Debunked: Planet sized object (ALIENS) caught by SOHO

[Jason]

The below video is a little over 4 minutes long. In the video the author UFOvni2012 makes several claims. For the purpose of this thread I will investigate 2 of the 3 claims made in the video, since the coronal holes was previously discussed here; https://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-giant-black-sphere-hovering-near-the-sun.469/
The first claim made in the video deals with streaks of light seen around the sun usually during or after a CME or solar flare event. Below are screen shots of some of the images;






NASA's SOHO page explains why these occurrences happen.

WHAT ARE THOSE FLYING SAUCER-SHAPED OBJECTS IN THE LASCO IMAGES?
The "funny-looking spheroid" is a typical response of the SOHO LASCO coronagraph CCD detector to an object (planet or bright star) of small angular extent but so bright that it saturates the CCD camera so that "bleeding" occurs along pixel rows. There is a bright horizontal streak on either side of the image, because the charge leaks easier along the direction in which the CCD image is read out by the associated electronics.

CCD stands for charge-coupled detector, and refers to a silicon chip, usually a centimeter or two across, divided into a grid of cells, each of which acts like a small photomultiplier in that an incoming photon knocks loose one or more electrons. The electrons are "read out" by row (fast direction) and column (slow direction), the current converted to a digital signal, and each cell or picture element ("pixel") thus assigned a digital value proportional to the the number of incoming photons in that pixel (the brightness of the part of the image falling on that pixel). This is the same kind of detector as is used in a hand-held video camera, though until recently, the analog-to-digital conversion was left out in consumer devices.

If you point a video camera at a very bright source (say, the Sun), the image "blooms" or brightens all over --- there are so many electrons produced in the pixels corresponding to the bright source that they spill over into adjacent rows and column, perhaps over the entire detector. Better CCD's will "bleed" only along the fast readout direction (a single row), and perhaps a few adjacent rows.

The LASCO and EIT CCD cameras include "anti-bleed" electronics which limit the pixel bleeding around bright sources to less than the full row (and usually no adjacent rows). In the case of a marginally too-bright object, the pixel bleeding will be only a few pixels in either direction along the fast readout direction. Thus, the "flying saucer" images.

A few of the LASCO images that have appeared on the "extraterrestrial" Web sites show much larger and brighter, but still saucer-like features. These images are in fact obtained with the instrument door closed, but with an incorrectly long exposure. The big "saucers" result from massive pixel bleeding along every row of the detector containing part of the image of the "opal," or small diffusing lens, in the instrument door, that is used for obtaining calibration data.

If your correspondents still prefer to believe that the pixel-bled images of planets or bright stars are something else, ask them why the extended part of the "saucers" (i.e., the pixel bleeding) always occurs in the same direction relative to the image --- even when the spacecraft is rolled relative to its normal orientation relative to the Sun. http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/explore/faq.html#FLYING_SAUCER

Content from external source

In the next part of the video he shows a video that was taken from SOHO which shows a planet size disc moving across the plane of the sun, and argues that the object due to SOHO's location should move from left to right, but this object moves from right to left. Here is an image of where SOHO sits as it orbits the sun;


I would appreciate some help in explaining why the planet in view is moving across the screen from right to left. The only thing I can think of that would cause this is if that the satellite orbits its lagrange point, http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html, and it's the orbit of the satellite swooping past the earth or moon that cause this planet to appear like it's moving in the wrong direction. So this isn't an Alien Mothership as discussed in the video. The video came out a few days ago on the 25th of September so I thought it deserved to be debunked...

 

[Hevach]

Up is not always north on SOHO images. Some images will have it marked, but images released to the public often don't. They may or may not rotate them to expectation, but a lot of photos released to the public are adjusted for artistic value, not scientific.

The part of the video from 2014-09-24 I believe is from the SDO, not SOHO. SOHO is at L1, so the moon never passes in front of it (it has an instrument that can create artificial eclipses, but they don't look like this). SDO, however, is in geosynchronous orbit with a 28.5 degree inclination. It never gets total solar eclipses, but it gets a lot of partial ones like that, and they're always at weird angles like that.

Because it's in geosynchronous orbit, it moves a lot faster than the moon, and the apparent motion of the shadow across the sun is almost entirely due to the satellite's orbit, not the moon's. Depending on the time of year, it can be on the descending or ascending part of its orbit and make a right angle with the earth and sun, making the moon look like it's going straight up or down during the eclipse. More often the moon will follow a slanted (potentially up to almost 34 degrees), with left-to-right or right-to-left depending on whether the satellite is on the day or nigth side of its orbit (and whether anyone bothered to align north/south in the image, since you can't really tell and it only matters to researchers who have access to the raw data and not publicity photos) In rare cases it'll line up just right so that you see an eclipse appear to stop and change direction part way through.

Here's a picture from what I'm pretty sure is the same transit (falls into the time range on the same date) on the NASA SDO facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/NASA.Littl...6480/721258787921347/?type=1&relevant_count=1

Taken with a different filter or a separate instrument (or maybe just edited to be pretty like I mentioned above), but you can see the same filament diagonally near the limb of the moon and the sunspot feature on the top-right.

 

[Chew]

The instrument that took the images is annotated on the bottom left. The AIA 171 is on the SDO, exactly as Hevach said.

Go here: http://www.helioviewer.org/ and expand the "images" arrow and it will let you select which observatory, instrument, etc to select.

 

[Chew]

P.S. Adblock Plus will get rid of those ads.

 

[Mick West]

P.S. Adblock Plus will get rid of those ads.

Or you could at least click the X to get rid of them before taking screenshots

 

[Jason]

I took a screen shot from the OP video. This part of the video starts at 3:33. You can see what looks like a circular mass moving across the screen from right to left. Does anyone have any ideas as to what this could be. Is it a defect in the instruments or an artifact?

 

[Jason]

Here is an example of a proton storm also known as a "snowstorm". The "snowstorm effect" that you see was caused by high-energy particles hitting the spacecraft's detectors in the SECCHI instrument's extreme ultraviolet and inner coronagraph telescopes. You can clearly see the streaks all over the image. This CME was so powerful it actually messed up the star tracker instrument on both STEREO satellites. In this quick time link you can see the satellite go all screwy during the storm. http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/img/stereoimages/movies/ProtonStormcombo_sm.mov

 

[Hevach]

I'm assuming an artifact, like the shapes you can see if you stare at screen static for a few seconds. It's too slow to be a coronal ejection, its not solid or fixed shape, and it doesn't block fixed sources.


A point to add to my earlier post: Gravity is a factor here. These objects are supposedly about the size of Saturn. A space ship is going to have relatively low density compared to a planet (assuming it's made out of mundane materials and not some kind of exotic stable heavy isotope, which many alien conspiracists would have me believe) but you're still talking about something with the mass of a large terrestrial planet moving freely through the inner solar system. The disruption would be substantial. Not cataclysmic (assuming the ship's crew cared enough to avoid destroying the monkeyplanet orbiting their fuel stop*), but it should have a measurable effect on Mercury's orbit, and it should invalidate nearly every inner solar system asteroid orbit we've calculated.



*-A fun thought experiment:

Building a planetary scale megastructure and fueling it by starlifting puts these aliens squarely into the upper brackets of K2 on the Kardashev scale. If they've got a fleet of these things, low K3 at least.

Humans are in the bottom half of K0. Because intelligence was not, strictly speaking, in the listed requirements, ants, termites, and possibly bees arguably just make the cut at the bottom of K0.

So I ask you: When we build a new gas station, just how much attention do we devote to preserving the local ant colonies?

 

[Jason]

So I ask you: When we build a new gas station, just how much attention do we devote to preserving the local ant colonies?

Excellent thought experiment! But if the local gas station is being erected over an ancient archaeological site, then construction comes to a grinding halt until everything is preserved. We have no idea how "aliens" would view us or our planet

 

[Hevach]

That's true, but really my point was more about the ridiculousness of the Kardashev scale - it's not often I get to point out just how wide the classifications are, and how insane differences of even 1 point are.

 

[LadyHarleyRider]

You know, I really wish that the people who make these silly videos would at least look at the anomalies page of the SOHO site and get an idea of what they are REALLY looking at.