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