That would be one big a$$ UFO."