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Confirmed. The stars in the background behind Comet #67P are in Canis Major: the cluster NGC2362 "falls down" past the limb at top-left; sparse cluster NGC2354 & the star 27CMa are also in the field. Cropped image & ID's from http://astrometry.net in next tweet. 1/https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168 …
OSIRIS --ROSETTA EXTENSION 2 MTP030-- Miércoles 1 Junio 2016 all filters stacked pic.twitter.com/Bf173Z5g79Here's one of the #Rosetta OSIRIS NAC images cropped to remove most of #67P (solution converges much quicker without those "useless" data) & the http://astrometry.net ID. The faster-moving streaks are then likely dust close to the spacecraft. Great optical illusion 
2/2pic.twitter.com/FwqSjL2zBI
Actually, without cropping, the solution doesn't converge at all. FWIW, NGC2362 is also known as τ CMa, a massive young open cluster at 1.5kpc & around 4–5 Myr old. Here's the full http://astrometry.net page link. 3/3 http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/2081025#annotated …
I actually dismissed background stars at first as they were too dense. However, the comet is very black, so it makes sense that the exposure must be sensitive enough to see background stars. Cool result.
Relatively far from the Sun at that time too at ~3.1AU, so only ~10% of the sunlight we get at Earth. Combine with a ~6% albedo & yes, 12.5 second exposures, which means stars are readily visible.
Thanks. I’m also pretty mind-boggled that we now have the ability to feed a program a star field and it can say where you are looking. Rationally, I can see how it’s done, but it’s an impressive step up from the last time I did any astronomy.
Yep, it's clever stuff. Or at least well-programmed brute force :-)
@landru79 did another gif with images aligned on stars 
https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040 …
OSIRIS --ROSETTA EXTENSION 2 MTP030-- Miércoles 1 Junio 2016 all filters stacked
pic.twitter.com/UyZ628JxKPCool – makes it quite clear what's happening in the background now.
some of the streaks are cosmics too, no?
Entirely possible, but there's a clear top-left -> bottom-right directionality to many of the longer streaks, which indicate foreground dust trailing as the spacecraft moves through it.
Yeah, right after I wrote that I dope-slapped myself because all the streaks were in the same damned direction!
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