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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday June 14 2020, @06:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the Life's-the-same-I'm-moving-in-stereo dept.

New Horizons conducts the first interstellar parallax experiment:

More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. "It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before—to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth."

On April 22-23, the spacecraft turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of the "closest" stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, showing just how they appear in different places than we see from Earth. Scientists have long used this "parallax effect"—how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations—to measure distances to stars.

[...] when New Horizons images are paired with pictures of the same stars taken on the same dates by telescopes on Earth, the parallax shift is instantly visible. The combination yields a 3-D view of the stars "floating" in front of their background star fields.

"The New Horizons experiment provides the largest parallax baseline ever made—over 4 billion miles—and is the first demonstration of an easily observable stellar parallax," said Tod Lauer, New Horizons science team member from the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory who coordinated the parallax demonstration.

[...] Download the images (and learn more about creating and posting your own parallax perspectives) at pluto.jhuapl.edu/Learn/Paralla ... /Parallax-Images.php


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:22PM (#1007790)

    That is pretty funny. Let's take our closest star system, Alpha Centauri which is 4.3 light years away, or 271937 AU. Then, as our friend takyon pointed out [soylentnews.org], this spacecraft is 43 AU from us. So, the parallax is 43/271937 = 0.15 mrad! That star moved less than 0.009 degrees (or 30 seconds of arc) as seen by the spacecraft. Remember the amateur astronomy rule of thumb that your pinkie finger held at arm's length is about one degree wide, so our closest star moved less than 1/100th of the width of your pinkie. All the other stars in the sky moved less.

    It is the same damn sky regardless of whether you are talking about you or the spacecraft looking at it. You can only measure it when you align and do image differences. Calling that an "alien" sky is stupid and misleading. It is enough to describe parallax without making it sound like the whole sky looks crazy different.

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