Oh wow - so your livelihood partially depends on how well decaying radioactive isotopes packaged in the 1970’s allow a spacecraft designed with slide rules, to run its remaining instruments on the edges of interstellar space? :)
Nope :). All my dissertation work was done from small instruments on the ground. As to my livelihood, I teach for a living, so I’m mercifully not dependent on the grant writing cycle or the vagueries of spacecraft tech. I still dabble on the research end of things, but I like not having that “publish or perish” pressure hanging over me.
Seems like the time stamp on the nav camera skipped a frame and the the calibration info it was feeding to the gyroscope system acquired some lag, which confused it. Fixed now according to Scott Manley. Yay :)
Speaking of which, the kind of observing I was doing would be much, much more difficult now:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210601.html
Yup, that’s how astronomy’s done - you need all the light you can get so you take long exposures and add them up… I had over 250 5 minute exposures for one project I was doing. Every picture you’ve ever seen of a nebula was made with long exposures and usually by stacking a lot of them. These aren’t stars or planets, even the bright ones are pretty faint.
Those streaks don’t have to be visible to make the data useless, shooting to highlight them makes it clear to the naked eye what the problem is. The killer line in that APOD descrption is this one:
Planned future satellite arrays that function in higher orbits may impact investigations of the deep universe planned for large ground-based telescopes at any time during the night.
NASA plans to ship the telescope to the launch site by boat late this summer. (NASA is keeping precise plans vague due to concerns about piracy at sea. Seriously.) The space agency’s chief of science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said Tuesday that “we don’t have a lot of reserve” left in the schedule to prepare for shipment. However, he added that NASA and Webb’s primary contractor, Northrop Grumman, are close to folding up the telescope and putting it into a shipping container. He said that this should happen toward the “end of August.”
It’s a $10 billion telescope funded by the US government. It’s not a shipment of Nikes from China. You’d think they’d task an Arleigh Burke to escort the damn thing.
RichVR
4441
Why not a C-5M Super Galaxy? That sucker can carry anything.
Sounds like a job for agapepilot!
If you don’t mind my asking, what are you looking at these days and with what equipment?
context: I’m very, very amateur, but enjoy the occasional observing session and even more amateur astrophoto shoot. Love any excuse to chat about it.
Absolutely nothing, I’m afraid. As I mentioned upthread, I teach for a living. I’d love to get a small viewing club going at my school and pick up some instrumentation, but unfortunately don’t have any of my own right now (our current housing situation simply doesn’t allow for it and attempts to move are being prevented by the housing market having gone batshit crazy).
Aaaanyway, I did a lot of my research work on one of these:
which is pricey by civilian standards but dirt cheap by research grant ones. It’s a fantastic little scope. Pair it with a decent CCD and you get some absolutely fantastic imagery. Add in a custom built spectrometer and you’ve got the makings of a 230 page magnum opus that probably no one will ever read. :)
My field of study was diffuse emission nebulae so I spent lots of time observing targets like the North American Nebula, the extended parts of Orion (Trapezium is just too damn bright), the Rosette, and the Coccoon. Wide field, long exposure imaging and lots of in-group custom built software to process it, basically.
Matt_W
4445
One other unmentioned tidbit about that photo is that all the satellite trails in it are from geosynchronous satellites, and not from Starlink or any other near-earth objects. Not saying Starlink isn’t a travesty, but you could’ve put that photo together 20 years ago.
Fair, I’ll confess that I flat-out missed that when I read it this morning. Never post before having coffee is the lesson here.
Higher orbit stuff is going to be the next problem, though - it’s not like these satellite “constellations” are going to stop with LEO. When you’re dumping that much crap into the sky things are going to get crowded fast.
I’m not really familiar with Axiom space but this sounds interesting.
Oh, man. That Tak is a sexy, sexy beast. Not too heavy, either. Now I’m going to have to resist the urge to splurge… What mount were you using? Paramount, AP900 or something else along those lines?
I’d love to do more observing, both visual and imaging, of the faint fuzzies, but being in the middle of silicon valley means lots of light pollution, so that’s extra challenging.
Uh, not exactly. It was a Paramount, something along the lines of this though I don’t recall the exact model off the top of my head:
That would probably not be in any sane person’s price range - it was purchased with other uses in mind (and these days is hosting a considerably heftier instrument. That poor Tak looked so tiny on it, but it was a rock-solid tracking platform that allowed for very stable long exposures.
If you’re in a splurging mood you could always try and get some narrow band filters. I had an H-alpha filter that cut straight through city light pollution AND a full moon and still got me nice clean data. But, again, pricey. As an alternative they do sell light pollution filters that should, at least, drastically reduce the impact. Most light pollution if from a few specific spectral lines (mostly sodium and mercury from street lights) so it’s not super hard to filter out.
Very nice! An astro club I was in back in Arizona a decade or so ago had a Paramount set up on a permanent pier. It was amazing.
Great suggestions on the filters. I need to dig into that. San Jose uses yellow LED street lights, which are better than the old school variety. I bet if I emailed the folks at the Lick they’d be able to tell me what the emission lines are for those lights… Hmmmm…
I have absolutely no doubt that the Lick Observatory knows exactly what the spectrum of those lights are, more than likely off the top of their heads.
It’s true, with LED’s being more prolific this is all getting a wee bit more complicated.
JoshL
4452
That can’t be right, can it? Geosynchronous satellites don’t streak across the sky (if they are in non-equatorial orbits they’ll go north-south, maybe that’s what’s happening?)
Oh, nvm, I think I got it. The nebula is moving across the sky, and the long-exposure cameras are moving to track it, and so the satellites are moving relative to the nebula (in the sky) so cross the image.
Still, the image description says “with some images taken to highlight the background Orion Nebula, while others to feature the passing satellites.” so the satellites and the nebula ren’t even really in the same image so who knows.
