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Astronomy Picture of the Day - Pluto at Night
NASA ^ | 16 Nov, 2024 | Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute

Posted on 11/16/2024 12:29:12 PM PST by MtnClimber

Explanation: The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper Belt in dramatic silhouette, the image also reveals Pluto's tenuous, surprisingly complex layers of hazy atmosphere. Near the top of the frame the crescent twilight landscape includes southern areas of nitrogen ice plains now formally known as Sputnik Planitia and rugged mountains of water-ice in the Norgay Montes.


TOPICS: Astronomy; Astronomy Picture of the Day; Society
KEYWORDS: apod; astronomy; nasa; pluto
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To: Jamestown1630

??????? You mean I’ve been despising the wrong wgghead all this time? Do tell re Mike Brown. TIA.


21 posted on 11/16/2024 3:21:41 PM PST by AFB-XYZ (Two options: 1) Stand up, or 2) Bend over)
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To: Jamestown1630

Argh. Of course you know I meant “egghead”, not “wgghead”.


22 posted on 11/16/2024 3:22:38 PM PST by AFB-XYZ (Two options: 1) Stand up, or 2) Bend over)
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To: ComputerGuy
I liked things better back when he was a Planet. And stuff.

Discoverer Clyde Tombaugh is pinwheeling in his grave right now.

23 posted on 11/16/2024 3:27:00 PM PST by AFB-XYZ (Two options: 1) Stand up, or 2) Bend over)
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To: AFB-XYZ

Mike Brown is the astronomer whose discoveries led to the whole controversy over whether Pluto should be classified as a ‘planet’, and to the final decision.

He wrote the book, ‘How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Killed-Pluto-Why-Coming-ebook/dp/B003F3FJTG?ref_=ast_author_mpb

The following talk is long, but fun if you should have time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pbj_llmiMg


24 posted on 11/16/2024 3:51:19 PM PST by Jamestown1630 ("A Republic, if you can keep it.")
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To: PROCON

Interestingly, the dog was named after the planet.


25 posted on 11/16/2024 5:48:46 PM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets (לעזאזל עם חמאס)
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To: central_va

LOL!


26 posted on 11/16/2024 6:21:43 PM PST by Deaf and Discerning
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To: Verginius Rufus

Lowell left money for the search for the ninth planet in his will. His widow contested the will, but when the search succeeded she suggested the name Lowell.

There was precedent. Herschel wanted to call Uranus the Georgian Star after his patron, King George. The French favored the name Herschel. Uranus is the masculine form of the name of Urania, the muse of Astronomy.

Galileo similarly named what are today called the Galilean moons the Medician Stars after his patron.

There was considerable controversy over the name of Neptune. It was named after the sea god because of its blue color. Many in France wanted to name it Le Verrier, after the French mathematical astronomer who had accurately predicted the location where Galle discovered it after a brief search. Actually, Galle’s assistant, Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, did most of the work of reducing Le Verrier’s orbit to pointing coordinates and finding the correct and updated star charts unavailable to other observatories, and deserves equal credit.

Astronomer Royal George Biddle Airey took considerable blame for allowing the French to win the race to find Neptune. The young British Astronomer John Couch Adams had undertaken calculations similar to Le Verrier’s, and personally called on Airey twice, without apparent result. In fact, Airey had delegated the search to the Cambridge Observatory. (Adams and Airey had both been “first wranglers” - mathematics first place graduates.) Airey and the Royal Greenwich Observatory was in charge of producing the Nautical Almanac, as well as tables of Magnetic declination and other information useful to Admiralty who funded the RGO. The RGO was a production facility, not a scientific research facility.

After the discovery of Neptune, the Americans got into the act, claiming that the discovery was more luck than brilliant inspiration. The orbit of Neptune was allegedly inferred from its influence on the orbit of Uranus. The inverse perturbation problem is maddeningly difficult, especially in the days before electronic computers. To reduce the number of degrees of freedom, to limit the number of parameters that needed to be determined, both Adams and Le Verrier had assumed that Bode’s Law was approximately correct. In order to fit the observed perturbations, both Adams and Le Verrier had to assign large eccentricity to the orbit of the unknow planet. In fact, Bode’s Law was not valid, and Neptune’s orbit is almost perfectly circular, with only a small eccentricity. The Americans, correctly, attributed the discover more to luck, and the fact that the form of the perturbation would quite logically to assume that a large planet was in the trail of Neptune at the time of discover.

Percival Lowell was an enthusiastic votary of Urania, but gifted with money than talent. He had tried his hand at inferring the orbit of a trans-Neptunian planet based on irregularities in the orbit of Neptune, but without the skill of either an Adams or a Le Verrier. He did have resources neither of them had, his own observatory and staff, and the blink comparator. Fortunately for his reputation, his staff included the dedicated Clyde Tombaugh, whose dogged persistence paid off.


27 posted on 11/16/2024 6:25:56 PM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets (לעזאזל עם חמאס)
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
Thanks. I knew some of that but not all of it.

Lowell died in 1916. Clyde Tombaugh, born in 1906, began to work at the Lowell Observatory in 1929, so he never had any personal contact with Percival Lowell.

According to Wikipedia, Clayton Kershaw (longtime Dodgers pitcher, now a free agent) is a great-nephew of Clyde Tombaugh.

Venetia Burney was the 11-year-old girl in England who first suggested the name Pluto for the newly-discovered planet.

As far as I know, Disney has not relegated its Pluto to "dwarf dog" status.

28 posted on 11/17/2024 1:35:16 PM PST by Verginius Rufus
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Doctor Fun Archive

29 posted on 11/17/2024 9:08:15 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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