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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 FunkyLich on Sunday June 14 2020, @09:51AM
I will actually try this in Celestia. Finding out some details where New Horizons is, 'traveling' there and then traveling back to Earth, should show that 'floating in space' effect.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday June 14 2020, @10:06AM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday June 14 2020, @11:09AM
The FITS ones? I looked on Firefox on my mobile, it didn't even recognise it as an image.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:26PM
Try opening the .fit files in GIMP. It will open several windows at once. I'm not sure yet how to interpret the images.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:29PM
I don't have anything that handles FIT either. I was able to open the PNGs. They looked black at first too, but when I used a gamma slider I could see stars.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(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.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Sunday June 14 2020, @07:09PM
Another option that I should have mentioned, but I don't have first-hand experience in using it, is the Astropy [astropy.org] package for Python. It would certainly have the tools needed to handle these files, and make use of the FITS metadata (assuming it is included in the file).
My tool of choice is R, so I'm going to be playing with the imagery with one of the FITS reader packages there.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 14 2020, @10:08AM (1 child)
It's nice to see that this spacecraft is continuing to do work. Maybe it can be aimed at another object after the current download is done in September 2020.
Follow-ups to New Horizons should use laser communication. The data storage and radio bandwidth are limiting factors. If it could transmit at 100 Kbps instead of 1 Kbps at its current distance, it would be able to take a lot more star field imagery in between rocks. It might even be capable of finding new KBOs, or the crazier achievement of finding a new KBO and traveling to it.
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:01PM
Do a back of the envelope calculation on the link budget for laser communications that far out and you'll see it is not feasible. Take a NIF-like laser in terms of power, pick a length of time your 1 bit is broadcast, assume ~3 mrad divergence going out, and see how many photons intercepts something that far out. Then, to make matters worse, do the reverse using larger than reasonable sized lasers on the spacecraft side (ignore the power budget for now, that would kill your idea before you got started). Calculate the number of photons that intercept Earth, then try to figure out how you can capture those photons, because you can't scale apertures like you can do in the RF regime. You can probably close your optical link if you slow your data transmission down to ridiculously slow data rates, but then you might as well go back to RF.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 14 2020, @01:27PM (2 children)
To get meaningful distance denominations in the solar system, the measurement unit of choice is the astronomical unit. So how many astronomical units are 4 billion miles?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:06PM (1 child)
4 billion miles = ~43.03 AU
It seems to be close to the edge of the Kuiper belt [wikipedia.org] already, unless there are more objects out there than is apparent.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:03PM
Holy cow, that's 3.78E12 smoots!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:22PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:54PM
hey-yeyh-yey... shouldn't that read "new horizon IS the first stellar parallax experiment"?
i mean my htc vive headset is doing this everytime i put it on.
just imagine a ginormous htc vive headset, with the left monitor showing view from earth and the other, right one showing view from where "new horizon" is ... the stars that are close to our gigantonourmous headset will appear hovering 3d from the flat-plane-stars which are sooooo far away that they appear as flat background.
if you can see the "3d pixel mess" pictures, you can try this with pencil and paper:
draw a square A (2x2cm) and the same square again to the right as square B.
disstance from middle of each square should not exceed the distance of your pupiles (else you will need the "cross-eye technic, which i feel is painful, whilst the parallel "stare off into distance" technic is relaxing).
next draw a dot in the middle of square A and another dot in square B but slightly off from center (left or right, but not up or down).
now apply the "parallel stare" so that the left eye sees square A and right eye sees square B (they overlap to one square).
once you get your brain to "parallel focus", you will notice that the square seem to be located on the plane whilst the dot hovers above or below the plain of the square.
here to practice "the stare": https://stereogramsworld.wordpress.com/tag/cool-stereograms/ [wordpress.com]