And have you ever seen a paper of this type with only two citations? And one of those is only a handbook of astrophysical quantities, a sourcebook or desk reference..

I happen to have one of those too, (“Astrophysical Formulae”, Kenneth Lang, Springer-Verlag) and it give a (B-V) value for the sun’s spectral type pretty close to the one in the paper, but that refers to a traditional astronomical method for describing stellar colors. It is the magnitude difference between stellar images on Blue and Visual sensitive photographic emulsions. No one would use that today in an application like this when you could read a color temperature directly off an instrument. I think they just cribbed that to make it look legit. And you’re right, what the hell does color have to do with distance?

These guys are talking about imaging objects thousands of kilometers away traveling at speeds exceeding earth’s escape velocity, in broad daylight, with 6mm focal length camera lenses. and they don’t even remark on the wonderfulness of it all.

This is bogus.

Sorry, but lines like:

Figures 7 and 8 show the image and color charts of the phantom object. The object is present in
only one frame, which allows us to determine its speed of at least 52 degrees per second, taking into
account the angular dimensions of the frame.

don’t inspire a lot of confidence…

And the whole claim that they can get distance from the color spectrum seems – to put it mildly- questionable…

Because they are not objects?

Now, wait, I’m just spit balling and y’all can tell me how wrong it is.

This is the first time we have seen this much remote sensing brought to bear on a war zone. There are spook satellites up there we have no comprehension of what they are doing. Sure, we see a lot of neat stuff online – the commercial stuff.

Right now, as we speak, that area is getting covered in real time (probably from geostationary orbit) with not only images, but active radar, LiDAR, microwave, and who knows what else.

Question: How are those wavelengths from multiple satellites sweeping radar through the sky interacting? Is it possible that constructive interference might disrupt the atmosphere in such a way to create optical effects with wild telemetry? Especially under different atmospheric conditions? Temperature, moisture content, particulate count?

Ever seen the two grapes in a microwave experiment?

(looking for a video for edit…)

https://www.science.org/content/article/why-sparks-fly-when-you-microwave-grapes