The Black Sky

Introduction

For those who have read Silent Subversion I, this article should give you some hints about the contents of the second book, but should not come as a spoiler. For some, the contents of this article will cause confusion, anxiety or both. This article will address the following question. Are stars visible from the upper atmosphere? No conclusions are made yet, but some interesting information has been discovered.

There is a big challenge of writing a fictional story intended to take place in the real world. The author’s understanding of the world can be wrong and can change after they write the story. It’s one thing to create stories set in the real world as Anxiety Publishing claims, and actually writing a story which could actually take place in the real world. This is what happened to me. I wrote book 1 and 2 of the Silent Subversion saga from my understanding of the world, but then my understanding changed. This happens to everyone, hopefully every day, but in this instance, my new views all of the sudden conflicted with some of the content in Silent Subversion 2. I cannot be honest with myself and my audience without aligning the story to my most current world view. Of course, this will put a minor delay in the publication of the second book.

Here is what shook my world, so to speak. In my never-ending search for what NASA is hiding, I came upon a set of videos that disrupted my reality. At first, the new information caused me to feel anxiety as it conflicted with my current set of beliefs. In my life, I’ve grown accustomed to these experiences of anxiety. I do not fear anxiety, but have learned to embrace it. It’s like what happened to me when I discovered my religion to be a hoax. At first, the world transformed into a scary place of the unknown, but after a while, it became more beautiful and mysterious and the thought of returning to my old set of beliefs frightened me more than the new unknown ever did.

These videos that caused so much disturbance were all the high altitude weather balloons videos where the clouds are far below and the atmosphere is thin. I’ve watched so many of them, some of much better quality than others. I love watching the balloon take off from the ground and ascending into the sky. As it travels through the blue, I get impatient for the blue to disappear and to see the black of the new sky above. The view brings an eerie sensation, a feeling of being all alone in an empty universe.

Where are the stars?

Figure 1 above is a typical image from one of the videos taken in HD quality. In the video you can see the sun, the Earth and the blackness of the sky without the slightest hint of any stars. When I first encountered these videos, I temporarily accepted the standard explanation for the lack of stars. The exposure must not be set correctly. The aperture must not be large enough. The brightness of the sun and Earth must be totally saturated the sensors. For a while, I accepted those explanations, but with a healthy dose of skepticism. Most people though, easily swallow the typical excuses without any question because they come from authority figures.

A closer analysis of the sky with photographic imaging software revealed absolute blackness. For my own analysis, I chose to take a snapshot without the sun to show more of the black sky where the evidence of stars would most likely be found. On my computer, I used GIMP software edge detection and found no evidence of stars, see figure 2. In the images, if stars were present, they should be shown as areas of slightly less black than other areas and would be surrounded by contour lines. Above the dense part of the atmosphere it is totally reasonable to assume the brightness of the stars to be much greater than below. They should be detectable! In the image, the contour lines simply show a gradient from the bright Earth to the black sky with no circled areas.This means that the bright stars failed to show less black than the areas without stars, a highly unlikely scenario when the stars are supposed to be much brighter. This is evidence that the stars are not shining in wavelengths sensitive to standard cameras, wavelengths in the visible spectrum.

Are the photo analysis and arguments above sufficient to convince me or others that stars are invisible in space? For me, it’s almost enough considering all the other reasons I have to doubt NASA’s claims. In this instance, however, I also need to determine if the faint signatures of stars from pictures below the atmosphere can be detected using the same analysis. If the same edge detection analysis on videos from below the atmosphere can be used to detect the faint signature of stars, that should be sufficient evidence that they should be visible above the atmosphere.

The logic makes sense. Stars should be possibly twice as bright above the atmosphere than below, maybe more. This alone would make photographic evidence of stars more abundant at high altitude. All it takes is one picture, just one real picture taken at the Earth’s surface.

The image in figure 4 is one such image from a video of the moon taken below our dense atmosphere. The video appears to be raw footage and not manipulated. I specifically restricted my search to videos by amateurs and not space organizations. Places like NASA rarely if ever provide raw imagery. Everything they provide has been edited and is usually composite creations. Nowadays, everyone has the ability to take video in HD which should be good enough for this analysis. Figure 4 is a snapshot of the raw video and figure 5 is the same photo but with edge detection. As can be seen, there are many circular contour lines indicating areas with different brightness. These are most likely stars.

Implications

There are several implications to these observations. On a personal level, I have to modify parts of my second Silent Subversion novel before publication. On a more global scale, our imagination of space might need to be slightly modified. This would impact the producers, participants, and fans of every science fiction movie about space. Needless to say, all mainstream scientists who have their reputation built on the present understanding will fight any contradictory information.

Observations like this usually lead to more questions. If the Sun is like all the other stars, why is it visible in the upper atmosphere when all the other stars are not? Perhaps since we are so much closer to the sun, the radiation is strong enough that even the thin higher atmosphere can transform much of it into the visible spectrum. From what we know about blackbody radiation, however, an apparently hot object like the sun should emit some visible light. So, is the Sun different than the stars or does visible light not travel as far? It is also known that there is a significant electrical field which ends at the ionosphere. Could the different electrical condition above the atmosphere interfere with star light propagation? These questions are beyond the scope of this article. Speculation can be fun and productive, but sticking with observation is often the safest course of action.

The observations in this article might help those of us who have noticed:

• Why the astronauts aboard the international space station, ISS, never point their cameras into space during their day or night. They only take video of the Earth.
• Why no pictures from the Hubble Telescope are taken in the visible spectrum. For example, they are taken in x-ray or UV or some radio frequency and then assigned visible light.
• Why no camera aboard any rocket ever points to the sky while traveling into orbit. They all point to the Earth.
• Why no astronaut ever points his camera into space to show the stars while on an EVA, or why no stars are ever shown (until only recently).
• Why Neil Armstrong claims not to have seen any stars other than the sun while on the moon or on his way to the moon.

Sometimes NASA astronauts admit that no stars are visible in space and other times they claim the stars are visible. I think they do this to cover their bases, one way or the other, but they must know the truth. Maybe they’ll go public one day, and make some excuse for lying about so many things. What other information are they keeping from us?

Notes: The following video shows a camera view of the sky and an altimeter reading on the whole trip. The sky begins to turn black before 70000 ft or 21 km. youtube.com/watch?v=hceMXAQWWN8. Another video shows the view from a U2 spy plane at 70,000 ft., youtube.com/watch?v=q48Swb2ATww. Although the pilot doesn’t point the camera up, the horizon is dark blue, and seems to turn blacker as the angle upward increases.

Disclaimer: I make no claim to some of the images shown as they are freely available on the web for the public to use. No attempt has been made to contact the owners of the videos which were used in my analysis.