The Astronomy Thread

Called the “eVscope” (pronounced Ee-Vee Scope) for short, Unistellar’s product outwardly appears to be just a typical 4.5-inch Newtonian reflector—a simple small telescope that, along with its tripod, easily fits inside a backpack. But a peek through its eyepiece reveals the eVscope’s power: Using a proprietary system of sensors, optics and specialized software, the telescope can amplify and display the accumulated light from a faint target over time, stacking up and processing hundreds of images to correct for instrumental jitter and smeared exposures to build up vivid, sharp views that rival those from far larger and more expensive equipment. And, as Marchis intends to show with his demonstration from a Brooklyn graveyard, the technology even works under poor viewing conditions—such as in and around New York City, where the glare of city lights is so oppressive that even on clear nights one can practically count on fingers and toes all the stars visible to the naked eye. (The technology works so well, in fact, that Unistellar’s eVscope has managed to capture and display images of faraway Pluto in its eyepiece as a dim and distant dot hanging in the light-polluted skies over Marseilles, France, and San Francisco.)

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“Remember, this telescope isn’t just about pretty pictures,” Marchis says. “It could also lead to new ways of doing science.” According to Marchis, by the time the eVscope hits stores it should be capable of imaging objects as faint as about 15 apparent magnitude—that is, as faint in Earth’s skies as a 100-watt lightbulb seen from 30,000 kilometers away. That would, among other things, allow it to image, track and study tens of thousands of known asteroids, and to discover new ones as well. Through a partnership with the SETI Institute, eVscope users will have the option of automatically uploading their observations to an online database for use by amateur and professional astronomers alike. “We’ll build it up slowly, with a thousand eVscopes providing millions of frames for any given region of sky that can be combined to get good signal to noise,” Marchis says. “We could use it to search for Earth-threatening asteroids and comets, stellar occultations, supernovae, variable stars; maybe even things we can scarcely imagine—a flash of light, a laser pulse from another cosmic civilization? Who knows what we might find—it’s not like we have been observing the sky continuously at these magnitudes.”

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Dandain said:

Elon Musk did a Reddit AMA on the BFR. His responses, and one reddit user specifically asked him some incredible questions. It is well worth looking over, a few laughs are probably to be had. I would recommend reading this if you have even the slightest interest.

I am Elon Musk, ask me anything about BFR! • r/space

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meStevo said:

Official release that needs an interpreter:

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Furry said:

Dual LIGO detection with weak to no virgo detection yet again. Interesting.

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MIT said:

Though the LIGO detectors first picked up the gravitational wave in the United States, Virgo, in Italy, played a key role in the story. Due to its orientation with respect to the source at the time of detection, Virgo recovered a small signal; combined with the signal sizes and timing in the LIGO detectors, this allowed scientists to precisely triangulate the position in the sky. After performing a thorough vetting to make sure the signals were not an artifact of instrumentation, scientists concluded that a gravitational wave came from a relatively small patch in the southern sky.

“This event has the most precise sky localization of all detected gravitational waves so far,” says Jo van den Brand of Nikhef (the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics) and VU University Amsterdam, who is the spokesperson for the Virgo collaboration. “This record precision enabled astronomers to perform follow-up observations that led to a plethora of breathtaking results.”

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Furry said:

Non detection can still be used for triangulation via exclusion . I mean their published paper specifically called Virgo a no detection.

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Are you trying to claim that my statement is somehow false? I'm only using their own claims, you are the one presenting the idea that they are lying. What gives you cause to believe that?

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Furry said:

"The low signal amplitude observed in Virgo significantly constrained the sky position, but meant that the Virgo data did not contribute significantly to other parameters." - pg 3 https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101

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My statement is 100% correct, and now referenced for your lazy ass.

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