Artifacts in the sky

Telescope mirrors

Lines in the sky from airplanes

Link to Example of airplane artifacts on blue plate in WorldWide Telescope

Your statements about the artifacts are correct. The only thing I'll add is that the dataset that they are visible in is called the Digitized Sky Survey and that they occur on the original plates taken decades ago.

Oh, and nice use of WWT links.

I'm not entirely sure if this belongs here bur it's all I could find, When I switch the "look at" tab at the bottom left corner of the screen to planet, then switch the "Imagery" tab to something called Mandelbrot. I'm not entirely sure just what that is, or if it even really exists, only that it just creeps the hell out of me. Any idea what it is?  

BS1:

I'm not entirely sure if this belongs here bur it's all I could find, When I switch the "look at" tab at the bottom left corner of the screen to planet, then switch the "Imagery" tab to something called Mandelbrot. I'm not entirely sure just what that is, or if it even really exists, only that it just creeps the hell out of me. Any idea what it is?  

Hi BS1,

Mandelbrot is not a planet. Here is a Wikipedia article on Mandelbrot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set Check out some of the images and you will see they are quite beautiful.

Thank you,

Chuck

Fantastic! :) congrats for the idea to put in the Mandelbrot set.

For those interested but not willing to read the wiki article, just zoom in at the black edge and if you keep zooming in you will see even smaller "mandelbrots". At some point you cannot zoom in anymore, but it's interesting to knoq that the sets keep repeating to infinity. 

nice spider is also here: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/wwtweb/goto.aspx?ra=13.35000&dec=-9.6407&zoom=30