The Astronomy Thread

khorum

khorum

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Abefroman said:

Blue Origins better start making a CGI of this too.
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Oh wow that would be awesome. The whole mission stack was designed to be reusable, so technically the 2nd stage has some dead weight in it if they're never gonna bother to try to reuse it. He gave a talk in MIT or CMU a couple years ago and explained why he thought upper stage reusabilty wasnt a priority anymore. The falcon 9's upper stage is still designed for it, but some of their commercial missions have been for higher and higher orbits that the second stage never has enough fuel to decelerate and do a propulsive landing.

I guess the Falcon Heavy would be powerful enough to change that equation up... but they couldn't do that for missions with the max payloads, which is what ppl would be hiring the heavy for.
 
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Cybsled

Cybsled

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I know some telecom companies would love for fast turnaround on launches due to the volume of satellites they need to be launched.
 
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Pops

Pops

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https://phys.org/news/2016-09-china-world-largest-radio-telescope.html

chinabeginso.jpg
 
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Lambourne

Lambourne

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The telescope requires a radio silence within a 5-kilometer (3-mile) radius, resulting in the relocation of more than 8,000 people from their homes in eight villages to make way for the facility, state media said.
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There's why China is booming, you can't so much as build a road in the West without there being a lawsuit over some "rare" rodent or insect, let alone actually relocating people. Everything gets delayed forever as a result. China just gives people some cash and tells them to GTFO, gets shit done.
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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ToeMissile said:
I read a while ago about the insurance policies they put on these launches are pretty pricey too, of course that's going to be across the board though.
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It's going to rewrite that as well.

The current economics are like: it costs your 15M$ to build a satellite, and 60M$ to launch it. If it fails, you're in for 75M$.

The SpaceX 2019 economics are like: it costs you 15M$ to build a satellite and 10M$ to launch it. You can afford ONE failed launch without even insurance, and you're still ahead on your original budget after the second.
 
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Dandain

Dandain

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https://phys.org/news/2017-04-atmosphere-super-earth.html

The size of stars like GJ 1132 is well known from stellar models. From the fraction of starlight blocked by the planet, astronomers can deduce the planet's size—in this case around 1.4 times the size of the Earth. Crucially, the new observations showed the planet to be larger at one of the infrared wavelengths than at the others. This suggests the presence of an atmosphere that is opaque to this specific infrared light (making the planet appear larger) but transparent at all the others. Different possible versions of the atmosphere were then simulated by team members at the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. According to those models, an atmosphere rich in water and methane would explain the observations very well.
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The discovery comes with the usual exoplanet caveats: while somewhat larger than Earth, and with 1.6 times Earth's mass (as determined by earlier measurements), observations to date do not provide sufficient data to decide how similar or dissimilar GJ 1132b is to Earth. Possibilities include a "water world" with an atmosphere of hot steam.
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The presence of the atmosphere is a reason for cautious optimism. M dwarfs are the most common types of star, and show high levels of activity; for some set-ups, this activity (in the shape of flares and particle streams) can be expected to blow away nearby planets' atmospheres. GJ 1132b provides a hopeful counterexample of an atmosphere that has endured for billion of years (that is, long enough for us to detect it). Given the great number of M dwarf stars, such atmospheres could mean that the preconditions for life are quite common in the universe.
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Borzak

Borzak

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Any amatuer astronomers here into actual observing? Got someone to put me up a temporary obervatory and have been getting my stuff set up. Got an atlas mount that will hold approximately 40 pounds but I aim for 1/4 of that while taking pics. I have a 102mm refractor that I use when I'm too lazy to use the other scope. My other scope gets the most use, an 8" relector I mount on the GEM atlas mount. It was a cheap chinese reflector and I polished a mirror out of a pyrex blank for it (I don't think you can get pyrex like that anymore) and used the tube to house it. Anything larger and I would have to build a truss tube dob or something which really would not be much fun.

So anyway anyone else? I do astrophotography, or have in the past. Not sure if I will now or not. I have some pretty large obstructions in the way, IE trees) but I have a clear shot for visual observing about 1/2 the sky. I used to do film astrophotography for a long time and it was/is much cheaper than the new CCD cameras but I'm not sure I can find a place to develop slide film anymore, even shipping it.

I like looking a the fain and fuzzies (DSO's deep space objects) more than plants but we'll see.
 
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meStevo

meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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From Spaceweather.com:

INCREDIBLE COMET TAIL: More than 180 million km from Earth, something is happening to Comet PanSTARRS (C/2015 ER61). On April 4th and 5th, the comet brightened more than 6-fold, from magnitude +8.5 to +6.5, suddenly reaching the verge of naked-eye visibility despite its great distance from our planet. Now amateur astronomers are photographing an incredible tail. Gerald Rhemann sends this picture from his private observatory in Farm Tivoli, Namibia:

"The comet's tail is about 2.5 degrees long," says Rhemann.

That means it spans more than 8 million km. For comparison, the entire sun is 1.4 million km wide; you could wrap the comet's tail around the sun's equator twice. Another way of putting it: The distance from Earth to the Moon is only 5% of the length of the gaseous lane behind Comet PanSTARRS.

The comet's outburst is probably caused by a fresh vein of icy material in the comet's nucleus exposing itself to solar radiation. Furiously vaporizing, the comet's core is spewing jets of dust and gas into space--a tail-building process that should intensify as the comet approaches the sun between now and early May.

The comet's closest approach to Earth will be 176 million km (1.18 AU) on April 19th. Even at that distance, the comet might be a beautiful sight in backyard telescopes if current trends continue. Stay tuned!
 
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