JCC The All-New, All-Different JCC Astronomy Thread

Interesting to note about this pic, one side is brighter than the other because it is spinning.

Might have to buy some binoculars

Keep an eye on the sky. There’s quite a show in store as Jupiter and Earth will reach their closest point later this month.

Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, will appear bright to the naked eye in the night sky, even in cities. With nothing more than a pair of binoculars, you’ll be able to see several of its moons.

 

Prepare to be blown away
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw...hats-it-like-when-you-fall-into-a-black-hole/

 

I use this website when I look at Jupiter though my binoculars or telescope.
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/jupiter_moons/jupiter.html

Has anyone here seen the starlink satellites? I want to see them but it keeps being cloudy when they go over.


Could our night sky really look like this one day???

 

That is certainly a valid concern in the stargazing/astronomy community

 

Good luck India

 

And this will be one of the coolest things you'll see today

 

Jupiter got hit

Happily the Great red Spot is visible for a sense of scale. It is a bit over 10,000 miles wide, the Earth is 7,926 miles wide.

 

Jupiter impacts by 1+ km comets takes place every 500-1000 yr, and an Earth impact every 2–4 Myr. Hopefully Juno can give us a front seat view.

 

https://www.space.com/china-far-side-moon-rover-strange-substance.html

 

Looking for lurkers

Small smart probes. I'll keep an eye out for a recording of the lecture.

 

First extrasolar planetary atmosphere with water present found

 

Yeah bit of a wide margin, .01% to 50%. But still water vapor. This world is 7.6 Earth masses.

 

Looks like we have another interstellar visitor

This one is a comet, we are seeing it as it comes in instead of going out. It will come as close as 1.8 AU to the Sun. It's closest approach will be this December.

 

NASA chief Jim Bridenstine still insists Pluto is a planet. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...zXRD1NMHosBSybEszD5eYQYU4R9Ht0bIYqe1cJQfKY9VI

@Kenneth Morgan

 

Calculating the time it will take existing spacecraft to get to other stars

The researchers found that the four spacecraft will come somewhat close to approximately 60 stars over the course of the next 1 million years—and will come within two parsecs of approximately 10 of them. They also found that Pioneer 10 will likely be the first to pass by a star system—one called HIP 117795. It sits in the constellation Cassiopeia. Their calculations show that the spacecraft will pass within 0.231 parsecs of the star in approximately 90,000 years. They also found that all four of the spacecraft will travel for a very long time before they collide with or are captured by a star system—on the order of 1020 years.

 

9 gigapixel image of the Milky Way

You can zoom in on the image.

 

30th Anniversary a new look at the pale blue dot

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

 

Just 300 light years away

An Earth sized world in the habitable zone. Like actually Earth-sized at 1.06 Earth's radius.

 

The closest known black hole to Earth

1000 light years away, 4 times the mass of the Sun.

 

I've often heard that it would take 9 months to reach Mars (of course depending on if we timed it right) using current technology.

But I've also heard that for years, maybe decades, so my questions are
1. Is that still true?
2. Is there a chart somewhere showing how long it would take us to get to each of the planets in the solar system, with current technology? And perhaps to Alpha Centauri too?

 

This might help though the column marked Shuttle is wrong since the Shuttle could only reach 17,000 mph(it says as much) and you need 25,000 just to escape Earth. I assume the 28,000 mph figure means something like a manned Apollo style rocket.

However, the SpaceX plan for mars trips involves several launches to orbit for refueling a rocket and that alone will cut Mars trip times in half without going nuclear.

The fastest thing in mind is a laser pushed sail which could push a probe to Mars in 3 days, or a manned shuttle-sized vehicle in 30 days. I assume that includes speed up and slow down.

 

With current technology we could begin building tomorrow? It'll be a long time before we have the infrastructure for a laser-pushed sail system. And not sure if we could make long journeys, or escape Earth, in a small shuttle-sized vehicle?

I'm just looking for lengths of journey using existing technology to each planet. The table has the shuttle options, but are those other options actually feasible?

 

Galileo was launched from Atlantis. Ion propulsion has been used on a number of probes, and there was a hell of a cool solar sail, but of course those are probes and such.

As far as a manned mission to Mars the only thing being built is Musk's Starship, 3 month transit as I said. Perhaps Bigelow counts, as one module is attached to the ISS and he has a couple in orbit, and he had a deal with Boeing to launch another.

 

The interesting thing about this is illustrating that the ISS is moving very quickly which perhaps many do not realize given that we usually see it as if it is sitting there suspended.