M82 Oddity

[kbrown]

I am puzzled about what I saw in M82 at two different nights recently. More info and a video clip here:

http://www.spellboundfx.com/2019/02/24/m82-oddity/

Any ideas?

[ollypenrice]

It's slightly displaced between appearances. Could it be reflection from something flashing near the telescope?

Olly

[vlaiv]

That is very interesting, but almost impossible to analyze in a movie. How about you take those two frames and make side by side montage of a crop of affected area.

Maybe even provide fits for further analysis?

[kbrown]

Here they are, side by side at 100% resolution.

Not sure about the random reflection theory. I imaged these with a robotic telescope in AstroCamp at Nerpio, Spain (MPC Code I89). As I said in my blog post I imaged tons of LRGB and Ha data but the blob just appeared in these two subs. I will be imaging it again tonight. I'll keep you posted...

[vlaiv]

That shape is so odd.

In left image it looks like two peaks, in right it again looks like two peaks but closer together. And it changed position slightly - which is very intriguing since two frames are taken almost a day between. It's even stranger that no other frames before and after have anything on them.

It certainly isn't cosmic ray, meteor or airplane. I don't think it's satellite either.

There is a lot of things that you can try to extract from these two frames, here are few ideas:

- do profile plot to see what sort of resemblance there is between signals and if indeed there are two peaks like it looks like

- compare to PSF of stars in the image - try to establish if light source can be considered point like (far enough) or extended in nature

- measure relative shift in arc seconds between two images

- do photometric measurement to try to figure out magnitude of the signal

- measure angular size of signal

Maybe above could provide further clues to what it might be.

[kbrown]

Well, it did appear again in slightly different position and shape. And again only in one 600s sub (out of 8). Maybe Olly is right after all. It's just an unlucky reflection of something in the OTA... Certainly got my imagination on overdrive ?

 

Could be the Klingons too as pointed out my sister ?

[andrew s]

I am reminded of the Parks radio telescope picking up the microwave oven from the astronomer cooking lunch. Who knows what may have been going on near the telescope. 

Regards Andrew

[davew]

They don't send out a security guard with a head torch just after midnight do they ?

Fire up an adjacent scope after midnight ?

Don't let the Area 51 investigators see this ?

Dave.

[kbrown]

36 minutes ago, davew said:

They don't send out a security guard with a head torch just after midnight do they ?

Fire up an adjacent scope after midnight ?

Don't let the Area 51 investigators see this ?

Dave.

I did actually fire up adjacent scope a couple of times but couldn't do it exactly at the time the other scope saw the blob because someone else was using it. Anyway, the other scope didn't see anything unusual in 90s Luminance Bin2 at least...