After work, I had Zoe cross reference the LAF’s locked-on position with know terrestrial sources.  She said it was a waste of time – though I couldn’t see why.  Meanwhile, I continued to scan through the logs.  So far, the pattern simply continues – 42 waves, 42 silences.  This effort was going too slow, so tonight I just wrote a small application to systematically search the remaining logs and detect if this pattern ever varies.  It is probably not a good use of my time, but hey.

The real interesting news is that Zoe confirmed that the signal was unlikely from a published terrestrial emitter.  I asked here how she knew this.  “Easy !”, she explained, “The log continuously shows each position adjustment “God’s Ear” made after lock-on last night.  Based on these adjustments, it’s easy to tell the movement of what it was tracking with respect to our position.  If it were an airborne platform, it could be either moving or stationary.  If it was a stationary platform, the dish wouldn’t have moved – but it did.  If it was tracking a non-stationary airborne platform, the LAF position would change, but not in the same way as it would if it were tracking a distant object in space.  In fact, the way the LAF was tracking, it was basically compensating for the Earth’s rotation.  This means that whatever it was tracking was either very far away, or local… but moving in a path with ridiculously significant coincidence with the Earth’s rotation.  I’m betting on the former.”

Well, I’m done with the simple search application, and I’m kicking it off as I type this.  We’ll see if it turns up anything tomorrow.  Either way, I can’t think of anything terrestrial or celestial that would emit such a meaningless signal, so I’m curious about what the LAF found.  At this point, though, I can’t help but think that I’m getting sidetracked.  Maybe I should just ignore this signal and keep searching for something more interesting?  Or, maybe I should just go to sleep and worry about this tomorrow!