Dion, haven't you ever been in total darkness, and suddenly a tiny blip of light, for just a second, happens in one of your eyes? You're not sure where it came from or if it was even real. Secondary particles from cosmic rays can hit rods and cones in your eyes and fire them off. They don't even have to enter through your pupil. I've experienced it a number of times during my lifetime. So it's easy to imagine the Hubble camera chips just getting peppered with primary cosmic-ray strikes. On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Dion Davidson <diondavidson@yahoo.com>wrote:
It's amazing how the "raw" images from Hubble look - speckled with dots and lines Max called cosmic rays. He said it's one of the disadvantages of having the telescope outside our protective atmosphere.
Dion