Free 3 month upgrade to the first person who can correctly answer all of this... *Congrats Dr. Acula!*

Were those plate numbers I posted even relevant Astro? The timing seemed right (march 1955) and I finally figured out how to do the input correctly but never got to see the images...

btw the image astro posted was done with gimp

i found some, but not all, couldnt find where to look for all or how to search for something with no name at the time on the site i was looking at.

Good job Dr. Acula

After Astro posted a link I found out how to post the image to get the coordinates, doing so pointed to Sirius being the cause...

The plates were a loss for me though. I gave up a few times.

Relentless searching lol

my biggest clues at first was threads on here!
Thread: Google Sky---Somebody tell me What the hell is that blue thing next to Sirius? space jellyfish?

and this one was a somewhat helpful? maybe?
Thread: Google Sky mystery between Capella and Aur, UPDATE!! What about this?


then it was off to... many many different sites lol

Last Edited by Dr. Acula on 01/25/2013 07:21 PM

lol i just realised how i put that mustve sounded rude- sorry.
Calm and drAcula seemed to have some'special' method of finding the plates.

lol its on!

All I did was save it as a JPG with gimp. I simply copied it off of this site directly into gimp and saved it, no alterations.
[link to stdatu.stsci.edu]

it's broken window in the winter

[link to freescruz.com]
i got stuc looking at images on this site^^^^, i did learn stuff along the way,that sites pretty interesting., but was obviously looking in the wrong place.lol

thanks for sharing DrAcula and Calmshock.i sort of see what you did and i guess the tricks patience(maybe spurred on by a little friendly competition lol)

Well done both of you!!
Thanks Dr.Astro, killed a few hrs of my saturday morning lol.

Bad post by fried brain contributor.
Find it in your hearts to forgive

Last Edited by omar on 01/25/2013 07:17 PM

I know you didn't alter it was just stating gimp was in the exif info. I love gimp

Calmshock is a good sport! :)

*closes 400 tabs*

I could use a drink...

And yeah, that's the site I was expecting people to eventually find. The year 1955 was supposed to be a big clue to that; during that time the original Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) was a big deal (started in 1949, 99% of it was completed by 1956). They used glass film plates to record every bit of sky that could be seen from Palomar Observatory using the Samuel Oschin telescope. These film plates have since been digitally scanned and are now part of what is known as the "Digitized Sky Survey" or DSS for short, but it's really just a digitization of POSS:
[link to en.wikipedia.org]
The MAST archive for DSS contains a handy dandy plate finder tool (under retrieval options on the left hand bar):
[link to archive.stsci.edu]
Plug in the coordinates, select the image type you want, and off you go. Using the plate finder you can also see that every time a bright star like Sirius appears somewhere on a film plate, a reflection of the telescope's optics will appear in the mirror opposite location on the film plate.

lmao!

Me to
I had google earth running so i could use google sky for the .kmz file in the link Astro gave us.

then about a pot of coffee and 43 cigarettes lol

so it is hole in this telescope?

Congrats Dr. Acula and CalmShock, nice efforts, guys.

No, not really. You were close on the date (not sure how you did that, but it was a creative and interesting approach I didn't anticipate), but the location is in a different part of the sky altogether. They were real plate numbers though. Here's what the first plate you mentioned contained:
[link to stdatu.stsci.edu]

Last Edited by Astromut on 01/25/2013 07:34 PM

Check you PM when you're done. Let me know when your current month will expire.

I watched the thread throughout the day but couldn't stay around long enough at one time to do better research.

What great fun.....kudos to Dr. Astro for making a scavenger hunt really fun on this forum and giving a nice reward.

Might have started something there....

see.. i couldn't figure out the kmz file... I input the details in here..
[link to stdatu.stsci.edu]

I'll be writing them a letter....

all caps.

I'm basic again on the 16th, but seriously you don't have to.

Acula beat me fair and square.

I'll get the next one.

Dam Dr.'s always in cahoots. The game is rigged! J/K

I hope so!

I'll exclude myself in the future cos I won this en

but i hope other people who can... does this. It would be totally cool and add extra girth to a forum that is already top of the line.

it gave me hell too

The KMZ gave this

-19 52 73.96°

-74 04 73.69°


But.. this is what worked

-19 52 73.96

7 04 73.69


oh and before the kmz file I was looking on this site
[link to archive.stsci.edu]

and used the RA for Sirius and was trying to manually change it little by little to find the "serious" spider

the KMZ was a blessing... but i was almost there with out it lol

That's where I went wrong. Instead of taking the time to figure out the input method, I scrambled to find another source...

It was gettin down to the wire... I panicked.

Thank you guys for participating, it was really exciting to watch the race to the finish there at the end. I hope you guys find those sites useful in the future as well; the astometry.net site will take any real image of the sky that contains stars and tell you where in the sky that image is located. The plate finder site is handy too; any time someone says they "found something" in the visible light images from google sky it's usually from the POSS2 survey. That site will let you find the exact plate and can be very helpful for identifying what it really is. The images you can get from it are much higher quality than Google's processed versions and you can see each of the plates individually.