It is no longer a heart. It's what it was meant to be all along...

Pulsar wrote:

Weaver wrote:REALLY excited about this. Although I've seen Pluto before (with my father's backyard Celestron 8" telescope one awesome night - saw all the planets that night!), I never thought I'd live to see what it looks like up close.

You either have the eyesight of an eagle and live on top of Mauna Kea, or you were looking at something else. It's virtually impossible to see Pluto with an 8".

Once in a lifetime - but it happened. Brutally cold night with the best seeing I've ever seen. I have a lot of telescope experience, and am confident we saw it that night.

I've got a bit more time now, so here's some more details to help the doubters.

My father had been into astronomy since he was a child. He'd had numerous telescopes, but jumped at the chance to get the C-8 because it had remarkably good optics for a scope of that size - likely unavailable today. He taught my brother and I the basis of telescope astronomy starting with a Newtonian reflector we rebuilt, then continued with the C-8 over many years. We'd view mainly at our home in Mamaroneck, in a very dark back yard, with cooperative neighbors (bribed with scope demos) who kept their lights off. One brilliantly clear night we leapt at the possibility of seeing all the planets - some naked eye, others with telescopes. Uranus was slightly difficult, Neptune was slightly more, but seeing them was about like seeing Jupiter on a crappy night - no possibility of moons or cloud detail, but notable non-stellar objects.

Pluto was different. We each took turns, one outside on the eyepiece, two studying the star field chart with Pluto's location added in, then rotated when the person on the scope got eye-tired and too cold. Sitting at the eyepiece we tried to recall the field and roam our eyes, concentrating on the Pluto location without actually staring at it (to avoid the fovea). After a couple periods of about 15 minutes each, we'd seen enough flickers in the right place, with our eyes physically looking at different parts of the field, to rule out both structural eye defects and to cancel out noise. As I said earlier, this was the absolute best seeing night I've ever encountered - real chance skies, especially for Westchester County, NY.

After we left there, Dad started teaching at Alfred (where I reside now) and we moved mostly to bigger scopes. He taught Astronomy lab courses, and developed the asteroid hunts when the Stull Observatory built the 32" scope and automated it. He discovered a couple of asteroids with that telescope (and my mother discovered one) - and after he died another asteroid, discovered by one of his students, was named after him.

Seeing Pluto wasn't like seeing the definitive disk of the other planets, or seeing it through a big scope - but I'm absolutely convinced I did see it, as did my father and brother.

Great story - I still vividly recall seeing Jupiters moons and Saturns rings in soon to be brother-laws 6" home built.
It's something every kid should experience.

Weaver have you read



Her story under the shadow of her brother is incredible...both brother and sister were astonishing....you'll love the sections on building their own telescopes that were far far ahead of their peers.

•••8

Btw the graphic above got good chuckles from Australia.

No, I haven't - have to look it up.

I had no idea about either of them.....with your background you'll adore it....if you can beleive ....she was paid by the King....something unheard of in that day and age.

Here's a treat as well

http://digg.com/2015/every-photographed-planet

4 new images today - discussed at press conf. but will take a good while (and increased resolution) from now onwards to decipher... All available here...

Ice mountains 11 thousand feet (ooops!1) high on Pluto - but 0 impact craters in image!, Charon has a 5 mile deep canyon and few impacts, and Kerberos Hydra is a bit fuzzy and oddly shaped.

Superb surprises. woot!1

Edit for fucking unit failure - again. Thanks MoS

Thanks for sharing. Those mountains are 11,000 feet though, not 11 miles.

https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/stat ... 44/photo/1

Weaver. The C-8 (or at least more recent versions) are still available:

http://www.celestron.com/browse-shop/un ... -telescope

Still a popular product. Celestron though is now owned by a Taiwanese company. Not that it matters, they still have some good products.

klazmon wrote:Weaver. The C-8 (or at least more recent versions) are still available:

http://www.celestron.com/browse-shop/un ... -telescope

Still a popular product. Celestron though is now owned by a Taiwanese company. Not that it matters, they still have some good products.

I know they're still selling scopes under that name, but it was my understanding that the optics available in the late '70s were far better than those available now.

I could well be wrong, though, and have no wish to slander a fine product line.

Mountains of Pluto at 11,000 feet rival the Rockies




and canyons on Charon

Yesterday's releases:

About 2% of 50 gigabits (50x109 bits) stored on New Horizons safely transmitted back to Earth. So far everything is strange and hard to describe in detail but this will change in the coming days, weeks &c. Icy planes with polygonal shapes - some with dark deposits/leavings of erosion - are young (100 million years or less).

Pluto's atmosphere is extensive (1000 km) and probably not turbulent away from the surface - mostly molecular nitrogen but a lump of carbon monoxide was noted over that "heart" shape.

Images at New Horizon web gallery.
e.g.

In the center left of Pluto’s vast heart-shaped feature – informally named “Tombaugh Regio” - lies a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains and has been informally named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. The surface appears to be divided into irregularly-shaped segments that are ringed by narrow troughs. Features that appear to be groups of mounds and fields of small pits are also visible. This image was acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. The blocky appearance of some features is due to compression of the image.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

So that's where the Martians moved to...note the canals.

icard:

I get pissed-orf by some of these mumbling newscasters going on about the planet 'ploodo'.

But excellent pics. Superb results. Look forward to a lot more.

Just to think, we've only gotten 2 days of over a year's worth of data coming. This will be a good year

What's the transmission rate from that spacecraft? Only I seem to recall it was 1 kilobit per second. If that's the case, then 50 gigabits is going to take nearly 18 months to transmit back to Earth.

Just looked up the info on Wikipedia. Apparently the data transfer rate is just 1 kilobit per second, because the transmitter is a relatively low power affair, and can't handle faster data transfer rates in an error-free manner over 3 billion miles. The data collected is stored on two solid state hard drives, each 8 gigabytes in size. Because, according to the Wikipedia article, it will take 16 months to transmit the data in full, only one drive can be used at a time. The data being transferred from the Pluto flyby might not have been completely transmitted by the time the spacecraft reaches a Kuiper Belt target. So the probe will have to transmit data, hang on to whatever data hasn't yet been transmitted, then store lots more data from the Kuiper Belt target, then transmit the remainder of the Pluto data to free up the first drive, then transmit the data from the Kuiper Belt target from the second drive. If they want to target a second Kuiper Belt object, assuming there's enough fuel for the delta-v manoeuvres, then we're looking at nearly five years of latency time for the data to arrive in full, not including the time spent in transit between targets if it happens to be more than 16 months.

Just imagine what NASA could have done if they'd been given the money to give that probe four times the storage, and a transmitter capable of even 10 kilobits per second at that distance.