Posted on 04/10/2018 12:07:11 PM PDT by messierhunter
Let's see how long this thread lasts, the mods pull everything I post that offends or upset the delicate little flat earth and science hating snowflakes that have taken over FreeRepublic these days. Here's a simple method anyone can use to measure the altitude, size, and velocity of the International Space Station by capitalizing on a lunar transit (where ISS is silhouetted against the moon within a narrow corridor - you can find opportunities on transit-finder.com).
Anyone can do this with a friend using a good high magnification camera like a P900 or other long focal length telephoto lens on a tripod. You could also use a simple cheap telescope, even without tracking capability. The result is that ISS is exactly as high, fast, and large as NASA says it is. I used highly precise astrometry to perform the measurement, by shutting off my telescope's tracking and allowing the moon to drift out of the field of view immediately following the transit. A few minutes later when the moon was far enough away to reduce the glare, I took a photo of the background stars in order to calibrate the image and precisely measure the angular separation of the ISS transit in my footage compared to footage from a friend about a kilometer away from me.
Oh dear. I know amateur radio operators who downlinked Apollo telemetry data, which they could not do if the CM/LM combo was not where NASA said it was.
a dome! haha! That strikes me as funny. The earth is flat, but it’s surrounded by something spherical (at least partially). Seems a bit ironic. Good stuff
That’s a gorgeous example of an ISS transit. Did you take that one?
Not familiar with that scene.
Very nice. Is that yours?
Oh, I see the apparently very old headline now. The dope thinks it's current news, like that democrat congresswoman, Sheila Jackass Lee, who thought we had already landed men on Mars.
Sheila Jackson Lee (Democrat!)
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
From Texas's 18th district
On a visit to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2005, Jackson Lee made embarrassing news by asking if the Mars Pathfinder had taken an image of the flag planted there in 1969 by Neil Armstrong.[2]
Prior to the 110th Congress, Jackson Lee served on the House Science Committee and on the Subcommittee that oversees space policy and NASA.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100409095818/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Jackson_Lee
No, it belongs to NASA.
Actually, the astronauts on at least some of the lunar landing missions left behind laser reflecting corner cubes that are still used today for precise laser ranging of the moon to update lunar orbit predictions. For those interested, the lunar orbit of the Earth is one of the most complicated due to the larger moon/Earth mass ratio and due to both bodies being perturbed by the Suns gravity (as well as Jupiter and Saturn) differently. Kepler’s laws only work for short durations for the moon as they assume what’s called the two-body problem (i.e. the Sun and a much smaller Earth, or the Earth and a much smaller satellite). When you have multiple gravity sources playing off each other its gets really complicated math wise.
Lol! (joking!)
No, the photo is not mine.
If the earth was round that chip would fall off your shoulder.
I have a friend that is an actual ‘rocket scientist’(NASA) and I asked him about the ‘flat earth’ folks.
He just snickered and said “It is like putting mittens on an autistic 7 year old and then giving them an ice cream cone and a puppy, fun to watch and no body gets hurt.”
;’}
I took your first answer to mean that the photo was from NASA ...
Raises a question, though. Who does own ISS?
Bttt.
5.56mm
Ham radio people use the moon to bounce signals to places on earth below the horizon. It’s called EME, for Earth-Moon-Earth bounce.
We can bounce signals off of buildings to get around other buildings using directional antennas too. We can use mountains, whatever.
Clearly NOT flat. There’s several big mountains visible right outside my window.
Yes, I’ve seen it myself, it’s another great proof of how far the moon really is without even needing to get as fancy as lunar laser ranging.
Good times and great entertainment! Anyone at any coast (pick one) can watch ships leaving and entering the horizon. But it sure is fun to raise peoples’ blood pressure. Course there plenty of man made flat places.
Here's more 'proof':
Can you imagine the service manual for that thing?
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