Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
So what is it we are really looking at when detailed pictures are posted of distant stars and nebula from Hubble? Are they just artificial reconstructions of the spectral data into what it would look like were we close enough to view it?
It is not even what they think we would see were we closer, as what they are showing us is all in wavelengths we could not see with our eyes at any distance.
nick c
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
hi Lloyd,
Nick, this webpage http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 6060224122 says, "If you consider [the Hubble telescope] as a camera, its main camera is 16 megapixels at about 540 times normal magnification." * Do you have reason to doubt that its magnification is not 540x? * If it its magnification is 540x, it can see 540 times as far as the naked eye. Right?
No, magnification is the amount of times the image is larger than what would be seen by the naked eye. I have looked through telescopes at close to that magnification, but those telescopes could not see anywhere near as far as the Hubble. Even if you used 100X magnification on the Hubble, it would still see much further than a 12 inch telescope at 400X. There are three powers to a telescope: 1. Magnification 2. Resolving 3. Light Gathering
That is because the most important power of a telescope is Light Gathering Power, which is what yielded that number that I gave in my post. Light gathering power is determined by the area of the objective lens or mirror. That is why astronomers have, since Galileo, been forever equiping their observatories with larger and then even larger objective lenses or mirrors.
Nick
Orthogonal
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
GaryN wrote:
So what is it we are really looking at when detailed pictures are posted of distant stars and nebula from Hubble? Are they just artificial reconstructions of the spectral data into what it would look like were we close enough to view it?
It is not even what they think we would see were we closer, as what they are showing us is all in wavelengths we could not see with our eyes at any distance.
That's not what I meant. I understand that numerous observatories scan the sky in wavelengths across the EM spectrum. My question revolves around pictures that are labeled "Visible". Like in this recent TPOD.
Is this not the visible spectrum as in 390nm to 750nm wavelengths? Isn't this what we would see with our eyes? I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just don't understand what you were originally saying.
fosborn
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
fosborn » Why do Blue stars not show up in the mid-infrared?
GaryN wrote: Because you are not seeing reflected light, you are seeing Hydrogen glowing in the far UV from a charged region above the surface of the planet. The light travels as a quasi-planewave, and is only visible on Earth as the UV reaching us is converted in the atmosphere and gives off light in the visible wavelengths. That is why 'stars' can not be seen from the moon, or in space, by eye or normal camera, but only through H emissions. There was great hope for balloon astronomy, show me photos of the stars even from balloon elevations. http://books.google.ca/books?id=1wkAAAA ... rs&f=false
Then Bahram Katirai's speculation of blue planets, has no way to verify it.
GaryN
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Is this not the visible spectrum as in 390nm to 750nm wavelengths? Isn't this what we would see with our eyes? I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just don't understand what you were originally saying.
Caption from one site showing the image:
This image composite shows two views of a puffy, dying star, or planetary nebula, known as NGC 1514. The view on the left is from a ground-based, visible-light telescope; the view on the right shows the object in infrared light, as seen by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
Visible light from a ground based telescope,OK. Put that same telescope in space, and I bet it will see no stars! I'm probably too biased to be a fair examiner of Katirais proposal, as his model, with the extension to an EU model, would fit very well with my EM Universe model. So far I have seen nothing to make me quit looking into this, and I have been E-Mailing assorted sites with questions to try and reach a definitive answer. The first question of whether stars can be seen from space has received no answers from the big boys. There are no pictures that I can find of stars taken from the Moon, ISS, or any of the Apollo or Gemini missions. There are no images of the stars taken from high altitude balloons. The images from Hubble or Chandra can not convince me that the nearest stars are really stars. There is still a 25 to 50% distance discrepancy mentioned even for objects which are relatively close, so the estimates for the further objects must be taken as pure speculation. Just looking at Formalhaut.
There are many exciting images of different kinds of circumstellar disks. Recently, Hubble reported the "first visible-light snapshot" of an exoplanet around Fomalhaut. The 2m Hubble telescope does not suffer from atmospheric distortion but there is still very significant scattered light obstructing the view of the exoplanet. The image in the press-release used several images at different epoch's to remove some of the scattered light. Even with the most sophisticated scattered light removal techniques, a very large radial scattered light pattern obstructs the view of the circumstellar disk in a single image. Building better telescopes to minimize scattered light will greatly enhance the utility of these telescopes.
Hubble Takes First Visible Light Image of Extrasolar Planet They don't know how far away it is, about 25 LY, they think.
"The gravity of Formalhaut b is the key reason that the vast dust belt surrounding Fomalhaut is cleanly sculpted into a ring and offset from the star," Kalas said. "We predicted this in 2005, and now we have the direct proof."
Ground based image of Formalhaut And in Infrared from Spitzer So, I'll just have to, maybe, believe what they are telling me, even when all the data has probably been processed in ways no non-astronomer can ever hope to understand.
Orthogonal
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Gary N, thanks for the detailed response, that was very helpful. It has given me a lot of information to chew on. I learned something new and am completely astonished if this is true.
Curious, if you cannot see stars from space, what would you see if you tried looking at the Sun while standing on the moon? Surely it would be visible... or not? Perhaps its one of the few things brilliant enough to be visible.
If you hear anything back from your inquiries, please let us know.
Luciditus
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Gary says: ...The first question of whether stars can be seen from space has received no answers from the big boys. There are no pictures that I can find of stars taken from the Moon, ISS, or any of the Apollo or Gemini missions. There are no images of the stars taken from high altitude balloons...
Keep up the good work, Gary & all ! Surely, we can see stars from a high up freaking balloon ! This is unbeleivable ! Freaking people on the ISS should see a lot more stars than we do ? ? ?
flippinrocks
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
I like the way he kept it simple.
How many stars do you see in each of these photo's?
Lloyd
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
* That's an excellent image of a ring galaxy, Flip. It appears to be Hoag's Object. There are other images of ring galaxies at: http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=ri ... 24&bih=381 - They do mostly look like planetary systems around central stars, don't they! A lot of galaxies look like they could be planetary systems, don't they! See: http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en ... =&aql=&oq= * Gary, that's an amazing image of Fomalhaut: http://www.universetoday.com/21025/hubb ... lar-planet - * If that bright dot is a planet, then all of the other nearly bright dots should be planets too. The whole thing looks like iron filings in a strong magnetic field. Here's another view that makes it look like a ring "galaxy": * I'm not convinced that the book Revolution in Astronomy is largely correct. I read a little about debates that were held in the early 1900s and it looks like galaxies may contain many stars, but I'm not convinced that they're large stars. It's possible that they could be small stars the size of Uranus, which isn't a lot bigger than Earth. * Here are some paraphrased statements about galaxies from the book. The main thing that stands out here is the idea that the galactic centers are single Sun-like stars while the outer stars are bluish. And don't the galaxy images tend to show that? Which of these statements seem probable and improbable?
- A method to distinguish a star from a planet is spectrum analysis. - In the mid 1800s Harvard Professor and leading astronomer, Edward Pickering, lettered the stars according to the strength of their hydrogen spectral lines. - He found that all objects in the Milky Way had spectra very different from the sun. - The whitish or bluish objects such as Sirius that have much hydrogen in their spectra are more numerous in the Milky Way. - It appears that no spectrum analyses were ever carried out for the sole purpose of differentiating stars from planets. - Galaxies are planetary systems not over a few thousand light-years distant. - The center of a galaxy is only one star, not millions of them. - Each galaxy has no more than a few hundred planets, rather than billions of stars. - The clouds in a galaxy are just dust and gas, not stars. - The center of the Milky Way galaxy is a single, massive star: our sun. - The diameter of the Milky Way is less than 30 light-days [480 billion miles]. - The greatest distance that the Hubble can detect a great star, such as the sun, is 18,110 light years. - In 1907 the Andromeda galaxy was determined to be only 19 light-years away. - Later, Van Maanen measured the parallax of the Andromeda galaxy at 0.004' ± 0.005" which placed it at 815 light-years away. - This means the Andromeda galaxy is not only nearby, but small. - By mistaking planets for novas and Cepheid stars, astronomy went off course. - In 1924, Edwin Hubble, resolved the spiral arms of the Andromeda Galaxy into many stars and found Cepheid variables and blue supergiants. - But he could not resolve its center into stars, nor has anyone else done so since, though many tried. - Astronomers claim that the small, bluish objects circling galactic centers are stars. - The centers are only a few times larger than the bluish objects, but they should be billions of times larger if they contain millions of stars. - The enlarged image of the nucleus of the galaxy M100 is a yellowish star similar to the sun. - The smaller objects that have blue colors are circling that center. - If we study the true color photographs of all galaxies, we see that each center has a yellow color similar to that of the sun. - Jay Pasachoff writes "Color photographs of galaxies show that the central regions are relatively yellow …, while the arms are relatively blue". - Many astronomers were puzzled to find that the light of the center of a galaxy was much brighter than the rest of the galaxy. - In 1997 Dr. Philippe Crane at ESO said, "Something is lighting up the center of galaxy NGC 6251 and illuminating a surrounding material disk." - Some galaxies harbor in their nucleus objects that emit more energy than all the stars in the rest of the galaxy together. - It has been found that the nuclei of galaxies emit large amounts of infrared energy. - If we examine recent images with excellent resolution, it is easy to count the number of spherical and luminous objects within the galaxies. - In most galaxies there are less than a few thousand such objects. - In the large majority of galaxies, there are less than several dozen. - If the objects circling just beyond the center of the galaxies are hot stars, then they should illuminate the clouds surrounding them, but they don't. - The centers of galaxies are strong sources of infrared and x-rays, while the objects circling the centers are not. - The light of the objects circling the centers of galaxies, like Andromeda, undergoes phases, similar to those of our moon. - In 1899, astronomer Isaac Roberts discovered that the Andromeda galaxy was rotating within a short period of time, proving it is relatively small. - If the galaxy were as huge as claimed, it would take hundreds of millions of years to make one rotation and it would be impossible for the photographs to detect it. - In 1909, astronomer William Huggins announced that the Andromeda nebula was a planetary system, similar to our solar system.
ItJustMakesSense
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
The center of the Milky Way galaxy is a single, massive star: our sun.
I thought that the center of the milky way galaxy was the so called black hole? I'm really liking this thread. It brings order to the universe rather than there being stars, planets, and other celestial objects being randomly placed throughout the universe.
kalensar
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Now for another off the wall post from the new guy.
When reading through this topic I was amazed at how much sense it made. I already stumbled upon Halton Arp's argument on redshift being wrong with the quasar in Stephen's Quintet. I'd say that he was 100% correct as that galaxy was not diffuse like the Einstein Cross and it's accompanying quasar. Trusting our eyes is important is what it boils down to for me.
Using the Absolute Parallax method makes full sense to me since it is nothing but basic geometry and a little trig. That ain't to difficult for the mathematicians in any crowd. It's just too bad that the Big Bangsters are too blinded by the red light.
I once read an article from earthmatrix.com about how Mercury should be used as the standard measurement of AU since it is the first planet in our lineup. The guy who runs earthmatrix.com is a mathematician and apparently openminded on top of it. So I gave him a read and was surprised by his findings in the essay. His findings on the numbers, and I've done this too, was that using Mercury distance as AU revealed a Holographic sequence. Fractals. The line up also put the center of the planetary system at the Asteroid Belt instead of out past Saturn.
So I got to thinking about the areas of redshift distance vs absolute parallax distance, mercury AU showing fractal sequencing and the speed of light in earth time of 365.26 days. What I came up was a conversion for redshift distance to absolute parallax.
squareroot{Redshift( in lightyear) x 0.39 (conversion from earth to mearcury AU) x 365.26} divided by 23.33
This is crackpot wizardry thinking from Discworld at its best but the equation works for the Andromeda Galaxy numbers of 2,540,000 to 815 lightyears. This equation says Sirius is 1.5 lightyears away.
If someone could test this out for comparison to the Absolute Parallax method then it would be one cool achievement.
I Hope you all enjoyed this adventure.
Orthogonal
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
kalensar wrote: I once read an article from earthmatrix.com about how Mercury should be used as the standard measurement of AU since it is the first planet in our lineup. The guy who runs earthmatrix.com is a mathematician and apparently openminded on top of it. So I gave him a read and was surprised by his findings in the essay. His findings on the numbers, and I've done this too, was that using Mercury distance as AU revealed a Holographic sequence. Fractals. The line up also put the center of the planetary system at the Asteroid Belt instead of out past Saturn.
If you can find that article I would like to read it. The way you've explained it doesn't make any sense. A fractal pattern would exist, regardless of the unit of measure. The unit of measure is extrinsic and has no relation to the object being measured.
GaryN
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
I'm trying to figure out just who can see what, at what elevation. The are no images of stars viewed from an aircraft at 35-40,000 ft. I have E-mailed a commercial pilot. SOFIA will be doing high altitude infrared astronomy, no mention of visible, will attempt to contact the team. http://www.ithaca.edu/frequent_flyer/ho ... e_can_see/ Balloon images, none so far, but here is an abstract about daytime sightings from high altitude. Very little is seen. http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract. ... a-49-6-626 From mount Everest, an image of the moon, no stars. Have emailed the climber. Awesome image of the stars from about 11,000 ft. elevation. I'll Email the photographer and see if he will tell me how he took this shot. There is no blurring of the stars, so I though it would be on a tracker, but wouldn't that have made the surface features blurry? Some of those stars just look like you could reach out and touch them! http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091205.html Great fun!
fosborn
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
So I gave him a read and was surprised by his findings in the essay. His findings on the numbers, and I've done this too, was that using Mercury distance as AU revealed a Holographic sequence. Fractals. The line up also put the center of the planetary system at the Asteroid Belt instead of out past Saturn.
