The Left-Handed Spanner: A Big Bang

Words and seizure inducing gifs by Kaibeezy: DT posted this 1968 Ford Galaxie 500 coupe just a few weeks
ago. Good looking car, nicely presented, priced to sell at $8300. So I
was pretty surprised to see it back up the other day here on Craigslist, same car, same town, but at a new price of
$10,300. The ad does say: “New engine has been installed”, but heck, the
old ad might have said that too. The two engine shots look very
similar, but I’m no expert. How can we tell with more certainty?

Mind trip with me if you will… Galaxie…
galaxy… astronomy… hang on, that’s it! Astronomers used to use
something called a “blink comparator” to quickly switch between two
images of star fields, which made even a tiny change such as a distant
supernova or the motion of a comet instantly visible. Here’s an example I
borrowed from a website put together by theObservatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science (which has a
copyright mark on it, but I hope they don’t mind – if they do, we’ll
take it down and apply for a grant to make our own black squares with a
bunch of dots on them – or if they would like to quid pro
quo post the motion GIF which is frankly indispensable to see
what the heck they are actually on about, they can contact me by an interleaved encoding into a sequence
of prime numbers on a carrier wave set at the hydrogen spin-flip
freq).   

See it? You’ve got the two static images A and B, and the blinky blinky version makes the supernova easy to spot.

OK, now back to our own Galaxie. Will this technique work with engine
photos? Sure it will. Here for example are before-and-after photos CFlo
sent me of his Beetle (still for sale, surprisingly). A bit of Rust-eze,
some elbow grease – it really pops out at you, doesn’t it?

Looking at the Galaxie photos, I am hard pressed to see any difference. Anyone?

Here I hand off to the experts for a guess as to why the price increased, and whether it’s still a good deal. ~Kaibeezy