identifying unusual activity seen by TESS space telescope

[MrPosti...@kymhorsell.com]

We have prev looked at unusual regional variations in brightness of
key stars being tracked by the TESS space telescope. The sat orbits
between the earth and moon and is watching a list of nearby stars for
brightness variations that might signal planetary transits.

But we've seen large numbers of target stars appear to vary
synchronously over periods of hrs to a few days. Both large-area
brightening and darkening are observed in the datasets from time-to-time.

It's hard to avoid the "mental model" that something is passing
between the stars and the telescope and that something is relatively
close to earth (i.e. a couple light hrs at most).

And so we come to trying to correlate the variations in brightness
with "other things". Straight away we find e.g. the total area of the
sky seen by TESS that is 1 sd brighter than normal (or darker)
predicts the appearance of fireballs in the sky over earth.
(I've used both the NASA and AMS data -- the NASA shows a good corr
but the AMS data shows a weak correlation). But fireballs only link
with a small% of the hr to hr variations in brightness being
seen by the telescope. What about the rest?

And no surprise that various types of reported UFO activity also
robustly correlate with the brightness variations. But many of the
object types seem hard to reconcile -- according to number witness
reports -- with fireballs passing across the sky. Many witnesses
report dark objects moving in unusual ways that just happen to
increase and decrease over time in close parallel with the variations
in brightness seen in the TESS data.

So the next step is to try and identify which type of UFO activity
might be related to which region of the sky being observed by the
telescope. It's expected then we might be able to zoom in on the
suspect regions at the indicated times and see whether we can actually
image some object that is either passing in front of a sequence of the
target stars or (more probable) passing within a short distance "in
the background" of the target stars.

Fishing around in the many many 10-20-30 MB TESS full images is a
difficult problem. While there are only 1000s of target stars,
blowing up the telescope full images finds mns of possible
objects -- i.e. all the stars in the sky the telescope can see.

I've left some samples on a web page to give a hint at the search
involved.
<kymhorsell.com/UFO/TESS/cal.jpg>
is one image from the space telescope taken in 2018. The image shows
only a few bright objects, presumably all target stars. We also see
the imaging system + processing s/w has rendered them as "lines" on
the plate rather than points or small circles.

But with a little more processing we can bring up what else is on the
same image. <.../cal-histeq.jpg> shows the equalized version of the
prev image. We see many many many possible objects that might need to
be investigated if we are trying to find what might be moving around
and dimming a dozen target stars in the nearby 10x10 deg region of the
sky on the same day.

But it seems possible with the large number of images available
covering large parts of the sky many times on the same day we might
use some kind of "super resolution" methods (i.e. building up a
"average image" from a large number of stacked-up images that have
been moved into precise sub-pixel alignment) to directly see faint
objects that may be moving around between the earth and moon.

In the meantime we can use correlation studies (trying to match light
variations in each region of the sky against observed "activity"
across the US during the same day or even same hr) to ID what type of
thing we are looking for and where it might be.

To that end the latest processing pipeline is trying to determine for
each 10x10 region of the sky ("tile") across the period 2018-2022 that
TESS has been taking images, what kind of objects have been observed
around the same time in the sky across N Am that rises and falls in
statistically the same way.

The first cut of that movie is currently being periodically refreshed at
<kymhorsell.com/UFO/TESS/movieufo.mp4>.
The prelim version of the movie displays just text labels in the
region of the sky that at the given time is "best predicted" by a
simple linear model. The labels are code names for the exact type of
object that seems to best correspond with the variations in brightness
in that part of the sky over time.

We've seen in past posts that some regions of the sky appear to vary
up to several days before a particular type of UFO sighting changes,
while some other regions of the sky change in statically significant
parallel several days after a given type of UFO sighting is made.

With this kind of information is should be possible to ID which "star"
(or lack of a star) in the sample image represents an object moving
across target stars in a particular part of the sky, and therefore a
list of images to pile up and try to super-resolve into a more
detailed object.

The new movie gives some hints what we might end up seeing.

--
But what is true and I'm actually being serious here, is there are, there's
footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what
they are, We can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not
have an easily explainable pattern.
-- Pres Barack Obama, "The Late Show", 2021

Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events
B.E. Zhilyaev, V. N. Petukhov, V. M. Reshetnyk
Main Astronomical Observatory, NAS of Ukraine,
Zabalotnoho 27, 03680, Kyiv, Ukraine
[...] We present a broad range of UAPs. We see them everywhere. We observe a
significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single,
group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to
15 degrees per second. Some bright objects exhibit regular brightness
variability in the range of 10 - 20 Hz. Two-site observations of UAPs at a
base of 120 km with 2 synchronised cameras allowed the detection of
a variable object, at an altitude of 1170 km. It flashes for one hundredth
of a second at an average of 20 Hz. [...]
An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using
colourimetric methods. [Objects with 0 albedo] are observed in the
troposphere at distances up to 10-12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12
meters and speeds up to 15 km/s. [...]
[Astronomers in Ukraine have undertaken their own independent survey
of objects they see flying over the Kyiv region at speeds around 15
km/sec. They are watching the daytime sky at the zenith and in front
of the moon. They see many objects -- some bright and some dark,
different sizes. They travel often singly but sometimes in large
groups. They report brightness is linked with speed. The spectrum
of bright objects is reportedly not reflected sunlight. Objects
have been spotted inside the atm upto ~10 km but also out to ~1000 km
above the earth, travelling up to ~1000 km/sec. They are not likely
anything sent by Russia or any other country].

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