Recent content by Solon

Hubble is not so simple. These are perhaps what you imagine Hubble to be, but no telescope with camera attached has ever been tried from orbit. If it were so simple then China, Japan, Russia or India would have their own space telescopes by now. Testbed Paves Way for Amateur Space Telescope...

"Where can I find high resolution photos of distant stars?" Photographs are taken by cameras, but there are no cameras used from outside of Earths atmosphere by any of the instruments examining stars. What you are looking for is images, created by using information from instruments that gather...

"..densely packed free neutrons" I thought free neutrons decayed in 10.3 minutes?

@Drakkith My query was prompted when I read about the new Lunar impact crater, and how these events are detected from Earth, but I wondered why not from space instead? For detecting flashes, then from space a broader spectrum could be detected as there is no atmospheric absorption, providing...

Don't mean to side-track your thread, but I had a question about orbits too, and orbital mechanics just make my head spin. So, I was wondering about a spacecraft to watch the Moon for impact flashes say, and where the best position for that spacecraft would be to observe the Moon more or...

He doesn't? "it's the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions" I think you are putting words in his mouth that don't belong. Astronauts have probably the best vision of anyone, yet from my own experiments, it takes less than 5 seconds after blinding myself...

I was reading an interview on NPR with Cris Hadfield, recently retired Canadian astronaut, who has performed EVAs from both a shuttle and from the ISS. His words seem quite unequivocal, that space is an endless blackness in all directions. Am I to take his words at face value?

Hannes Alfven, 1986 "Double layers in space should be classified as a new type of celestial object." DOUBLE LAYERS AND CIRCUITS IN. ASTROPHYSICS (16 meg pdf) www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:514247/FULLTEXT01.pdf‎

"Meteorites hit the ground at terminal velocity, about 200-400 miles per hour." http://meteorites.wustl.edu/realities.htm I thought that some of the forward velocity the meteorite carried from the meteor entering the atmosphere would have been added to the gravitational acceleration, but...

Now that the large chunk of meteorite has been removed from the Chelyabinsk lake, I'm puzzled as to how it remained intact and also ended up 6 feet or so below the lake bed. I'm getting mixed results from different experts on meteorites as to the terminal velocity on impact with the water...

@Drakkith. I've never seen a colour calibration card used out in orbit, or a white balance reference card. Maybe it's because colour being perceptive they don't bother?. SOLSPEC has 1 nm sampling, but calibration is needed regularly, and I don't see any charts showing how the spectrum changes...

A pink Sun? http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/Tspectrum.html This begs the question then about how we can base the model of distances in the cosmos on the colours of the distant Suns when the colour of our own Sun is stll so contentious?

I have posted the question to the photographer, maybe he can recall those details.

Well that's why I suggested the exact same set-up, same camera and settings, same (overhead) shot, that should be as close a comparison as we can get.

@sophiecentaur Well I'd like to see the difference. The curse of an inquiring mind. Sorry, won't do it again. @cjl That's why the ND filter is needed, it attenuates all wavelengths equally, so should show a true colour.