Lasers in the sky!?! (google earth sky).

[Tre]

Hello all! I am just getting into the hobby having never owned a more powerful laser than a cheap "<5mw" green pen, I have a rayfoss waterproof 30mw on it's way (including goggles) that I will be sure to do a review on. I am excited to be a part of this community and learn way too much about obscure laser parts and science .

With that introduction out of the way, I would like to address something that I noticed many years ago on google earth's sky feature: what appears to be a
large number of various red, blue, and green laser beams showing up in a large portion of the sky (along with a mind boggling number of galaxies).
This is confusing to me, I am not convinced that these are real lasers IN SPACE[/COLOR]
Because Rayleigh scattering wouldn't work so well with so few molecules in space to scatter the light (unless we had some super-advanced aliens with multi-gigawatt lasers shining around)
[Insert "Ancient Aliens" meme]
Most of them are short and show little divergence but some change size and seem to cover multiple passes of a telescope.
Sorry if this has already been covered but does anyone know what these could be?
*There are too many of them to be a childish prank by a google employee
*They are not aligned with borders of photos so I think that we can rule out computer errors
*I would think that the beams would have to stay still to show up in a photograph
*There are no yellow beams that I can see and I think that they try to avoid the paths of other telescopes with guide stars (Searing the Sky to See the Stars)
The only thing I could come up with is that there are some trolls with high powered lasers and tripods shining above observatories to try and prank them.
:wtf:
Let me know what you think,
Tre

 

[micheal rosen]

weird, wonder if it could just be a glitch.

 

[T_Warne]

Where are the cameras located that take theses pictures?
Could theses colored streaks be made by aircraft?

 

[Tre]

Where are the cameras located that take theses pictures?
Could theses colored streaks be made by aircraft?

I don't know anything about how they take these pictures but they seem stitched together from long tracks.

I don't know of any aircraft that give off steady light in red, green, or blue.
I did get a 15 second exposure of the night sky with a plane in it a few years ago though.

 

[Eudaimonium]

First and third one appear to be either plance trails or even comets bassing by. Long exposure photograhs during meteor showers appear similar to that.

No idea about second image though. Looks to be some heavy lens flaring (from what?) or just an internal sensor glitch/error. Looks interesting as heck though. Coordinates?

 

[RedCowboy]

Looks faked to me, the lines are crisp and the far field is in focus, and those red/green boxes are copied and pasted, it doesn't look like a real phenomena. If they were earth lasers they would not look like that at all. Who took these pics? Someone has probably photo shopped them. Also to capture 2 crisp blue lines would take a short exposure while to see all that distant detail takes longer exposure.
Seriously these images have been screwed with.

 

[DrSid]

Those streak looks like satellites. They can tumble, which explains the regular changes in intensity.
Those two lines of different color could actually be ISS with resupply module closing in. It looks just like this. ISS itself is kinda redish due the it's solar panels. Add the usual crazy amount of image processing on star photos, and you got this.
And those red/green/blue boxes are just glitches in processing IMHO.

 

[Tre]

Here are the coordinates for the large Red, Green, and Blue boxes:
12h29m14.87s 3°31'07.22"
Edit: I just found this source that Supports DrSid, it seems to make a lot more sense than actual laser beams. For me this is pretty cool about meteorites, I once saw one that I thought changed color from green to bright blue.