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Credit: Google
Analysis by Ian O'Neill
If, like me, you've spent countless hours staring at astronomical photographs, you know the score: there's a lot of noise, artifacts and anomalies. (And no, when I say "artifacts" I don't mean big, black monoliths standing erect on the moon.)
How many times have you seen a star "with wings" that appears to be orbiting the sun? Some people jump to the conclusion that it's the mythically stupid planet Nibiru. Scientists know that its actually Mercury reflecting too much light, causing the camera's CCD ("charge-coupled device") to become oversaturated.
Often a smudge in an old photographic plate is confused for an invading hoard of angry aliens hell-bent on giving us a bad 2012. In fact, astronomers know that the odd-looking smudge is... a smudge.
And who can forget all the amazing wildlife that lives on the Martian surface! Alas, the yeti, skull, statues and an alien with a big head are all figments of our imagination -- rocks that look funny. We know they're not really what the conspiracy theorists say they are... right? And so, that brings me to this week's case of Martian mistaken identity, a story I passed up a couple of times, but it just won't go away.
Fresh from Conspiracy Theory Mecca (a.k.a. YouTube) a self-described "Armchair Astronaut" has created a video describing his discovery of some kind of structure on Mars while using the Mars maps available on Google Earth. (Frustratingly, at time of writing, the YouTube video has been taken offline. It was rapidly approaching 1 million views before removal.) By his reckoning, this "structure" is 750 x 150 feet, making it an obvious top secret base of some kind......
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