This thread is in response to Reuben's suggestion in silly questions. This is how I found what the telescope was looking at when it recorded a task with a lot of pulses.

But first, a bucket of cold water over the whole idea. As the thread title suggests, it's more than likely that the pulses came from planet earth. If finding ET was as simple as picking up one batch of pulses, we'd all have said 'been there, done that' and moved on to something else by now. So don't go mad, and start ringing up your local radio observatory, claiming that you know where ET lives: even if you're right, and you have picked up the elusive 'WOW!' signal, all you really know is where her spaceship was parked two and a half years ago. Can you even remember where your own car was parked that night?

So, in the spirit that it's all just a bit of fun, and merely gives us something to while away the long winter evenings (in the earth's northerm hemisphere, at least), here goes.

Let's start with the task that sparked off the question: Luke's task 1430354862

You need to get hold of the original WU data for that task. If you're serious about this, you'll already be running something like BoincLogX, so the data from your own WUs will be preserved. But if you aren't, or you're looking at somebody else's task, you still have a chance.

The WU files are stored in http://boinc2.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/download_fanout - but you won't find it there. There are a thousand (and twenty four) subdirectories: please don't even think about looking in each one until you find it. Either you, or the SETI servers, will go mad before you find it. Here's the smart way.

First, get the WU name: 03mr07ah.12102.375738.4.10.37, in this case (ignore the _1 on the end, which just identifies the task replication number).

Then, find the MD5 hash of the name. I used md5 Hash Generator just because it was the first one Google found. Paste in the WU name (with no spaces or newlines), and the answer should be "63758a55a8ffc4680623ca183443defb".

You want the bit I've picked out in red - characters 6 to 8. That's a55 this time. And then you want to narrow things down even further, by taking 'modulo 4' of the first character. That's the remainder when you divide by four - here's a crib:

[ 0, 4, 8, c ] --> (0)
[ 1, 5, 9, d ] --> 1
[ 2, 6, a, e ] --> 2
[ 3, 7, b, f ] --> 3

Putting it all together, that tells you that the WU is in this subdirectory of the fanout:

http://boinc2.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/download_fanout/255/

And here it is:

http://boinc2.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah/download_fanout/255/03mr07ah.12102.375738.4.10.37

You can quickly see the answer to the original question:

      <start_ra>5.3250722193798</start_ra>
      <start_dec>9.6094136906623</start_dec>
      <end_ra>5.3250789007916</end_ra>
      <end_dec>9.609325360211</end_dec>

or, to put it another way,

start: 5.3250722193798,9.6094136906623
end: 5.3250789007916,9.609325360211

If you have a recent copy of Google Earth (any time in the last couple of years), you can change to a sky view with View|Explore >. Paste those figures into a location search, and you'll see ....

.... absolutely nothing. The proverbial black cat in a coal cellar. Zoom out to see first some faint galaxies, then some insignificant stars, and eventually the constellations.

Enjoy. Share if you find anything interesting.

.... absolutely nothing. The proverbial black cat in a coal cellar. Zoom out to see first some faint galaxies, then some insignificant stars, and eventually the constellations.

Enjoy. Share if you find anything interesting.

<sarcasm>
But, but, but.....

Couldn't that mean that that area is simply overflowing with black holes?

Imagine some sort of pan-dimensional beings that live and play along the event horizon?

Isn't it as likely that there is something there, instead of nothing at all?

Those twelve pulses could be loaded with data, we just didn't record them at a high enough sample rate to see the bits!
</sarcasm>

Sorry, I'll behave now.

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.... absolutely nothing. The proverbial black cat in a coal cellar.

Of course, that is what THEY would want us to see when we looked there .....

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They may have mastered the art of cloaking their worlds and ships. On the other hand, how do you know it isn't Google or the provider of the actual photos of the sky (NASA?) that's censoring what's actually visible there? Better yet, how do you know for sure that what Google Sky says is there, is actually that bit of the sky?

I'll go take my meds now, yes. :-)

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heck if we can create radar eluding planes how hard would it be for a space race to do it

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

that spot is near a infrared hotspot and a microwave coldzone.
maybe a spinning pulsar obscured by dust?

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Uh, oh........

Klingon's cloaking failed for a moment.......

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I prefer to use Microsoft Worldwide telescope. I haven't tried it in Google Sky, but in WW Telescope the location is in Orion. Is this correct?

- Luke.

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- Luke.

They may have mastered the art of cloaking their worlds and ships. On the other hand, how do you know it isn't Google or the provider of the actual photos of the sky (NASA?) that's censoring what's actually visible there? Better yet, how do you know for sure that what Google Sky says is there, is actually that bit of the sky?

I'll go take my meds now, yes. :-)

And this is why everyone is encouraged to get their own optical telescopes and look into the sky for themselves. Or if you have the resources, build your own radio telescope. I want to do that someday.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

ummm
its not all that undoable a project...
there are old satellite dishes everywhere...

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I prefer to use Microsoft Worldwide telescope. I haven't tried it in Google Sky, but in WW Telescope the location is in Orion. Is this correct?

In Google Sky 5.3250722193798,9.6094136906623 puts us between Pisces and Pegasus, on the South side of Pegasus.

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Uh, oh........

Klingon's cloaking failed for a moment.......

Remember "Pavel Checkov says that's a Russian Inwention". ;)

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's