Comment Set of observations by people in Europe (Score 3, Informative) 33
The following webpage contains a set of light curves and videos from astronomers in Europe who succeeded in measuring the brief dimming of Betelgeuse last night:
The following webpage contains a set of light curves and videos from astronomers in Europe who succeeded in measuring the brief dimming of Betelgeuse last night:
> I would bet money that I am the only person present
> who ever got paid for programming in APL.
I'll take that bet. I made a bit of spending money in college by acting as a computer labbie in a room full of IBM 3270 terminals running APL. I wouldn't call my past self an expert, but I could help the occasional student working on a course assignment.
Whoever wrote the summary should be fired.
For those who did not read the paper: the paper starts with a model of the stellar population of the Milky Way, and a model for stellar evolution, and predicts the positions of stellar remnants (black holes and neutron stars). It is not a catalog of actual black holes and neutron stars observed by astronomers.
Actually, this joke was first made by a BRITISH (well, sort of) astronomy at Maynooth University in Ireland. He posted it, and then the French astronomer stole the joke and re-posted it the next day without attribution.
See
For those who want to read the original paper, go to
Correction: any Earth-sized planet in another stellar system will most certainly NOT subtend "several pixels"; instead, any such planets will be point sources. In brief, diameter of Earth is around 10^7 m, while the nearest star is of order 10^(16) m away from us. The angular size of the Earth at such a distance would thus be 10^(-9) radians, which corresponds to 0.0002 arcseconds.
In comparison, the diffraction limit of JWST at a wavelength of 2 microns is roughly (2 x 10^(-6) m)/ (6.5 m) = 3 x 10^(-7) radians. That's more an an order of magnitude larger than the angular size of the Earth at the distance to the nearest star; for the great majority of stars -- which are much more distant -- the difference is even larger.
tl;dr JWST will measure Earth-like exoplanets as point sources.
The Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) on JWST has a channel which can take images at wavelengths as short as 600 nm = 0.6 microns. That's within the range of human vision, contrary to your statement.
Moreover, since JWST has an aperture roughly 2.5 times as large as that of HST, the images it takes at 600 nm will be sharper than those taken by HST. It's true that the plate scale NIRCam will prevent it from fully sampling this higher resolution, but the images taken by JWST at this wavelength will certainly rival those of HST, and perhaps exceed them in some cases.
In part, as described by the other commenter, because the number of characters needed to type to carry out a simple task is often smaller for awk than for perl. But mostly because I started using awk before Perl existed
Thanks, Mr. Aho. Awk has saved my bacon many, many times. I still use it several times a week.
Taken from the Planetary Society's website:
Planetary Society members and supporters funded the world's first Mars microphone on NASA's Mars Polar Lander, which launched in 1999. It was the first citizen-funded science experiment to fly to another world. Sadly, the spacecraft crashed on Mars later that year. We were scheduled to refly the microphone experiment on a French Mars mission called Netlander that was ultimately canceled in 2004. NASA's Mars Phoenix lander had a microphone aboard, but it had to be turned off before launch due to last-minute technical difficulties.
Read more at https://www.planetary.org/sci-...
I agree that the SDSS is fucking awesome -- I was a post-doc working on the project for five years in the 1990s. Thanks for the kind words!
However, the telescope is located at Apache Point, New Mexico, not in California.
A number of professional and amateur astronomers have followed this object over the past few days. The short movie below was made by Nick James with an 11-inch telescope.
http://www.nickdjames.com/spac...
Note the changing brightness as the object rotates with a period of around 9 seconds.
Exactly right. Take a look at this accepted proposal for using SOFIA -- this is almost certainly the project that has generated this press release.
Proposal ID: 08_0132
Principal Investigator: Paul Lucey
Title: Water abundance on the Moon from 6 micron observations
Abstract: Spacecraft observations of the Moon showed a hydrogen-bearing species caused an unexpected 3 μm absorption. However, existing data at 3 μm cannot resolve the chemical form of this hydrogen, whether molecular water (H2O) or the hydroxyl radical (OH-) attached to a metal cation. The chemical form of the 3 μm absorber provides information on solar wind interaction with the lunar surface, and whether the hydrogen- bearing compound is mobile and can form and sustain known ice deposits at the lunar poles. Low resolution spectroscopy at 6 μm is uniquely sensitive to the presence of molecular water in a spectral region both inaccessible from the ground and lacking in existing and planned spacecraft observations. The project will produce 6 μm spectra of the Moon as a function of local time, location and temperature for use by the wider planetary astronomy and lunar science community.
The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it. -- Allan Sherman
