Stars / Astronomy / Astrophotography / Telescopes / Astro

Some excellent speculation.

Some extreme speculation, our ability to investigate exo atmospheres has a long way to go. I'm a little out of date, but no particular mission has launched in the last 5 years to improve the situation, the extrapolation from very few data points was alarming.

JWST and the next gen ground-based telescopes are the great white hope. If they ever materialise.

My PhD was on exoplanet atmospheres

My PhD was on exoplanet atmospheres

Mine was on an exoplanet atmosphere telescope design. When I was working alongside the dedicated atmospheres guys they showed whole spectra plotted against two or three data points!

JWST launches next year? And The ELT should help as well in 10 years or so.

Which telescope?

they showed whole spectra plotted against two or three data points!

Yeah, pretty silly... I steered well clear of any observational stuff, pure theory for me

JWST was supposed to launch in 2018... They've recently halted work due to coronavirus so guessing it's going to be delayed yet again!

It was a novel blue sky (black sky?) project to look at a space based IR interferometer .

Have you seen the starshade proposed by Kasdin? Could potentially allow for imaging of planetary discs...

You two really should get a ... laboratory.

laboratory.

? You did read they're a theorist...

@mespilus yep - what @Backstop said - I avoided labs at all costs during undergrad! Why would I want any real data making a mess in my nice ordered logical models?

Reckon it's possible to see these Starlink satts from London tonight? Or just too much light pollution? https://explainingscience.org/2020/01/29/spacex-starlink-satellites/

Magnitude 4 and brighter so feasible

This looks great:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/08/astronomers-capture-new-images-of-jupiter-using-lucky-technique

ISS coming over brightly in 10 minutes

Fast moving, relative to background, small dot of light fainter than the background stars?

Much brighter, close to the brightness of Venus

In another 90 minutes it will pass overhead and be even brighter.

Satellites move at about the speed a plane moves across the sky, but you can perceive a subtle difference in the path, it's more curved and less of a chord that planes take.

They will cross about .5 to .66 of the sky before passing into the Earth's shadow in a minute or two.

See here for track details: Heavens Above

Managed one decent shot of the ISS last night, shot at 4m focal length.

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Sorry what lens is that? 😊

Wow

Moon & venus yesterday evening

Awesome.

It’s a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a 2x teleconverter. Tracking the ISS by hand is quite fun.

Very nice - if you do some pixel-peeping you might just see Mercury as well. Venus has just sunk past it this last week.

space x launch tonight anyone got one of those tracker things so i might have a watch and see it go past
lost the link to the site that tracks the little satellites

https://heavens-above.com/passdetails.aspx?lat=51.5479&lng=-0.1149&loc=Unnamed&alt=0&tz=GMT&satid=71000&mjd=58999.8868687834&type=V

This shows it pass very low in the south west at 10:15 which would be about its third pass since launch.

The actual launch will be shown on YouTube via the NASA or spacex channel.