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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
(Score: 2) by hubie on Sunday June 14 2020, @06:30PM
You should download Fiji [fiji.sc], which is an ImageJ [imagej.net] distribution (Fiji == Fiji Is Just ImageJ). It is written in Java and it runs everywhere. I run it often on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
ImageJ [nih.gov] is software out of the National Institutes of Health that was written to open and process the images you get in the medical field (microscope pictures, MRIs, etc.). People would write plugins and addons for it, and it got to the point where once you'd download ImageJ, you'd go out and find and download all the useful plugins. Somebody had enough of doing that and put together Fiji, which is basically ImageJ with all of the really useful plugins included.
Included in Fiji is the "bioformats" plugin that handles all sorts of image formats, FITS being one of them.
For a very quick tutorial, open one of the FITS images and hit CTRL-Shift-C and it will bring up the contrast display, if you grab the maximum bar and slide it way down, the stars pop right out.