The Astronomy Thread
- Thread starter Araxen
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
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meStevo
I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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We may finally know why Betelgeuse dimmed so much. Bonus: No supernova. Yet.
Beteleguse faded rapidly in 2019/2020, and astronomers think it was a combo of temperature drop and dust production.
Because it's such a showy star, and easily observable all over the planet — not to mention a popular movie based on the name, as well as the small fact that one day (though not any time soon) Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova and be way brighter than Venus in our sky — people took notice. Especially astronomers, of course, who came up with a lot of ideas for why the star faded so rapidly. Starspots, gas and dust clouds, a temperature drop, and other hypotheses were put forward with varying degrees of success, but a paper just published combines two of them to explain the weird behavior: The star ejected a cloud of gas, and then a temperature drop caused dust to condense in the cloud, blocking the star's surface from our view.
This conclusion is based on a series of jaw-dropping images taken of Betelgeuse using the SPHERE and GRAVITY cameras hooked up to the monster 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope in Chile. These cameras can be used to produce images with phenomenal resolution, enough to actually see the shape of the star! Usually stars are too small and far way to resolve their surfaces, but Betelgeuse is both close (something like 530 light years away) and enormous (a billion kilometers across), making it possible to map its surface in detail.
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BrotherWu
MAGA
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Hey guys. I want to get a starter telescope for looking at shit with the kids. I'm thinking it would be cool to get something that finds the shit for you.
Below is the one I am looking at. Anyone with experience with this family? I don't know what to look for and what to avoid but spending $100 for one of the "top sellers" on Amazon seems like a poor choice. It is currently $411 on Amazon.
www.celestron.com
Below is the one I am looking at. Anyone with experience with this family? I don't know what to look for and what to avoid but spending $100 for one of the "top sellers" on Amazon seems like a poor choice. It is currently $411 on Amazon.
NexStar 130SLT Computerized Telescope | Celestron
www.celestron.com
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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I wouldn't go with that for a first telescope for two reasons;Hey guys. I want to get a starter telescope for looking at shit with the kids. I'm thinking it would be cool to get something that finds the shit for you.
Below is the one I am looking at. Anyone with experience with this family? I don't know what to look for and what to avoid but spending $100 for one of the "top sellers" on Amazon seems like a poor choice. It is currently $411 on Amazon.
NexStar 130SLT Computerized Telescope | Celestron
1) Realistically with what you can see with something that size it's very easy to find with your eyes or a cheap pair of binoculars. With an azimuth mount it's pretty easy to get the hang of pointing a telescope.
2) A lot of money to drop on something that your kids may have little interest in and only use a few times.
Imo I'd go with something like this;
Amazon product ASIN B0000Y8C2Y
It's what I have and from all the reading I did it's as good as it gets for a beginner scope until you start stopping serious cash on a larger mirror and quality eye pieces to go with it. I'd also pick up a collimeter for easy aligning and maybe a phone mount to take a few pictures.
You can probably find that for cheaper,I just used the Amazon page to show you it.
BrotherWu
MAGA
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Hmm you running ublock origin? By default it blocks Amazon embeds.
PowerSeeker 114EQ Telescope | Celestron
www.celestron.com
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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Maybe I just don't get it but I don't understand what the draw of telescopes as a hobby is. It's pretty fun to see Saturn's rings or Jupiter's moons, but after that you're pretty much done. Stars through a telescope just look like...stars.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Which is why I recommended not spending $500. To start seeing various galaxies and such youre really gonna need to spend ALOT of money and make time to get somewhere pretty dark.
I take mine out a few times a year. Theres just something about seeing the light straight from Jupiter or Saturn.
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100km to 320km...minor planet sized comet. Pretty cool.
phys.org
Space object with orbit stretching into the Oort cloud discovered
Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein discovered a space object recently that has an orbit around the sun and also stretches into the Oort cloud—they have named it 2014 UN271. The researchers made the discovery while studying archival images collected for the Dark Energy Survey over...
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Burns
Avatar of War Slayer
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100km to 320km...minor planet sized comet. Pretty cool.
Space object with orbit stretching into the Oort cloud discovered
Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein discovered a space object recently that has an orbit around the sun and also stretches into the Oort cloud—they have named it 2014 UN271. The researchers made the discovery while studying archival images collected for the Dark Energy Survey over...
One trip around the sun has been calculated to take 612,190 years.
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Note that we probably can only detect it because it's on the near side of it's orbit. Like probably 99% of the time it would be too far to be detected. It's not the only large asteroid like object that is like this - it strongly suggests that there are HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of such objects out there, most too far to see.
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spronk
FPS noob
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Black hole devouring neutron star sends gravitational 'scream' all the way to Earth
The black hole-neutron star collision provides a glimpse into how cataclysmic cosmic explosions impact the expansion and shrinking of space-time.
www.nbcnews.com
its like mass effect
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