Astronomical Stargazer Thread

[Adam Peter]

Existence of Kordylewski cloud (called dust moon in Hungarian) reportedly confirmed by Hungarian astronomers. It was predicted by Polish astronomer Jozef Witkowski, and first observed by Kazimierz Kordylewski. Its existence was questioned due to the solar wind.

 

As always, it amazes me that quite a few thing is questionable in our Solar System, while we have found orbits around distant stars.

[Panzermann]

As always, it amazes me that quite a few thing is questionable in our Solar System, while we have found orbits around distant stars.

 

Well, we do not know much more about those planets orbiting other stars than that they are there and can make vague guesses about their size and idstance from the host star. And can make rough guesses about the planets climate based on size, mass, its gravity and distance from the star.

 

Our own solar system is already really big from our puny human perspective looking 1.411.664.083.250.104.773 km³ (first guesstimate number I found) of solarsystem. There is lots empty of space. And small and/or dark objects are really hard to see in space like some asteroid or dust cloud. And keep in mind that we know more about the universe out there than about the deep sea.

Edited October 29, 2018 by Panzermann

[BansheeOne]

"Farout" has a kind of "Firefly" ring to it in a simplistic way.

 

Discovered: The Most-Distant Solar System Object Ever Observed

 

Monday, December 17, 2018

Washington, DC— A team of astronomers has discovered the most-distant body ever observed in our Solar System. It is the first known Solar System object that has been detected at a distance that is more than 100 times farther than Earth is from the Sun.

 

The new object was announced on Monday, December 17, 2018, by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center and has been given the provisional designation 2018 VG18. The discovery was made by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard, the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen, and Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo.

 

2018 VG18, nicknamed “Farout” by the discovery team for its extremely distant location, is at about 120 astronomical units (AU), where 1 AU is defined as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The second-most-distant observed Solar System object is Eris, at about 96 AU. Pluto is currently at about 34 AU, making 2018 VG18 more than three-and-a-half times more distant than the Solar System’s most-famous dwarf planet.

 

2018 VG18 was discovered as part of the team’s continuing search for extremely distant Solar System objects, including the suspected Planet X, which is sometimes also called Planet 9. In October, the same group of researchers announced the discovery of another distant Solar System object, called 2015 TG387 and nicknamed “The Goblin,” because it was first seen near Halloween. The Goblin was discovered at about 80 AU and has an orbit that is consistent with it being influenced by an unseen Super-Earth-sized Planet X on the Solar System’s very distant fringes.

 

The existence of a ninth major planet at the fringes of the Solar System was first proposed by this same research team in 2014 when they discovered 2012 VP113, nicknamed Biden, which is currently near 84 AU.

 

2015 TG387 and 2012 VP113 never get close enough to the Solar System’s giant planets, like Neptune and Jupiter, to have significant gravitational interactions with them. This means that these extremely distant objects can be probes of what is happening in the Solar System’s outer reaches. The team doesn’t know 2018 VG18’s orbit very well yet, so they have not been able to determine if it shows signs of being shaped by Planet X.

 

“2018 VG18 is much more distant and slower moving than any other observed Solar System object, so it will take a few years to fully determine its orbit,” said Sheppard. “But it was found in a similar location on the sky to the other known extreme Solar System objects, suggesting it might have the same type of orbit that most of them do. The orbital similarities shown by many of the known small, distant Solar System bodies was the catalyst for our original assertion that there is a distant, massive planet at several hundred AU shepherding these smaller objects.”

 

“All that we currently know about 2018 VG18 is its extreme distance from the Sun, its approximate diameter, and its color,” added Tholen “Because 2018 VG18 is so distant, it orbits very slowly, likely taking more than 1,000 years to take one trip around the Sun.”

 

The discovery images of 2018 VG18 were taken at the Japanese Subaru 8-meter telescope located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii on November 10, 2018.

 

Once 2018 VG18 was found, it needed to be re-observed to confirm its very distant nature. (It takes multiple nights of observing to accurately determine an object’s distance.) 2018 VG18 was seen for the second time in early December at the Magellan telescope at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. These recovery observations were performed by the team with the addition of graduate student Will Oldroyd of Northern Arizona University. Over the next week, they monitored 2018 VG18 with the Magellan telescope to secure its path across the sky and obtain its basic physical properties such as brightness and color.

 

The Magellan observations confirmed that 2018 VG18 is around 120 AU, making it the first Solar System object observed beyond 100 AU. Its brightness suggests that it is about 500 km in diameter, likely making it spherical in shape and a dwarf planet. It has a pinkish hue, a color generally associated with ice-rich objects.

 

[...]

 

https://carnegiescience.edu/news/discovered-most-distant-solar-system-object-ever-observed

[Ivanhoe]

[Soren Ras]

Farout is an ok name, but with an official designation of VG18 they should have gone with Vger.

 

 

Soren

[BansheeOne]

Season greetings from Mars.

 

[Panzermann]

Frozen CO₂?

[BansheeOne]

Reportedly it's actually water ice, trapped by cold atmospheric layers in Korolev Crater.

[Ivanhoe]

Aha! That explains this;

 

 

I always figured there was some ulterior motive to Canada getting involved in space tech and space exploration. Now we know.

[BansheeOne]

How the Oumuamua mystery shook up the search for space aliens

 

The interstellar visitor made it respectable to talk about alien spaceships.

Dec. 25, 2018 / 12:00 PM GMT+1

By Corey S. Powell

Last year, an enigmatic object named Oumuamua startled astronomers when it came streaking past the sun, giving humanity its first close-up look at an object from beyond our solar system. This year, the interstellar visitor did something even more remarkable: It made it respectable to talk about alien spaceships.

 

The turning point came in November, when Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department at Harvard University, co-wrote a paper saying that Oumuamua is so unusual that scientists should consider the possibility that it’s not a far-out comet or asteroid, as his colleagues assumed, but rather an artificial structure.

 

In other words, maybe it’s an interstellar craft built by extraterrestrials.

 

Some of Loeb’s colleagues were intrigued. Others were disconcerted. But suddenly mainstream scientists were talking about how to tell if Oumuamua is a natural object or — as Loeb raised as a possibility in his paper — an alien spacecraft designed to capture the force of sunlight (a so-called lightsail).

 

Loeb is well aware that most scientists recoil from anything that sounds like UFO craziness, but he believes an overabundance of skepticism has cut them off from out-of-the box ideas. “The point of doing science is not to have a prejudice,” he says. “A prejudice is based on the experience of the past, but if you want to allow yourself to make discoveries, then the future will not be the same as the past.”

 

Jason Wright, a Penn State astronomer who recently launched a graduate program in SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), shares Loeb’s desire for open discussion — and offers an upbeat assessment of the field’s growing respectability. “There’s a real culture change. SETI is becoming a serious scientific discipline,” he says.

 

Strange visitor from the stars

 

It was clear from the start that Oumuamua (pronounced oh-MOO-uh-MOO-uh) would shake up astronomy’s status quo. Shortly after its discovery, scientists realized that the object’s unusual trajectory meant it had to have come from outside the solar system — and that it could have been traveling for millions of years. They quickly dubbed the mysterious object Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word meaning “messenger from the past.”

 

There were more surprises. Oumuamua was too far away for astronomers to observe its shape directly, but they could tell by the extreme way its brightness shifted as it tumbled through space that it wasn’t like any space rock they had ever seen.

 

“It’s very elongated, with an axis ratio of at least 7 to 1,” astronomer Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii said in an email. In other words, it’s at least seven times as long as it is wide — shaped like a cigar, perhaps. Or, as Loeb proposes in his paper, maybe a flattened disk.

 

Astronomers’ models predict that most of the small bodies wandering in interstellar space are comets. But when Meech and others examined it, Oumuamua showed no sign of the expected comet-like tail. It’s also quite small, on the order of 1,000 feet long, and it seems to be much more reflective than the comets we know.

 

Intrigued by its oddities, several groups of SETI researchers listened for possible radio transmissions from Oumuamua — and heard nothing.

 

An invisible push

 

The biggest puzzle about Oumuamua was the way it moved. As it zoomed away from the sun, it sped up slightly, as if given an invisible push. “It doesn’t take much to provide the little acceleration we see,” says Michele Bannister, a comet expert at Queens University Belfast, “but the effect is definitely there.”

 

Comets often accelerate that way when gases boil off their surface under heat from the sun. But observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope showed no such material coming off of Oumuamua.

 

At this point, Loeb thought it was time to consider a more radical interpretation and, with a post-doctoral student, Shmuel Bialy, wrote the provocative paper. In it, the scientists consider the possibility that Oumuamua lacks a tail because it isn’t a comet at all, and that the acceleration was caused not by boiling gases but by the pressure of sunlight against a very wide, thin lightweight structure.

 

“The Spitzer data are consistent with a sail about 20 meters [60 feet] across,” Loeb says. He and Bialy suggest that such an object could be technological debris or even “a fully operational probe.”

 

[...]

 

A universe of questions

 

Wright believes the excitement over Oumuamua, combined with the other recent developments in the field, is breathing new life into SETI research.

 

“There’s a popular misperception that it’s just people listening for radio signals and coming up with one null result after another,” he says of SETI. He counters that there are actually a tremendous number of ways to search for alien life once scientists broaden their horizons.

 

Wright raises the possibility that a now-defunct alien civilization left behind artifacts on the moon, where they could have survived even if deposited there billions of years ago. His colleague Paul Davies at Arizona State University has enlisted students to comb through archival images of the lunar surface to see if they can find evidence of any alien “technosignatures.”

 

Wright has participated in studies of Tabby’s Star, whose intermittent dimming had some scientists wondering if it was encased within a vast artificial structure built by aliens. While the latest results show that’s not the case, Wright is undeterred. Almost all such searches are destined for failure, he says, and all it takes is one success to change the world.

 

With that in mind, he advocates digging through existing astronomical data to look for other stars whose peculiar behavior could indicate the presence of alien construction projects. “There are many rich datasets sitting out there to look through,” he says.

 

This is exactly the sort of unfettered curiosity that Loeb says he wanted to spark with his Oumuamua hypothesis. “Why have a prejudice? Why argue that it must be natural? What do we gain, other than putting blinders on our eyes?” he asks. “We should examine each and every interstellar object entering the solar system to check if it’s natural or not. Even if most of the time it’s natural, every now and then we might be surprised.”

 

And what a surprise that would be.

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-oumuamua-mystery-shook-search-space-aliens-ncna950991

[BansheeOne]

NASA’s faraway space snowman has flat, not round, behind

By MARCIA DUNN February 11, 2019

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The faraway space snowman visited by NASA last month has a surprisingly flat — not round — behind.

 

New photos from the New Horizons spacecraft offer a new perspective on the small cosmic body 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away. The two-lobed object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, is actually flatter on the backside than originally thought, according to scientists.

 

Pictures released late last week — taken shortly after closest approach on New Year’s Day — provide an outline of the side not illuminated by the sun.

 

When viewed from the front, Ultima Thule still resembles a two-ball snowman. But from the side , the snowman looks squashed, sort of like a lemon and pie stuck together, end to end.

 

“Seeing more data has significantly changed our view,” Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, the lead scientist, said in a statement. “It would be closer to reality to say Ultima Thule’s shape is flatter, like a pancake. But more importantly, the new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed. We’ve never seen something like this orbiting the sun.”

 

Project scientist Hal Weaver of Johns Hopkins University, home to New Horizons flight control center, said the finding should spark new theories on how such primitive objects formed early in the solar system.

 

Ultima Thule — considered a contact binary — is the most distant world ever explored. New Horizons zipped past it at high speed, after becoming the first visitor to Pluto in 2015. Mission managers hope to target an even more distant celestial object in this so-called Kuiper Belt, on the frozen fringes of the solar system, if the spacecraft remains healthy.

 

New Horizons is already 32 million miles (52 million kilometers) beyond Ultima Thule. It will take another 1 ½ years to beam back all the flyby data.

 

The spacecraft rocketed from Florida in 2006.

 

 

https://www.apnews.com/bc7d1fa8995443568fd862974c2507b7

[JamesR]

Any of you guys dabble in astrophotography? I've been at it for a couple of years now, still have a lot to learn but I'd like to share a few of my recent images:

 

M42, The Orion Nebula.

 

 

 

NGC 2244 which is the open star cluster that's in the nebula. The nebula is known as the Rosette nebula:

 

 

 

Here's the moon from the recent lunar eclipse (Jan 2019)

 

 

 

[Ssnake]

Maybe three decades ago pictures of that quality could only be made by professional observatories.

[Ivanhoe]

Really nice, thanks for sharing.

[Corinthian]

One of the Israelis here does astrophotography.

 

Great pix! Wot is your setup?

[JamesR]

Maybe three decades ago pictures of that quality could only be made by professional observatories.

 

It is amazing just how far technology has come. I was able to create these using a 70mm refractor with a 6mp camera in the light pollution of North Austin, TX.

 

 

Really nice, thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks

 

One of the Israelis here does astrophotography.

 

Great pix! Wot is your setup?

 

Thanks. The equipment I'm using:

 

Telescope: Stellarvue SV70T with the .8 reducer

Mount: Celestron AVX

Camera: ZWO ASI178mm with the TEC cooler

Numerous imaging filters in a ZWO filter wheel (LRGB and Ha, O3, S2)

Plus a few other bits (guide camera, usb hub, laptop, etc)

 

The capture software I'm using is Sequence Generator Pro.

Most of processing is done with Pixinsight, although I'll sometimes do a little touch up in Photoshop.

[Panzermann]

Very nice photographs!

 

 

Only like twenty years ago or so, astronomers at a small observatory would have killed for this. Crazy how good cheap (relatively) equipment is nowadays. I can remember when big glass plates were put into the camera, when I visited an observatory.

[JamesR]

Very nice photographs!

 

 

Only like twenty years ago or so, astronomers at a small observatory would have killed for this. Crazy how good cheap (relatively) equipment is nowadays. I can remember when big glass plates were put into the camera, when I visited an observatory.

 

Thanks

[Corinthian]

Could you post a pic of your setup JamesR?

[JamesR]

Could you post a pic of your setup JamesR?

 

Yep...

 

 

 

 

 

My cable management has been improved since this image was taken, dangling cables aren't good for guiding. The other component missing from the shot is a cheap laptop I use to run everything. It would be setup on that pink laptop trey.

 

The imaging scope is the bottom one. The slightly larger scope on top is an older achromatic refractor that I've repurposed as a guide scope. That smaller black scope looking thing is the celestron starsense.

[JamesR]

Here's the link to might astrobin site. You can see that some of my earlier images aren't as good as my recent stuff (bloated, elongated stars and excessive noise). If you go to the astrobin home page you will see some really amazing stuff. Some of these guys that post there have remote observatories in very dark skies with the best equipment.

 

 

https://www.astrobin.com/users/JamesR/

[Corinthian]

Awesome setup. How heavy does it weight?

 

I'm looking to build my own setup. Just a simple one so I can bring it with me when I go to the field. Likely having it portered though heheh

[Rick]

Very impressive. As a side note, my day job is ophthalmic photography. Slightly smaller orbs than what your photographing

[JamesR]

Awesome setup. How heavy does it weight?

 

I'm looking to build my own setup. Just a simple one so I can bring it with me when I go to the field. Likely having it portered though heheh

 

The whole rig is probably around 40lbs/18Kg.

 

There's a lot of different options out there now, more so than even just a couple of years ago. You could start with a camera tracker and a dslr and a small scope like this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVtl_nZLDoQ

 

That guys youtube channel is actually very good. I watched a bunch of his videos when I was starting out.

 

Cloudynights is the best forum on the topic. I spend a lot of time over there soaking up information:

 

https://www.cloudynights.com/index

 

 

Very impressive. As a side note, my day job is ophthalmic photography. Slightly smaller orbs than what your photographing

 

Thanks

 

Yea,,, just a little smaller... but a whole lot closer, lol.

[JamesR]

Just finished up another astro image. The data did not come from my telescope. It was captured by one of my club members. He's got a telescope setup in a remote observatory in Marathon Texas. The skies are very dark out there. The software used to capture the data was Sequence Generator pro, same program I use with my telescope. I did the target framing and all the processing.

 

There's a lot going on in this image. The two larger Galaxies are M81 and M82. There's also a few other galaxies hiding in this image. The faint nebula structures are known as Integrated Flux Nebula (IFN). It is essentially large clouds of dust on the edge of our galaxy that is being illuminated by the star light of our galaxy. How cool is that? It's very faint and would be very difficult to capture in light polluted skies.

 

This image is pretty large so I just used the thumbnail for this post. The full size image is here (without the labels):

 

https://www.astrobin.com/full/393950/0/