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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
Cassini-Huygens has also transmitted many excellent photos of satellites and their shadows on Saturn.. and other phenomena..

It's just the sheer idiocy of the quotes in the article..
Are these people astronomers or middle-school students?
"Geeze, we thought maybe Hubble was broken or something".. Duh..

These "astronomers" didn't do their homework..

38 posted on 09/02/2006 6:53:30 AM PDT by Drammach (Freedom... Not just a job, it's an adventure..)
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To: Drammach
These "astronomers" didn't do their homework..

Worse than you think. They called it a transit, when clearly it's an eclipse. Sheesh.

The JPL free ephemeris website http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sat_ephem claims that they produce ephemerides of Areil 0.02 arcsecond accuracy from 1980 to 2010. The diameter of Uranus is ~3.6 arc seconds viewed from Earth, so they can predict it's location to about one part in 1/180 of the diameter of Uranus. They clearly would have predicted this if they had done the math.

39 posted on 09/02/2006 7:10:06 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (NYT Headline: 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of CBS: Fake But Accurate, Experts Say.')
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To: Drammach

from: http://skytonight.com/news/home/3823426.html







For the first time in recorded history astronomers witnessed the shadow of one of Uranus's tiny moons travel across the distant planet's cloud tops. Using the sharp vision of the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, scientists captured the tiny moon Ariel passing in front of the gas giant, casting its shadow briefly upon Uranus's azure-tinted cloud tops.

Due to the extreme tilt of Uranus's spin axis relative to its orbital plane, such events can only occur for short periods every 42 years — when Uranus is nearest the equinoxes during the planet's 84-year orbit around the Sun. In 1965, the last time such an event was visible, telescope technology wasn't advanced enough to resolve it. Currently, only the largest observatories on Earth equipped with the latest adaptive-optics technology — or orbiting observatories such as Hubble — can witness these occurrences with any clarity.








I wonder, does this mean you can stand an egg on end on Uranus on this date?

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/egg_history.html


55 posted on 09/05/2006 7:06:14 PM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (NYT Headline: 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of CBS: Fake But Accurate, Experts Say.')
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