91–100 of 172 posts
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With an opacity slider, for easy comparison: https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?baseImageLayer=CDS...
Thanks for the link, I didn't know one can do this with Aladin Lite! But to be fair, if we compare to DESI LS, it looks much less impressive. I.e. all the shells/tidal debris are basically visible in DESI.
I'll see myself out.
Petition to name those two mirrored galaxies "Wax on" and "wax off"? I'll see myself out.
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That is likely the most unexcitedly unsettling video I have ever seen. Amazing storytelling really.
It’s like swimming in a lake or river and thinking the water is just water but then you take a closer look and it’s just incredibly alive to the point of absurdity.
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…they do the science
I've worked on quite a few large-scale scientific collaborations like this (and also worked on/talked to the lead scientists of LSST) and typically, the end groups that do science aren't the ones handling the massive infrastructure. That typically goes to well-funded sites with great infrastructure who then provide straightforward ways for the smaller science groups to operate on the bits of data they care about. Her…
I really like the Rubin because I think a lot of people focus too much on "deep" seeing (IE, looking at individual or several objects with very high magnification only once). The Rubin does much more "wide" seeing and this actually produces a ton of useful data- basically, enough data to collect reliable statistics about things. This helps refine cosmological models in ways that smaller individual observations cannot…
Both modes of observation - surveys and targeted observations of individual objects - are necessary for astronomical research. Often, large surveys are used to scan the sky, and then targeted observations are used to follow up on the most interesting objects.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Digital_Sky_Survey
Note that "seeing" means something very specific in astronomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing.
TL;DR: VCRO is capable of imaging spy- and other classified US satellites. An automated filtering system (involves routing through some government processing facility) is in place to remove them from the freshly captured raw data used for the public transient phenomena alert service. 3 days later, unredacted data is made available (by then the elusive, variable-orbit assets are long gone.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...
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Which also tells the astronomical low odds of asteroids hitting earth even with “so many” of them. To me it changes nothing
If it has the potential to wipe out our entire species, but there's something we could do to prevent it (which I'm not sure about w/r/to asteroids), then it's worth looking out for the black swan event. Doing some extremely rough math along these lines to double check myself: * Gemini says that a dinosaur-extincting asteroid hits Earth about once every 100 million years. So in any given year that's 0.000001%. * Econo…
So you could actually make an argument that to a country like the US, full 100% reliable asteroid protection is only worth like $50M/year (even if an impact means full extinction)?
So if upkeep for a detection/deflection system costs more than that we'd be "better off" just risking it?! Thats insane. I would have expected this number to be much higher than $50M/year.
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>The prompt products are alerts, issued within 60 seconds of observation, about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position. Transferring, processing, and differencing such large images within 60 seconds (previous methods took hours, on smaller images) is a significant software engineering problem by itself.[64] >This stage of processing will be performed at a cla…
I thought all satellites already have known orbits? Both because they can't be made invisible, and because you need to avoid collisions.