Remember this scene from the movie Star Trek: Generations?

At the time, I thought this was a very cool visualization for a science fiction movie.

Seems as if Google is heading there in fact. If you haven’t downloaded the latest version of Google Earth, 4.2, you may be missing it. The latest version has two views, the normal Earth view and a new “Sky view.” In Sky View, you can rotate the map of stars in any direction for a view of the heavens from Earth; and then, you can zoom in incredibly far. Stars that you can’t see in the initial “eye-ball” view will come into view, growing larger and larger as other stars whisk by you.

You have to experience it for yourself. I am amazed.

While browsing the heavens today, I stumbled onto something. Seems to be a very odd something. Is it an error in the lens through which the photo was taken — or what? This feature does not have notes with pop-up info or links to info on Nasa sites. It’s just sitting there. Out there.

Before I go on, I’ll tell you how I noticed it. After strolling about, deep in outer space where, if the zoom is all the way out, everything begins to look much the same (a cosmic soup, i.e., poor resolution in the imagery), I reduced the zoom and happened to land on one of the stars in the constellation Scorpius, one of the brilliantly blue stars magnified:





I thought, damn that’s beautiful. From the eye-ball view, you don’t even see stars at the end of all the stick figures of the constellations, or not well anyway. (Probably because the lines in the stick figure overlays are nearly as wide.) So I thought I’d look around at more constellations, find more beautiful stars. Scorpius, btw, has several very brilliant blue stars, whereas some other constellations do not, but have mostly red or orange.

And then I stumbled onto it. The mystery. It looked something like this:




I wonder if you see it. Nope, it’s not the Google Earth symbols by the name Sculptor; those are links to more info.  Look here:




There’s a large blue, but very faint, circular object there. So I zoomed in. I had planned to post different zoom levels to give you the effect, but you can download Google Earth 4.2 and check it out yourself (more in a bit.) So I’ll skip right to what I found:





At first I thought, some kind of weird nebula? But the lines are too neat and straight, I think.  Then I thought it might be an error on the lens, or a partial reflection on the lens of something else.

But I really have no clue. Weird, that I should spot it out of so much sky.

I’m new to this version of Google Earth, so I don’t have all the controls down. But I’ve saved a KMZ file which should take you right to the object (at least, it does so for me when I test it.) Once you have Google Earth 4.2, download this file which I’ve uploaded:

http://phaticcommunion.com/images/entries/Second Mystery Item.kmz

Then open Google Earth, click the icon in the toolbar to take you to the sky view, and then use the menu in the top bar to open this file. Should take you right there. And then begin exploring the Universe on your own, after you’ve had your peek.

Update: Alberto has commented that it’s a ghost image. I don’t know whether we may know what it’s a ghost image of — but I found another tonight, I think, that is the same color (although it could be something else; it’s so far out, the resolution isn’t good) —

I tried clicking on the previous KMZ file linked above. GE opened, asked if I wanted to switch to Sky view, and I did; but I was not taken to the original point. So here’s the location of this one:

Dec: 0 (deg) 52’52.22”
RA: 2h56m57.83s

The previous image:

Dec: 52 (deg) 18’29.46”
RA: 1h43m56.06s

Actually, when I reopened the local copy of the KMZ file from within Google Earth, I was taken right to it, but when I clicked the linked file above, I was not. ??

Update #2: That last image may be a cluster of a few stars, actually. But I found another ghost image which looks very similar to the first ghost image from above, but gray instead of blue in color:

It’s at:

Dec: 41 (deg) 8’59.75”
RA: 18h42m48.96s