I am just wondering with it bouncing about if it weren't some sort of stray light/internal optical problem.
I agree that it's consistent in some ways with an unintended catadioptric effect. And I'm going to defer to you and others for the specifics of that kind of investigation since I'm not as familiar with the behavior of the equipment that might have been used to produce this image. I agree with your interpretation that an obviously overexposed element in the image should alert a skilled interpreter to be aware of the possibility of reflection. He would have the burden to eliminate that possiblity by evidence or experimentation prior to telling someone it "defies all explanation."
As a general rule, any claim framed in that language should immediately be treated with skepticism. What it says is that it defies all the explanations that hold under the intepreter's assumptions. When you falsify all the hypotheses that arise from the assumptions, then you start examining the assumptions.
In fact, I'm reading BAUT right now because in the other window on my desktop I've got two data sets from two different sensors that purport to measure the same thing, and they don't agree, and I have to find out why. I've already gone through all the hypotheses that arise within the design assumptions, and then relaxed those design assumptions. I'm still stumped, so I'm trying to come up with all the unstated assumptions so that we can relax those. In this case, "A wizard did it," is not an acceptable answer just because I'm currently out of ideas.
I don't think that is good enough. See my post about Chuck Shramek and the Hale-Bopp companion "discovery".
I did, after writing my post. I saw previously that Quijano had been mentioned in conjunction with the Hale-Boppe anomaly, but I couldn't draw a conclusion from my own reading whether he had been associated with the extraordinary claim
You don't go public with a discovery of something if you are a professional astronomer.
Yes, that's suspicious.
I know many amateurs who consider themselves "directors" of their own observatories.
I'm the director of Jay's Backyard Observatory, but the only thing we've ever discovered is a whole lot of light pollution. I named my discovery after my cat.
All discoveries require some skepticism and that should apply in this case.
I agree, which is why I'm wondering idly how much we can know about how much was done to eliminate uncommon ordinary causes.
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