What Could That Be??

[Ganymede12]

It doesn't suffer from trailing like the stars in the image. I'm stumped....

[Astro_king]

noise

[t_ilan_s]

Its can't be a satellite because I took this picture in 2 AM, and its cant be noise because its to big for that, the noise is much smaller than this dot.

[RobH]

Look closely....it's a cosmic ray hit.....as I said before....no trailing, plus, it's too well defined to be anything outside of the imaging train.......no, it's not a satelite / alien / nibiru / planet X / flying teapot or anything out of the ordinary at all....these things are common, I have countless subs with artifacts like this.

[Josh Wilson]

Cosmic ray hits are very rare. . In fact, impossible. Especially at his latitude in Israel. Cosmic rays are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field and sent up to the poles. NOWHERE near Israel. This would only be possible if he were photographing near the poles and had the camera on a very high ISO, typically 3200-10000 (or higher).

Also, visible light rays are on the spectrum of 2-3 eV's. Cosmic rays are on the spectrum from 10⁹ to 10²¹ eV's. Even with a high ISO, very (to the tenth power) improbable. Again, impossible. Unless you have a Gamma Ray detector.

[gkec]

I agree with cosmic ray,

[RobH]

Cosmic ray hits are very rare. . In fact, impossible. Especially at his latitude in Israel. Cosmic rays are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field and sent up to the poles. NOWHERE near Israel. This would only be possible if he were photographing near the poles and had the camera on a very high ISO, typically 3200-10000 (or higher).

Also, visible light rays are on the spectrum of 2-3 eV's. Cosmic rays are on the spectrum from 10⁹ to 10²¹ eV's. Even with a high ISO, very (to the tenth power) improbable. Again, impossible. Unless you have a Gamma Ray detector.

From the QSI website......

Cosmic rays are high energy particles that continually bombard the Earth. Some cosmic rays are generated by the sun, while others originate from far outside of our solar system. The higher above sea level you are the more likely you are to see the effects of cosmic ray hits in your images. Cosmic ray hits on a CCD can appear as a bright cluster of pixels at a random location or as line of bright pixels at any angle depending on the path of the cosmic ray.

From the ESO website........

When a high energy particle hits the CCD, it loses its energy by knocking the atoms constituting the chip itself. That liberates many electrons that cause a bright spot on the image. These high energy particle can either be genuine cosmic rays (exotic particle produced by exploding supernovae, black holes, etc.), or just the product of the decay of some radioactive atoms present in the lenses just above the CCD. Cosmic rays are usually easy to recognize, because they are much sharper than stars (the high energy particle hits just a couple of pixels). If one is just planning to produce a nice picture for a web site, they are very easy to clean out. However, removing them without damaging the real objects can be more tricky, but is still possible.

And another interesting web page with regard to cosmic rays......

http://darkerview.com/CCDProblems/particlehit.php

There's even a space weather and cosmic ray centre in Israel.

Cheers

Rob

[IanL]

Also, visible light rays are on the spectrum of 2-3 eV's. Cosmic rays are on the spectrum from 10⁹ to 10²¹ eV's. Even with a high ISO, very (to the tenth power) improbable. Again, impossible. Unless you have a Gamma Ray detector.

As per previous posts, and RobH's post above, what you detect are not the actual cosmic rays which do not reach ground level. They collide with particles high in the atmosphere and produce a shower of high energy particles and radiation, which in turn may impact particles lower in the atmosphere and so on. One cosmic ray can produce a veritable rain of particles at ground level. The most likely particles to be detected by CCD and CMOS sensors are muons, which as RobH cites will dump their energy in one or more sensor elements in the camera, knocking electrons in to the detector well(s) in a pattern that depends on the angle of impact (either a blob or a streak that looks like a short meteor trail).

Far from being "to the tenth power improbable", with a 2cm square DSLR chip you would expect to detect an average of two particles per 30 seconds of exposure time at sea level. The exact rate does vary but it is not 'improbable' it is extremely likely and to be expected.

Basically the process is exactly the same one as takes place in the Large Hadron Collider, only using high energy gamma rays and atmospheric gas molecules.

[IanL]

using high energy gamma rays

Sorry let me correct myself there, not gamma rays, cosmic rays are particles; nearly all atomic nuclei and a small number being electrons.