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The Space Thread


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35 minutes ago, Remmie said:

Anyone know anything about telescopes? I want to buy one for my dad's birthday, but don't know shit

I bought one for my brother's 40th a couple of years ago. Pretty sure it was a Celestron. Really good but cost about £300. What sort of budget are you looking at.

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1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Just checked. It was a Celestron NexStar 130 SLT Telescope. At the time Costco were doing it for £299 with the Astromaster accessory kit.

 

Not sure if that’s much help to you.

The telescope I bought was also by Celestron. A good maker and they are listed on amazon and range from £60 to however much you want to pay. May want to start cheap just in case it doesn't get used much but if fancy is tickled look at upgrading. 

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My mate is seriously into all things in space and things in the sky. Seriously into it.

 

Anyway, a few years ago now I was telling him I wanted to get a telescope. He asked me why and what I wanted to look at. I said, erm you know, the planets and stuff. He was looking at me like, 'here we go again, another one'.

 

Anyway, he goes on to explain that your lucky to get 30 good viewing nights a year and then you have to take into account a few different other things. Light pollution, the position your house facesas apparently east is best for viewing but most importantly, times and dates. This mate sometimes stays up till the early hours or gets up at 3:00 am onwards in order to see certain things. 

 

I eventually spent £150 (I think) on a telescope. Sure I posted it in here. It was OK to begin with but the setting up and of the thing was a pain in the fucking arse and storing it while in it's tripod was also a pain. The novelty wore off and it ended up going back in the box and becoming a dust collector. I ended up binning it last year.

 

For anyone thinking of taking the plunge, I'd think about the above. Also unless you've got a at least some knowledge of where to even start looking, I'd consider getting a go to telescope.

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Just being somewhere where it is pitch black with a clear sky and seeing the stars is absolutely majestic and you don't really see that any more unless you live in the sticks. People with kids should make the effort to really take them somewhere they can see the sky at night properly. As a kid it was hypnotic.

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Exoplanet tally set to pass 4,000 mark

 

The number of planets detected around other stars - or exoplanets - is set to hit the 4,000 mark.

 

The huge haul is a sign of the explosion of findings from searches with telescopes on the ground and in space over the last 25 years.

 

It's also an indication of just how common planets are - with most stars in the Milky Way hosting at least one world in orbit around them.

 

That's something astronomers couldn't be certain of just 30 years ago.

 

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, run by the Observatoire de Paris, has already passed the 4,000 mark.

Dr Françoise Roques, from the observatory, who is on the scientific board of the encyclopedia, told BBC News: "The great news is that we shift from a starry sky to a planetary sky, as there are more planets than stars.

"And also that the planetary systems have great diversity of structure, with planets orbiting zero, one, two... stars, or other planets."

 

The Nasa Exoplanet Archive is 74 planets away from the milestone. But there are 443 planet candidates detected by Nasa's Tess space telescope (launched in 2018) awaiting confirmation.

There are a further 2,423 candidates detected by the Kepler space telescope.

 

The latest exoplanet to be added to the Nasa archive was the Super Earth GI 686 b, which orbits a red dwarf star (a type cooler than our Sun) which was discovered using ground telescopes. It was added on 21 March.

The total number of confirmed planets differs between the two catalogues because of slightly different acceptance criteria - along with other factors.

 

The early technique of detecting new worlds by the "wobble" induced by a planet's gravitational tug on its star yielded many giant planets known as "hot Jupiters", which orbited close to their stars. These planet types were easier to detect using the wobble method.

 

Nasa's Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009; it used a different technique known as the transit method to measure the dip in brightness as a planet passed in front of its host star. Kepler discovered hundreds of Neptune-sized planets and those that fell into a category known as Super Earths (those having a mass larger than Earth's but below those of Neptune-sized planets).

 

Dr Roques said it remained a difficult task to distinguish between a type of star known as a brown dwarf and giant planets.

"Four-thousand is just a number as the frontier of the planet domain is uncertain," she said.

"The brown dwarfs have been defined by the [IAU - International Astronomical Union] as small stars, but in fact, some of them are big planets. Our database collects objects until 60 Jupiter masses and contains a mix of the planetary brown dwarfs (formed in a protoplanetary disk around a star) and starry brown dwarfs (formed by collapse of interstellar cloud).

 

"The only way to ensure the difference is to access its internal structure, which is a difficult/ impossible task."

The first exoplanets were found around a pulsar - a highly magnetised neutron star - in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail.

 

The initial discovery of a planet around a main sequence star - those that fuse hydrogen into helium within their cores - was made in 1995 by astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor.

 

Dr Roque explained: "For the field of exoplanet exploration, we [are going] from discovery projects to exploration projects, for a better understanding of the structure, formation, atmosphere and, of course habitability of exoplanets."

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47681239

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On 21/03/2019 at 20:53, Bobby Hundreds said:

Just being somewhere where it is pitch black with a clear sky and seeing the stars is absolutely majestic and you don't really see that any more unless you live in the sticks. People with kids should make the effort to really take them somewhere they can see the sky at night properly. As a kid it was hypnotic.

It still is mate. Pex Hill is great to go up on a clear night. 

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On 21/03/2019 at 20:53, Bobby Hundreds said:

Just being somewhere where it is pitch black with a clear sky and seeing the stars is absolutely majestic and you don't really see that any more unless you live in the sticks. People with kids should make the effort to really take them somewhere they can see the sky at night properly. As a kid it was hypnotic.

Absolutely. We went to the Arctic over new year 2017/18 and one evening found ourselves stood in the middle of a frozen lake, unable to see any sign of humanity (no lights, no sound) and with a completely clear sky. It was genuinely awesome. We spent hours around a small campfire with people we didn't know just looking at the stars and sharing in a sense of complete wonder.

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1 hour ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

Half an hour long but just fucking mind blowing.

 

 

Typical. Now even the black holes are gonna die. Hope they don't start stabbing each other.

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22 hours ago, Karl_b said:

Absolutely. We went to the Arctic over new year 2017/18 and one evening found ourselves stood in the middle of a frozen lake, unable to see any sign of humanity (no lights, no sound) and with a completely clear sky. It was genuinely awesome. We spent hours around a small campfire with people we didn't know just looking at the stars and sharing in a sense of complete wonder.

Where did you go?

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For budding astronomers or sky watchers.

 

https://stfc.ukri.org/news/stargazing-sites-free-from-light-pollution/

 

https://www.darksky.org/dark-sky-places-in-the-uk-and-ireland/

 

https://www.visitscotland.com/see-do/landscapes-nature/dark-sky-parks-sites/

 

Most areas in Britain with their own ‘Visit ——‘ website will also list local places if you do a search using the term ‘dark sky.’

 

Also, this is an interactive light bleed/dark sky map for the UK:

 

https://www.nightblight.cpre.org.uk/maps/

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