... 2015 November 11 . An Unexpected Rocket Plume over San Francisco . ... Explanation: What is that unusual light in the sky? ... The consensus of experienced sky observers was that the plume resulted from a rocket launch -- an explanation that was soon confirmed as an unpublicized test of a submarine-launched , unarmed, Trident II D5 nuclear missile . ... About APOD | ...

... An Unexpected Rocket Plume over San Francisco . ... It appeared just as the astrophotographer and his friend were photographing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California against a more predictable night sky. ... The consensus of experienced sky observers was that the plume resulted from a rocket launch -- an explanation that was soon confirmed as an unpublicized test of a submarine-launched, unarmed, Trident II D5 nuclear missile. ... Publications with keywords: rocket - launch . ...

The overall efficiency (including atmospheric transmission, reflectivity of the telescope mirrors and overall efficiency of the optics and of the detector) for broad-band imaging should be about 25% in H and K, and about 15% in J. The main noise source for both broad- and narrow-band imaging should be the photon noise associated to the background+source flux. ... Flat fielding (and possibly background subtraction) might increase the noise by a factor 2 ? ...

... In Table 14.1 we list a provisional summary of our calibration goals for Cycle 7 and Cycle 7-NICMOS. ... The present knowledge of photometric calibration does not yet permit a definitive projection of the ultimate accuracies which may be obtainable with NICMOS. ... Perforce our existing calibration data for Camera 3 have been obtained with it out of focus and therefore the estimates for its in-focus performance remain extrapolations. ... Breathing and dewar motion are approximately equal effects. ...

... This package contains a suite of tasks to aid in the development of the tasks rmfgen and arfgen . ... readrmf , to view one or more rows of an RMF dataset . ... readimage, which converts one of more rows of an image into columns in a new table (for use with the FTOOL dmprmf). comparermf, which compares the RMF generated by rmfgen with that stored in the CAL. ... Of these, the task readrmf is considered useful to other developers and users, and a separate task description is written for this. ...