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There was no other imaging technology at the time. Our challenge is to work with whatever material there was at the time. That's why I love archival astronomy: nothing is easy.

If so, thanwhere are the reports from people not on the highway? Anecdotally, we have reason to think more people were out looking at the sky than normal for a chance to see the rather spectacular comet Hale-Bopp, accounting for a lot of people...

We can always select star images that are not saturated. In the plates I got so far, very few stars are saturated, and these are accounted for by the data analysis software.

You are right that "stars do not have PSFs", in the sense that starlight gets first smeared by the atmosphere, and only then goes thru the telescope optics and is affected by the PSF. Because atmospheric smearing is orders of magnitude larger...

He says: But to explore all avenues, it is worth looking into "If it WAS am object, what properties would it have to have had?" I assume this is derived from properties of the camera/lens?

See Solano(2022). https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/515/1/1380/6607509?login=false This is explained upthread. Vilarroel references that paper, but it's unclear which of the steps have been applied to her data set, since it doesn't match...

Hi, I'm Ivo Busko, the author of that preprint. I see so many comments in here, that I can't possibly address everyone. Please feel free to respond to this post in case you have comments or questions, I will do my best to answer. And thanks for...

This far along , has anyone yet confirmed the object actually appears on the archived negative? IIRC, Vallee said it did, but that's just 2nd hand to us. Back on page 1, Mick was getting some prints from somewhere that were supposedly made from...

What is needed is physical examination of the remaining, if any, intermediate physical stages of the print transfer from the original film. Scanning the print again doesn't really help.

I can scan things at crazy resolutions as well, it doesn't mean that we have any more data

It wasn't. Villarroel's own data with regard to plate edges strongly suggest that the flaws/"transients" are more dense near the plate edges, though depending on the algorithm, this may be exacerbated by plate overlap. Remember, the graphs of the...

So far, I have found 63 candidate transients, out of 50 plates analyzed. Many more are still being worked on, and I don't expect to have a comprehensive data set and analysis for a long time still. As for that one pic, it is for illustration...

Yes, but that's the fallacy that makes a lot of phenomena look like a population heatmap. I'll bet you the majority of "highway reports" was made by people in cars.

See Solano(2022). https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/515/1/1380/6607509?login=false This is explained upthread. Vilarroel references that paper, but it's unclear which of the steps have been applied to her data set, since it doesn't match...

@ThomasH It is interesting, but you are leaping over the idea that it might not have been an physical object, but a camera artefact.