Schierer Space

Thanks to Bill at the Evil Eyebrow for inviting me to participate in his Plutopia! blog carnival. Or if “invite” isn’t really the appropriate word, at least throwing out a blanket invitation and letting me sign on.

So the whole point is that today is the 2nd anniversary of Pluto’s official demotion from the arbitrary astronomical classification “planet”. I’m not going to get into the pseudo-political world of why this is arbitrary or whether it’s particularly significant in any particular way, what I am going to say is:

Pluto is small.

Really freaking small.

Or at least really freaking small relative to anything else that we have come to know and love as a planet. According to NASA, Pluto is 1422 miles (2288 km) in diameter. So although I wouldn’t want to personally walk its entire 4467 mile circumference in one trip, it’s easy to fly that far without leaving this planet. In fact, in my flights to and from Australia, I traveled over three times that far (more if the trans-American legs are included). Granted, Oz is pretty far away in Earth terms, but can we really respect an astronomical body that can be circumnavigated in half a day by a commercial airliner? Mercury is now the smallest planet with a circumference of over 9500 miles (15000 km). Check out this graphical planet size comparison widget.

It’s not just that Pluto is smaller than our Moon, but because it’s 8 bajillion* miles (13 bajillion** km) away it’s absolutely ridiculously hard to see. In preparation for this post, I decided to pull up my handy free home planetarium software, HNSKY, and see if Pluto is actually visible. Not that I expected to walk outside, point to the sky and say “there’s Pluto”, but I thought there might be some remote possibility that I could capture it in a picture. It IS technically in the sky right now, not far from Jupiter in the sky (about 15 degrees to the right at the time of publication: 00:01 EDT). The problem is that (according to the software) Pluto is about magnitude 13.9. Do you have any sense for how many objects in the sky are brighter than that? No? Take a look at the picture below. It is the area around Jupiter and Pluto that you might see with the naked eye on a clear summer night with stars to magnitude 6 shown. Pluto should not be visible, but is marked with a small green dot and two lines.

One could reasonably argue that this is a better sky than most people will ever see, but it doesn’t matter, because THIS is what the sky would look like if you could see everything up to and including Pluto.

Obviously, you can see that the software has sort-of broken down for this many stars… and in fact, seems to only be displaying stars up to 11th magnitude. Click on the picture to see a larger rendering of this same piece of sky. My point is that even if you COULD see Pluto, you probably WOULDN’T see Pluto because it would be lost in the jumble of the other million objects in the sky which are brighter than it is. Which of course means that even if I could point my camera at the right piece of sky, AND get a few hundred thousand photons*** to travel from the Sun AND bounce off Pluto AND end up in my lens it would take a significant effort to determine which one of the non-black pixel dots contained Plutonian photons.
For reference, the two dimmest planets are Uranus and Neptune at approximate visual magnitudes of 5.7 and 7.8 respectively. So even though Uranus is within the range of human perception it wasn’t documented as discovered until 1781 AD. It was simply another dot lost in the background noise, and moved too slowly to appear to be changing in the sky.

So Pluto, we salute thee, even though you’re small and dim and probably deserved to not quite rank with the eight remaining Solar planets. The good news is that you seem to have plenty of siblings in this new realm of astronomical bodies.

Check out the rest of the Plutopia blog fest at the Evil Eyebrow.

As usual Spaceflight Now has the scoop on the 3rd Falcon mishap. The summary is that the first stage impacted the second stage after separation. The theory as I understand it is that the Merlin1C on the 1st stage was still burning, propelling the 1st stage into the second stage after separation.

The Falcon 1 launched a few minutes ago, but had “an anomaly” according to the webcast announcer just over two minutes into the flight. This would have been just before 1st stage burnout. A slight oscillation (0.5-1 Hz) was observable in the web feed just before the video was cut off.

There will probably be an announcement tomorrow.

Update 12:40AM: Spaceflight Now has been updating their site with addition ‘details’. Nothing informative yet. The link is to their page for the 3rd Falcon mission, so it will probably get updates as they come in.

As reported by Bad Astronomer (and many others), SpaceX is making their third launch of the Falcon 1 system today. In about an hour, actually, if no further delays occur.

A live webcast is available. Watch now!

I’ll link to the post-launch videos when they become available… but that would of course have to be… right… post-launch.

A beautiful warm evening here in Caz found me outside with the camera. A few shots for your pleasure:
The crescent moon plays tag with The Seven Sisters (The Pleiades, M45).

Fun with Orion.
200mm (cropped)

I really have to get busy with that tracker mount so I can up my exposures without blurring so much.

50mm (uncropped)

The Beehive (M44) 50mm, although this is a bit out of focus, it still makes for a pretty wide-angle picture.

Although we’re a bit spoiled by the 17P/Holmes outburst, 8P/Tuttle is an attractive comet with an apparent green glow. Not quite naked-eye observable, but binoculars can spot it.

I knew about where it was from the sky charts and HNSKY, so I aimed the camera at 70mm and found the green dot in the image. I zoomed in and shot the image below. 1600 ISO for 8 seconds is about as far as I can push this image. Still, the green hue is obvious in the image without enhancement.

I need to get to work on that barn-door tracker. I particularly like this approach with the bent threaded rod.

Many of you probably heard about this already, but Mars and the full Moon passed beautifully close last night (at least from our perspective). I took the following picture which is not quite what I hoped, but then it’s rather hard to get a good exposure on the moon and still see Mars… even at its brightest. In the northwest US and Canada, the moon actually occulted Mars.

Well technically it is a UFO, at the moment, by I don’t mean to imply it is alien in origin. After getting home this evening, I walked out in the driveway to look at the stars. It’s the first clear night in a while, and I’m prone to doing this sort-of thing. Anyhow, I looked up and saw this:

“How could a comet that obvious not already be reported?” I was thinking. I monitor all sorts of sites for things like this. Anyhow, I snagged the camera and snapped some quick shots. I’ve learned that sometimes things are best captured quickly and analyzed later!

Eventually I got out my telescope and could clearly see an object moving with the cloud but slightly separated. You can see this object as a track in the images due to the long exposure. Zooming in, multiple objects can be seen. I spotted two for sure, but I swear I saw flashes in the vicinity both naked eye and with the telescope. I’m guessing either a staging event (Geo insertion possibly), a fuel dump, or possibly a collision or break-up event.

I’ve cross posted to SpaceWeather.com for help identifying this apparition.

Update: I’m featured on the front page of SpaceWeather again! The quote and attributions are horribly scrambled, but that is my image (as you can see above). Correct quote below…

I spotted this naked eye object and wondered how such a bright comet could have been missed! Further observing (including these images) shows that this object is moving somewhat rapidly relative to the background stars. The plume was triangular (like a classic comet tail) to the naked eye. The motion has widened it. Two object trails are also visible. Perhaps a satellite explosion or staging event? The motion was basically eastward. With some time I could locate the star field to give somewhat accurate coordinates, but I wanted to get the picture up.

Update 2: SpaceWeather has identified this as:

…fuel dumped from the upper stage of an Atlas rocket that launched a classified satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office earlier this evening. It was a splendid display, now faded away.

Update 3: SpaceWeather has the quotes pretty much repaired now. Kudos to the webmaster for multiple quick response! More images in our Spacecraft Gallery.

This image certainly doesn’t do it justice, with the fog and waxing 3/4 moon last night, but it is fading as the debris field spreads.

This image is considerably more processed than the others I’ve posted because of the relatively high level of moon-glow in the background. I stretched the contrast (the brightness ‘curves’ for the imaging folks) pretty significantly to keep the background dark while enhancing the comet itself.

The bright star is Mirfak, alpha Persei, at magnitude 1.82. Monday night, when it was cloudy here, the comet was actually visually overlaid onto the star. I’m sort-of curious whether anybody did any spectral analysis of the cometary debris with such a nice bright spectral source shining through the field.

Well actually, the visible debris field is much larger than Jupiter, but this image shows that it is visually as large as the moon. The full moon subtends almost exactly 1/2 degree of the sky. The inner orange circle (overlay from HNSKY*) is also 0.5 degrees.

How cool is that? From a little speck of space debris to a cloud of debris that’s this huge in about 2 weeks.

Excuse the wiggles in the long exposure (seen on the brighter stars), my setup was a bit weak tonight because all of the neighbors had their porch lights on. I was forced into a pretty non-optimal location for placing the tripod. The jiggle is probably mostly due to the shutter opening and closing causing the camera to move. This is a 10 second exposure at f/2.8, 200mm, 1600 ISO.