Abstract / Description of output
We examine critically recent claims for the presence of above-atmosphere optical transients in publicly available digitized scans of Schmidt telescope photographic plate material derived from the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. We employ the publicly available SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey catalogues to examine statistically the morphology of the sources. We develop a simple, objective, and automated image classification scheme based on a random forest decision tree classifier. We find that the putative transients are likely to be spurious artefacts of the photographic emulsion. We suggest a possible cause of the appearance of these images as resulting from the copying procedure employed to disseminate glass copy survey atlas sets in the era before large-scale digitization programmes.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 73-79 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | RAS Techniques and Instruments |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 5 Feb 2024 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Digitization
- Image Classification
- Instrumentation
- Machine Learning
- Photography