Talk:Blink comparator

Illustration

If somebody can make an animated GIF that illustrates the principle, I think that would be great. Maybe of the ISS, or Venus or some other well known rapidly moving object, against a background of static stars. - Soulkeeper (talk) 10:22, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have done just that, using a pair of images taken by Clyde Tombaugh on January 23 and January 30, 1930, at Lowell Observatory, which he used in his discovery of Pluto. The image pair was obtained from the Planetary Society Web site, where they indicated that it came from the Lowell Observatory Archive, but I have not been able to find the image at the Lowell Observatory site, so I can't determine whether it is in the public domain or under copyright protection. There is a small, non-free version of the image pair on Wikipedia, but it is too small to be of any use, as Pluto is a very small, faint object, making it invisible in a low-resolution digital image. The GIF image of each photographic plate needs to be 800 pixels square, or larger. If I were to post a large, non-free image on Wikipedia, some nitwit or 'bot would soon rescale it to a useless, small size. If the Pluto discovery images can't be used for this purpose, it may be possible to fake it, using a public domain sky image from NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or other government-funded project and simply adding spots of light on different layers of the GIF image to represent an object moving against a background of stars. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 20:12, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]