https://www.legacysurvey.org//viewer/?ra=214.1977&dec=52.3387&layer=sdss&zoom=9
look at the red green and blue things!
explanation?
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Not 100% sure on this. Looks like diffraction spikes from the stars towards the edge of the camera chip
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I cant get Simbad to open for some reason to check, but I recently came across a star that looked offset like this and Simbad had it listed as a High Proper Motion Star. meaning it’s really scootin through space. I have been keeping an eye out for them hoping to find a real fast one.
update I did get it to open and the red one is listed as a High Proper Motion Star. that makes me happy. the one I first encountered like this was farther away. I wish I could understand how to figure out how fast they were going.
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You can find even more things like this if you zoom out. Not all of them are High Proper Motion Stars though. I’m guessing they’re artifacts.
Also, I was looking around, and found these red streaks. Are these also artifacts?
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Yep, this particular one is from the “SDSS” (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) camera, which has a kind of “lens flare” kind of effect coming from the edges of the CCD chips, so that bright stars leave a spray of light.
The images we show in the sky viewer are stitched together from many many small images, and you can see the boundaries of those small images by turning on the “SDSS CCDs” overlay, in the “Boundaries” menu – eg,
and with that, you can see that these sprays of light happen when you have a bright-ish star on one side of a boundary, and you get the spray of light across the boundary.
cheers,
dustin
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