I’ve been studying the area in the vicinity of the Wow! Signal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

in an attempt to see if there were any objects of interest. I have some pretty detailed charts of the area, and a planetarium program, but have been able to find nothing out of the ordinary at the Wow! position.

However, I have been downloading some nearby imagery from the Palomar Observatory Deep Sky Survey (try it, it is very easy to use). Select the GIF format, I couldn’t read the other one.

http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form

which shows a very unusual signature nearby Use the form I linked to to download the POSS2/UKSTU IR data (it only shows up in the IR imagery). Select the largest image size available (60′ x 60′) centered at
Declination: -27 degrees, Right Ascension: 19h 27m. As you can see, it is a slash of nebulosity, like a contrail, across the bottom of the image, oriented from L to R (East is to your left, RA increases to the East). You can download additional images, centered a degree or so apart, all at the same Dec to form
a mosaic. This feature extends several degrees across the sky!

It is my understanding this emulsion is sensitive to the near infrared, NOT thermal infrared, so this object should also
appear in the red plates for this area, but those show no trace of nebulosity. For a nebula to be brighter in the near IR than visible red is very unusual. Usually the two signatures appear together.

I’m baffled by this thing, perhaps I’ve just missed something, but this appears to be a new type of object. Its probably not connected to the Wow Signal, it may just be a coincidence that it appears in the same part of the sky, but…you never know.