airplane

[aah@nofs.navy.mil]

Marty Pittinger gave an interesting set of information regarding the
Boeing 737.  Thanks -- I always wanted to know that!  It would be useful
to get such info for the normal set of planes (747/757/MDxx etc) and see
if there is some way to cull these 'hits' from the database.  Of course,
most of the airplanes and satellites will be removed when the merge program
is working, but as we've stated several times, single events such as OTs
or flare stars will also get removed and it would be nice to find some
method to remove specific events like airplanes.
  MG suggested tightening the sum ratio limit parameter in STAR to remove
objects like airplanes.  I recommend against that, as you might start
eliminating non-stellar-like, but real objects (comets?).  One obvious
problem with planes is that they impact all objects behind them, either by
adding light (on-board lights) or removing light (contrails).  Just because
a 'dot' falls along the airplane streak does not mean that it belongs to
the plane.  Bottom line:  leave things alone until we have sufficient data
to understand the magnitude of the problem.
Arne