Finns det ett enda ordentligt UFO?

This is the deepest investigation and dialog ever made about some breakthrough footage that was filmed by NASA. This footage records high numbers of disc shaped objects, ambiguously classified, and until now, unidentifiable as any known phenomenon.

Ah yes, this is our old friend the cosmic ray (CR) again. Space is absolutely full of them -- high-energy particles
, many (in fact most, I believe) of which originate outside out galaxy. They're responsible for the overwhelming majority of the random spots and streaks we see in the LASCO images. The ones in that member's image you point to are no different. It's not unusual to see two or three that look similar in a 24hr period, especially now that SOHO has doubled it's C2 data rate. (Try counting the number of simple 'straight' CR hits per day -- there are dozens!)

So why do these ones have a "tail" and that bright "head"? I'll give you the long explanation, since you seem interested in this stuff...

Tail: CRs are extremely energetic, some more so than others. Using the CR in the 12:12 image for an example, it came in close to the plane of the CCD (camera). As it did so, it interacted with the atoms that constitute the CCD, causing the CR to slow down, lose energy, and create lots of electrons as a by-product. At the point the 'head' begins, the CR has slowed down quite a bit.

Head: The LASCO CCDs are comprised of 1024 rows of 1024 individual pixels, that for the sake of this explanation we'll think of as being buckets. But instead of collecting water, these CCD 'buckets' collect electrons. And just like any bucket, when they get full they overflow. However, our CCDs are designed such that the 'buckets' can only overflow horizontally into adjacent 'buckets'. (This is why the bright planets all have horizontal saturation bars, caused by charge overflowing into adjacent pixels.) Every time we read out an image, we reset the CCD, emptying the 'buckets'. So as this CR comes in and slows down, it creates so many electrons that it starts filling up the CCD 'buckets', which overflow into their neighbors. This process continues until (usually quite abruptly) the CR either passes out of the CCD or loses all of its energy.

So I hope this is reasonably clear. The 'bucket' analogy for CCDs is a particular favorite of mine for explaining their behavior.