Miserable Failures

Straightforward Failures

  • This image is from the Moon; but it fails for lack of detectable stars, not the change in view-point! Does anyone have a good picture of the sky from the Moon for us to solve?
  • An image with too few detectable stars; it is in the UV, so even the stars that are there may not be in the standards catalog.
  • Galaxy in the way! This image is large enough for us to solve, but because the galaxy takes up so much of the solid angle, there aren't enough bright stars in common between the standards catalog and the image to nail it.
  • Source detection goes awry; some of the stars that "should have" been detected are saturated; others may be lost to the confusion limit. As with many of our failures of this kind, this image solves when binned down 2x2 and re-submitted!
  • Too much camera distortion; we need an example of a failure of this kind.

False Positives

The goal is for the system never to have a false positive, so these are very bad. Please add any new false positives you find here.

As of 2007-05-07, all false positives (below) can be explained as being caused by either problems with USNO-B1.0 (such as diffraction spikes), or else problems with how we build indexes off of it (indexes that have edges, for example). As we fix these problems and the false positives go away, we will remove them from the lists below.

False positives from APOD

False Positives from Flickr