Posts Tagged what is it?

What Is It? (click to enlarge)

Last weekend was Valentine’s Day, as you’re doubtlessly aware. Well, we’re not really the mushy sort here at the Merseyside Skeptics Society, so we thought we’d hold off on the love hearts, the the rose petals, and the rainbow-farting unicorns and let you all wallow in your skepticality.

Well, that was the plan, but then the Prof sent us this fantastic image for our What Is It? competition, so we figured bugger it – let’s embrace the love, people. So, what is it? Leave your answers below, as ever.

Last week we showed you this photo and asked you what it was. Contrary to what a lot of people might believe, it wasn’t ghosts, fairies, orbs or spirits… it was simply dust, lit up by the camera flash. Lot’s of you knew the correct answer, so we’ve a few winners this week – first off the mark was Lukasz, with:

I would say it’s dust on lens/negative. Or scratched negative before processing. I didn’t use Google!

We also have honorary mentions for this comprehensive effort from Jon D:

Fair and square I think we’re looking at light from the camera’s flash reflected off particles of dust suspended in the air and bounced back into the camera lens. You see it more often these days because the flash is mounted closer to the lens on compact digital cameras and the cameras are so complex people can’t work out how to switch the auto-flash off. They look blurry and possibly a bit 3 dimensional because they’re out of focus due to being too close to the lens.

Last week's photo

As well as this from Hampshire Skeptics founder DaveTheDrummer, who was first on our Facebook page:

It’s a dude reflected in a mirror.Perhaps I’m missing the point… With some crap on the mirror that’s reflected the flash you can see in the top right. Which is exactly where it should be for the view point.

Well done!

So, another week, another testing image for you. Take a look at Prof. Dowling’s latest submission, and see if you can tell us what we’re looking at. Leave your answers below, and we’ll announce the winner next week.

Last week we showed you this photo and asked you what it was. The correct answer was the HR 8799 system. In the center, you can see the host star HR 8799. Further investigation shows that three of the specks surrounding the star are planets (marked): Starting at 11 o\’clock, clockwise: HR 8799b, HR8799c and HR8799d. The other specks and patterns are artefacts, which are unavoidable in a challenging observation like this one – star and planets are extremely close, and the star is a few thousand times brighter than the planets. The distance from the star to HR 8799c corresponds to 38 times the average Earth-Sun distance. This image is the latest taken by European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, in particular its combined camera/spectrograph CONICA, which was developed at the MPIA and at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (M-PIES, which is quite a funny acronym). Image credit: MPIA/W. Brandner (MPIA = Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Which you guys knew, because you Googled the filename, like dirty rotten cheats. Still, credit where credit’s due, king amongst those cheats was Jon D, who first to correctly guess/Goggle the right answer. No Googling this time, people!