Object identification quiz

[Dominic Ford]

Over the weekend, James Dawson circulated a quiz to some of us by email, based on the custom graph plotting facility on my website: https://in-the-sky.org/graphs.php

The attached PDF file contains eight graphs, each plotting the angular separation of a celestial object from the Sun over the next three years, at ten day intervals.

Your job is to figure out what the eight celestial objects are. In some cases, the sampling interval of ten days is quite a bad choice, creating lots of aliasing, but I suppose that’s part of the challenge.

This turned out to lead to quite a bit of head scratching, so I thought I’d share the fun here. The questions range from easy to pretty hard, though James has removed the most absurdly difficult graph from his original quiz.

I’d be interested to hear people’s scores!

Attachments:

1. What-is-the-celestial-object2.pdf

[Mike Scarisbrick]

I’ve just seen this interesting quiz. I’m still pondering 6, 7 and 8. Maybe I should think more about the sampling frequency.

[Dawson]

6 and 1 are not dissimilar in form, which should give you an idea of where 6 resides in the overall scheme of things.

7, I think the clue is the initial plateaux phase of the plot.

8 I think is just difficult!

Sorry.

[Author]

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