1.
Celestial cartography
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Measuring the position and light of charted objects requires a variety of instruments and techniques. Uranographers have historically produced planetary position tables, star tables and star maps for use by amateur and professional astronomers. More recently computerized star maps have been compiled, and automated positioning of telescopes is accomplished using databases of stars, the word uranography derived from the Greek ουρανογραφια through the Latin uranographia. In Renaissance times, Uranographia was used as the title of various celestial atlases. During the 19th century, uranography was defined as the description of the heavens, elijah H. Burritt re-defined it as the geography of the heavens. The German word for uranography is Uranographie, the French is uranographie, a determining fact source for drawing star charts is naturally a star table. C, AD150, Almagest – contains the last known star table from antiquity, C.964, Book of the Fixed Stars, Arabic version of the Almagest by al-Sufi. 1627, Rudolphine Tables – contains the first West Enlightenment star table,1690, Prodromus Astronomiae – by Johannes Hevelius for his Firmamentum Sobiescanum,1,564 stars. 1729, Britannic Catalogue – by John Flamsteed for his Atlas Coelestis,1903, Bonner Durchmusterung – by Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander and collaborators, circa 460,000 stars. 15th century BC – The ceiling of the tomb TT71 for the Egyptian architect and minister Senenmut, poeticon astronomicon, allegedly by Gaius Julius Hyginus 1092 – Xin Yi Xiang Fa Yao, by Su Song, a horological treatise which had the earliest existent star maps in printed form. True Visual Magnitude Photographic Star Atlas, pasachoff, Wil Tirion charts SkyGX – Christopher Watson The Great Atlas of the Sky – Piotr Brych. 100,000 Stars Cartes du Ciel Celestia 3D Galaxy Map CyberSky GoSkyWatch Planetarium Google Sky KStars Stellarium SKY-MAP. ORG SkyMap Online WorldWide Telescope XEphem, monthly star maps for every location on Earth Easy to use monthly star maps for northern and southern hemispheres. Helpful target lists for naked eye, binocular, or telescope viewing, collection of rare star atlases, charts, and maps available in full digital facsimile at Linda Hall Library. The Great Atlas of the Sky – worlds largest printed atlas of the sky, navigable online map of the stars, Stellarmap. com. The Digital Collections of the Linda Hall Library include, Astronomy, Star Atlases, Charts, and Maps, Astronomy, Selected Images, a collection of high-resolution star map images. History of Cosmology, Views of the Stars, high-resolution scans of prints relating to the study of the structure of the cosmos, EDSM, an external community supporting the recording of exploration data in Elite, Dangerous. GalNet, the community news source for Elite, Dangerous galactic activity, Community Goal, More Imperial Warships. Article citing the discovery of the lost Jaques station
2.
Lowell Observatory
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Lowell Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, United States. Lowell Observatory was established in 1894, placing it among the oldest observatories in the United States, in 2011, the Observatory was named one of The Worlds 100 Most Important Places by TIME. It was at the Lowell Observatory that the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, the Observatorys original 61-centimeter Alvan Clark & Sons Telescope is still in use today for public education. It was founded by astronomer Percival Lowell of Bostons well-known Lowell family and is overseen by a sole trustee, the first trustee was Lowells third cousin Guy Lowell. Percivals nephew Roger Putnam served from 1927–1967, followed by Rogers son Michael, Michaels brother William Lowell Putnam III, the observatory operates several telescopes at three locations in the Flagstaff area. The telescope, built in 1896 for $20,000, was assembled in Boston by Alvan Clark & Sons, also located on the Mars Hill campus is the 33-centimeter Pluto Discovery Telescope, used by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 to discover the dwarf planet Pluto. Lowell is a partner with the United States Naval Observatory and Naval Research Laboratory in the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer also located at that site, the Observatory also operates smaller research telescopes at its historic site on Mars Hill and in Australia and Chile. Past Anderson Mesa, on the peak of Happy Jack, Lowell Observatory has also built and is commissioning the 4. 28-meter Discovery Channel Telescope in partnership with Discovery Communications, Inc. Aside from the array of research and discoveries listed below. When Harold L. Johnson took over as the director in 1952, in 1953, the current 53 cm telescope was erected. Beginning in 1954, this telescope began monitoring the brightness of two planets, and comparing these measurements with a reference set of sunlike stars. Lowell Observatory is building a major new reflecting telescope in partnership with Discovery Communications, located near Happy Jack, the primary mirror of the Discovery Channel Telescope will be 4.28 m in diameter. It will be notable for its uncommon meniscus design for such a large mirror. This mirror was ground and polished into its parabolic shape at the Optical Fabrication, Lowell Observatorys astronomers conduct research on a wide range of solar system and astrophysical topics using ground-based, airborne, and space-based telescopes. In addition, the Observatory staff designs and builds custom instrumentation for use on Lowells telescopes, for example, Lowell staff built a sophisticated high-speed camera for use on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. SOFIA is a joint project of the United States and German space agencies, Lowell, Percival, Pickering, W. H. and the founding of the Lowell Observatory. National Historic Landmarks Program, Lowell Observatory+ Historic American Buildings Survey No, aZ-206, Lowell Observatory,1400 West Mars Hill Road, Flagstaff, Coconino County, AZ HABS No. AZ-206-A, Lowell Observatory, Slipher Building HABS No, aZ-206-B, Lowell Observatory, Clark Dome HABS No
3.
Cooke triplet
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The Cooke triplet is a photographic lens designed and patented in 1893 by Dennis Taylor who was employed as chief engineer by T. Cooke & Sons of York. It was the first lens system that allowed elimination of most of the distortion or aberration at the outer edge of lenses. A Cooke triplet comprises a flint glass element in the centre with a crown glass element on each side. In this design, the sum of all the curvatures times indices of refraction can be zero, the curvature of field is determined by the sum of the dioptres, but the focal length is not. At the time, the Cooke triplet was an advancement in lens design. It was superseded by later designs in high-end cameras, but is widely used in inexpensive cameras, including variations using aspheric elements. The triplet soon became a standard in lens design still used with low-end cameras today, the main optical manufacturers often further developed the original Cooke triplet that were produced for many decades. Binoculars as well as refracting telescopes often use triplets, the same holds for many projection lenses, e. g. for 35 mm slide projectors
4.
Pluto
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Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond Neptune. It was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered, Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and was originally considered to be the ninth planet from the Sun. After 1992, its planethood was questioned following the discovery of objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt. In 2005, Eris, which is 27% more massive than Pluto, was discovered and this led the International Astronomical Union to define the term planet formally in 2006, during their 26th General Assembly. That definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a dwarf planet, Pluto is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume but is less massive than Eris, like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small—about one-sixth the mass of the Moon and one-third its volume. It has an eccentric and inclined orbit during which it ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units or AU from the Sun. This means that Pluto periodically comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, light from the Sun takes about 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance. Pluto has five moons, Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos. Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body. The IAU has not formalized a definition for binary dwarf planets, on July 14,2015, the New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto. During its brief flyby, New Horizons made detailed measurements and observations of Pluto, on October 25,2016, at 05,48 pm ET, the last bit of data was received from New Horizons from its close encounter with Pluto on July 14,2015. In the 1840s, Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to predict the position of the then-undiscovered planet Neptune after analysing perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 19th century led astronomers to speculate that Uranuss orbit was being disturbed by another planet besides Neptune, by 1909, Lowell and William H. Pickering had suggested several possible celestial coordinates for such a planet. Lowell and his observatory conducted his search until his death in 1916, unknown to Lowell, his surveys had captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19 and April 7,1915, but they were not recognized for what they were. There are fourteen other known prediscovery observations, with the oldest made by the Yerkes Observatory on August 20,1909. Percivals widow, Constance Lowell, entered into a legal battle with the Lowell Observatory over her late husbands legacy. Tombaughs task was to image the night sky in pairs of photographs, then examine each pair
5.
Astrophotography
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Astrophotography is a specialized type of photography for recording photos of astronomical objects and large areas of the night sky. The first photograph of an object was taken in 1840. This is done by long time exposure since both film and digital cameras can accumulate and sum light photons over long periods of time. Astrophotography is a subdiscipline in amateur astronomy usually seeking aesthetically pleasing images rather than scientific data. Amateurs use a range of special equipment and techniques. With a few exceptions, astronomical photography employs long exposures since both film and digital imaging devices can accumulate and light photons over long periods of time, the amount of light hitting the film or detector is also increased by increasing the diameter of the primary optics being used. Since the Earth is constantly rotating, telescopes and equipment are rotated in the direction to follow the apparent motion of the stars overhead. This is accomplished by using either equatorial or computer-controlled altazimuth telescope mounts to keep celestial objects centered while the earth rotates, all telescope mount systems suffer from induced tracking error due to imperfect motor drives and mechanical sag of the telescope. Tracking errors are corrected by keeping a selected aiming point, usually a bright guide star, sometimes the object to be imaged is moving, so the telescope has to be kept constantly centered on that object. Guiding was formerly done manually throughout the exposure with an observer standing at the telescope making corrections to keep a cross hair on the guide star, since the advent of computer-controlled systems this is accomplished by an automated systems in professional and even amateur equipment. These all require specialized equipment such as telescopes designed for imaging, for wide field of view. Astronomical CCD cameras may use cryogenic cooling to reduce thermal noise, specialized filters are also used to record images in specific wavelengths. The development of astrophotography as a tool was pioneered in the mid-19th century for the most part by experimenters and amateur astronomers. Because of the long exposures needed to capture relatively faint astronomical objects. Early photographic processes also had limitations, the daguerreotype process was far too slow to record anything but the brightest objects, and the wet plate collodion process limited exposures to the time the plate could stay wet. The first-known attempt at astronomical photography was by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the process which bears his name. Tracking errors in guiding the telescope during the long exposure meant the photograph came out as an indistinct fuzzy spot, the Sun may have been first photographed in an 1845 daguerreotype by the French physicists Léon Foucault and Hippolyte Fizeau. No photographic alteration was caused by the light of the corona condensed by a lens for two minutes, during totality, on a sheet of paper prepared with bromide of silver, the Suns solar corona was first successfully imaged during the Solar eclipse of July 28,1851
6.
Asteroid
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Asteroids are minor planets, especially those of the inner Solar System. The larger ones have also been called planetoids and these terms have historically been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not show the disc of a planet and was not observed to have the characteristics of an active comet. As minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered and found to have volatile-based surfaces that resemble those of comets, in this article, the term asteroid refers to the minor planets of the inner Solar System including those co-orbital with Jupiter. There are millions of asteroids, many thought to be the remnants of planetesimals. The large majority of known asteroids orbit in the belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, or are co-orbital with Jupiter. However, other orbital families exist with significant populations, including the near-Earth objects, individual asteroids are classified by their characteristic spectra, with the majority falling into three main groups, C-type, M-type, and S-type. These were named after and are identified with carbon-rich, metallic. The size of asteroids varies greatly, some reaching as much as 1000 km across, asteroids are differentiated from comets and meteoroids. In the case of comets, the difference is one of composition, while asteroids are composed of mineral and rock, comets are composed of dust. In addition, asteroids formed closer to the sun, preventing the development of the aforementioned cometary ice, the difference between asteroids and meteoroids is mainly one of size, meteoroids have a diameter of less than one meter, whereas asteroids have a diameter of greater than one meter. Finally, meteoroids can be composed of either cometary or asteroidal materials, only one asteroid,4 Vesta, which has a relatively reflective surface, is normally visible to the naked eye, and this only in very dark skies when it is favorably positioned. Rarely, small asteroids passing close to Earth may be visible to the eye for a short time. As of March 2016, the Minor Planet Center had data on more than 1.3 million objects in the inner and outer Solar System, the United Nations declared June 30 as International Asteroid Day to educate the public about asteroids. The date of International Asteroid Day commemorates the anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid impact over Siberia, the first asteroid to be discovered, Ceres, was found in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, and was originally considered to be a new planet. In the early half of the nineteenth century, the terms asteroid. Asteroid discovery methods have improved over the past two centuries. This task required that hand-drawn sky charts be prepared for all stars in the band down to an agreed-upon limit of faintness. On subsequent nights, the sky would be charted again and any moving object would, hopefully, the expected motion of the missing planet was about 30 seconds of arc per hour, readily discernible by observers
7.
Meteoroid
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A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are significantly smaller than asteroids, and range in size from small grains to 1 meter-wide objects, objects smaller than this are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust. Most are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars and this phenomenon is called a meteor or shooting star. A series of many meteors appearing seconds or minutes apart and appearing to originate from the fixed point in the sky is called a meteor shower. If that object withstands ablation from its passage through the atmosphere as a meteor and impacts with the ground, an estimated 15,000 tonnes of meteoroids, micrometeoroids and different forms of space dust enter Earths atmosphere each year. In 1995, Beech and Steel, writing in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, according to Rubin and Grossman, the minimum size of an asteroid is given by what can be discovered from Earth-bound telescopes, so the distinction between meteoroid and asteroid is fuzzy. Some of the smallest asteroids discovered are 2008 TS26 with H =33.2 and 2011 CQ1 with H =32.1 both with a size of 1 meter. Objects smaller than meteoroids are classified as micrometeoroids and cosmic dust, the Minor Planet Center does not use the term meteoroid. Almost all meteoroids contain extraterrestrial nickel and iron and they have three main classifications, iron, stone, and stony-iron. Some stone meteoroids contain grain-like inclusions known as chondrules and are called chondrites, stoney meteoroids without these features are called achondrites, which are typically formed from extraterrestrial igneous activity, they contain little or no extraterrestrial iron. The composition of meteoroids can be inferred as they pass through Earths atmosphere from their trajectories and their effects on radio signals also give information, especially useful for daytime meteors, which are otherwise very difficult to observe. From these trajectory measurements, meteoroids have been found to have many different orbits, some clustering in streams associated with a parent comet. Debris from meteoroid streams may eventually be scattered into other orbits, the study of meteorites also gives insights into the composition of non-ephemeral meteoroids. Most meteoroids come from the belt, having been perturbed by the gravitational influences of planets. Some meteoroids are pieces of planets or moons, such as Mars or our moon, meteoroids travel around the Sun in a variety of orbits and at various velocities. The fastest ones move at about 42 kilometers per second through space in the vicinity of Earths orbit, Earth travels at about 29.6 kilometers per second. Thus, when meteoroids meet Earths atmosphere head-on, the speed may reach about 71 kilometers per second. Meteoroids moving through Earths orbital space average about 20 km/s, on January 17,2013 at 05,21 PST, a 1 meter-sized comet from the Oort cloud entered Earth atmosphere over a wide area in California and Nevada
8.
Comet
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A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to evolve gasses, a process called outgassing. This produces an atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are due to the effects of radiation and the solar wind acting upon the nucleus of the comet. Comet nuclei range from a few hundred metres to tens of kilometres across and are composed of collections of ice, dust. The coma may be up to 15 times the Earths diameter, if sufficiently bright, a comet may be seen from the Earth without the aid of a telescope and may subtend an arc of 30° across the sky. Comets have been observed and recorded since ancient times by many cultures, Comets usually have highly eccentric elliptical orbits, and they have a wide range of orbital periods, ranging from several years to potentially several millions of years. Short-period comets originate in the Kuiper belt or its associated scattered disc, long-period comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud, a spherical cloud of icy bodies extending from outside the Kuiper belt to halfway to the nearest star. Long-period comets are set in motion towards the Sun from the Oort cloud by gravitational perturbations caused by passing stars, hyperbolic comets may pass once through the inner Solar System before being flung to interstellar space. The appearance of a comet is called an apparition, Comets are distinguished from asteroids by the presence of an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere surrounding their central nucleus. This atmosphere has parts termed the coma and the tail, however, extinct comets that have passed close to the Sun many times have lost nearly all of their volatile ices and dust and may come to resemble small asteroids. Asteroids are thought to have a different origin from comets, having formed inside the orbit of Jupiter rather than in the outer Solar System, the discovery of main-belt comets and active centaur minor planets has blurred the distinction between asteroids and comets. As of November 2014 there are 5,253 known comets, however, this represents only a tiny fraction of the total potential comet population, as the reservoir of comet-like bodies in the outer Solar System is estimated to be one trillion. Roughly one comet per year is visible to the eye, though many of those are faint. Particularly bright examples are called Great Comets, the word comet derives from the Old English cometa from the Latin comēta or comētēs. That, in turn, is a latinisation of the Greek κομήτης, Κομήτης was derived from κομᾶν, which was itself derived from κόμη and was used to mean the tail of a comet. The astronomical symbol for comets is ☄, consisting of a disc with three hairlike extensions. The solid, core structure of a comet is known as the nucleus, cometary nuclei are composed of an amalgamation of rock, dust, water ice, and frozen gases such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia. As such, they are described as dirty snowballs after Fred Whipples model
9.
Refracting telescope
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A refracting telescope is a type of optical telescope that uses a lens as its objective to form an image. The refracting telescope design was used in spy glasses and astronomical telescopes but is also used for long focus camera lenses. A refractors magnification is calculated by dividing the length of the objective lens by that of the eyepiece. Refractors were the earliest type of optical telescope, Galileo Galilei, happening to be in Venice in about the month of May 1609, heard of the invention and constructed a version of his own. Galileo then communicated the details of his invention to the public, all refracting telescopes use the same principles. The objective in a refracting telescope refracts or bends light and this refraction causes parallel light rays to converge at a focal point, while those not parallel converge upon a focal plane. The telescope converts a bundle of rays to make an angle α. The ratio β/α is called the angular magnification and it equals the ratio between the retinal image sizes obtained with and without the telescope. Refracting telescopes can come in different configurations to correct for image orientation. Because the image was formed by the bending of light, or refraction, the design Galileo Galilei used in 1609 is commonly called a Galilean telescope. It used a convergent objective lens and a divergent eyepiece lens, a Galilean telescope, because the design has no intermediary focus, results in a non-inverted and upright image. Galileo’s best telescope magnified objects about 30 times, because of flaws in its design, such as the shape of the lens and the narrow field of view, the images were blurry and distorted. Despite these flaws, the telescope was still enough for Galileo to explore the sky. The Galilean telescope could view the phases of Venus, and was able to see craters on the Moon, parallel rays of light from a distant object would be brought to a focus in the focal plane of the objective lens. The eyepiece lens intercepts these rays and renders them parallel once more, non-parallel rays of light from the object traveling at an angle α1 to the optical axis travel at a larger angle after they passed through the eyepiece. This leads to an increase in the apparent angular size and is responsible for the perceived magnification, the final image is a virtual image, located at infinity and is the same way up as the object. The Keplerian telescope, invented by Johannes Kepler in 1611, is an improvement on Galileos design and it uses a convex lens as the eyepiece instead of Galileos concave one. The advantage of this arrangement is that the rays of light emerging from the eyepiece are converging and this allows for a much wider field of view and greater eye relief, but the image for the viewer is inverted
