Re: A Wile Speculation

[Arne Henden <aah@nofs.navy.mil>]

There have been several searches for optical transients.  The
basic scheme is to look at the image profile; if it looks like
a star, then it stays in the database.  I have yet to see a cosmic
ray that looks like a star, as long as you are properly sampled.
So you don't need multiple simultaneous images.  George's cosmic-ray
comment may have come based on your original email, where you
mentioned:
   "I keep finding stars with one bright point."
which could have been misinterpreted as a single-pixel event (at
least, I interpreted it that way).
   However, there also have been projects that did multiple simultaneous
images; the meteor researchers come to mind.
   To the best of my remembrance, these searches were a lot like
checking out UFO's: many events, most of which could be explained;
a few that remain ambiguous.
   I would definitely keep the single-observation objects in the
database (I keep everything from my own observing that is seen in
more than one filter), but investigating such single occurrences is
very time consuming and not something that I personally would work on.
Sounds like a good project for one of the list-members, though, to
browse through Tom's list.
Arne


Tom Droege wrote:
> Let us suppose that there is something out there going "Flash" on the 
> time scale of gamma ray bursts.  That is several milliseconds to several 
> seconds.
> 
> Who would see these flashers?
> 
> Sloan immediately comes to mind.  But they are drift scanning.  They do 
> not make simultaneous measurements in multiple filters.  Someone here 
> may know, but there must me a number of seconds between their different 
> filter measurements.
> 
> George Turner has told us the immediate reaction to a single channel 
> bright hit.  Assume it is a cosmic ray and throw the data out.
> 
> Is anyone else but tass taking dual channel data?
> 
> Tom Droege
> 
> 
> 
> 
>