In order to take the long exposures necessary an equatorial mount is necessary. As an object moves through the sky the field in an alt-az telescope rotates. Thus, you would have to take short enough exposures to ensure that the rotation doesn't smear the images and then rotate them as you stack them. Also, tracking is a bit more complicated since you have to drive on two axes.
The large alt-az telescopes like Magellan, Gemini, and Keck get around the field rotation problem by having the instruments on a rotator to take out the field rotation.
That was months ago.
Also, it takes a decent scope to see detail on saturn, such as a C5. A department store scope would never be able to.
While you might not see color bands, even a cheap telescope will let you see the rings. Heck, Galileo could sort of see the rings and he had optics much worse than a department store telescope!
Just a minor correction. the scientists did use interferometry but it was not "very long baseline interferometry". The "very long" term applies to the telescopes being separated by extreme distances, say over the entire United States as is the case of the VLBA. Also, the VLBA can only function in radio wavelengths because the data can be taken at the individual telescopes an recombined later. With near-infrared interferometry, what the authors of this study were using, requires that the light from each telescope be sent down an optical tube with mirrors and recombined at a central location which constrains the IOTA telescopes to be close together.
IOTA was dismantled a few years ago, geiven that a new optical/near-infrared interferometry was coming online, CHARA http://www.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/
Everyone seems to be aware of the historic Mount Wilson observatory, but there is also the CHARA array on Mount Wilson. It has 6 ~1m telescopes that are linked together as an interferometer studying evolved stars, binaries, and young stars in the near-infrared at extremely high resolution. A colleague of mine just shipped an instrument to the observatory that was been under construction for the past 3 years. So it's not just history and communications towers, it's also a cutting edge scientific facility. I hope it survives, it would be shame if his new instrument was lost as well as the lost research potential for his Ph.D. students.
While it is possible, it would probably be extremely unlikely. The odds are pretty slim for a planet to be stripped from one star and then captured again by another star. Space is just too damn empty, on average there is only 1 star per cubic parsec and the orbit of earth is 1/206625 pc.
Interactions with other giant planets in the system are probably the most likely explanation as they talk about in the article. Three-body interactions can have pretty crazy outcomes, astrophysically and for life in general
That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. It's a completely invalid comparison. The planet was already known to have a transiting exoplanet so it's not like it was dumb luck. As someone pointed out this verifies that everything on the spacecraft is working properly. To date, lots of transiting exoplanets have been found and it's not luck, it's statistics that tell us there will be more.
The best theoretical resolution at 100 microns will be 7.2 arcseconds, limited by the size of the main mirror. Hubble can do 0.05 arcseconds at 0.5 microns (visible light). This may not seem all that impressive, but it about 4 times better than previous far-infrared observatories. And the instruments on-board are significantly more advanced than anything ever used for far-infrared astronomy.
Yes, they were taken with one of the main instruments, PACS. PACS has been switched on since shortly after launch. Yes, the cover was only just opened, but this was one of the objects they viewed shortly after the cover was opened. M51 was chosen because they could directly compare it with Spitzer Space telescope images taken at similar wavelengths.
Considering that this image was taken while the main mirrors were still quite warm and not down to operating temperatures, this observatory is going to do great things once fully operational.
Sounds nice but it would not work for a few reason.
1. The orbits are very different, Hubble is higher and at a different inclination.
2. The sharp images need excellent stability of the spacecraft. Hubble's resolution of 0.1" is the equivalent to spotting a dime 40 miles away. Astronauts and all the equipment running on the ISS would cause lots ot stability problems for sharp imaging.
The problem with this idea is that you will have to send people to put it together. And you still need to launch all the pieces.
So you'll have combined cost launching the pieces and people. Whereas building it on earth, you have all the engineers to put it together and then put it up all in one shot.
Until there is a manufacturing base out in space which probably will not happen for a long long long time, you still have to design and test everything on the ground. This is because you can't afford to launch a faultly part, this is true if you are sending the whole thing up or putting it up in pieces.
You have the basics right. But it gets complicated because anything in the light path between the star light going into the telescope until it hits the detector is going to contribute to the point spread function, or point response function. Which is basically the diffraction pattern made by a point source on the focal plane. Hubble's PSF can be a bit more complex because of the corrective optics in each instrument.
You are right that we could do this 10 years ago, but we probably have a much better model for the point spread function now than we did then.
Well, it was observed with multiple telescopes, so it's not an artifact. The full paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf
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