On the nature of apparent transient sources on the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey glass copy plates

Abstract: We examine critically recent claims for the presence of above-atmosphere optical transients in publicly-available digitised scans of Schmidt telescope photographic plate material derived from the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. We employ the publicly available SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey catalogues to examine statistically the morphology of the sources. We develop a simple, objective and automated image classification scheme based on a random forest decision tree classifier. We find that the putative transients are likely to be spurious artefacts of the photographic emulsion. We suggest a possible cause of the appearance of these images as resulting from the copying procedure employed to disseminate glass copy survey atlas sets in the era before large-scale digitisation programmes.