The Russian Proton-M launched the Raduga 1M communications satellite at on a nine hour flight to orbit. The Russian workhorse was launching a government payload for the first time... Related posts:Russian Proton-M launches three Glonass-M GPS satellitesA Russian government Proton-M launch vehicle has successfully launched with... Russian Proton M launches Luch-5A and AMOS-5 satellitesA Russia…
Is there any publicly available, NEO-related database out there? Or is
there a specific institution a hobby-astronomer can/should turn to to
be able to learn more about individual NEOs?
Yes, there is NASA's Near Earth Object Program that catalogues all detected NEO's and had advanced re...
This has been done before, so I don't have to go through all the heavy calculations using Rayleigh criterion accounting for atmospheric diffraction and visible light wavelength. Ralf Vandebergh, a Dutch astronomer, professional photographer and veteran satellite spotter has been busy trying to do...
there's an animated gif showing what the problem is
OK... some smart software can iron out much of the atmospheric diffraction
but it's a problem for moving objects, because you'd need more frames of more or less the same image to do that
you wanna remove as much heat from IR wavelength telescopes as possible, they're detecting heat afterall ... otherwise it's like using a visual wavelength telescope with your lights on
still, it shouldn't be too difficult to keep it well chilled ... liquid nitrogen isn't that expensive
and it's a nice clean gas that electronics and optics don't mind, it's actually used frequently for "nitrogen purging" of cleanrooms and satellites and such
Nitrogen is relatively inert diatomic (N2) gas, but also importantly, while there are other gases that refuse to react with much anything even more so, like e.g. Helium, Nitrogen is cheap since it's often a byproduct of industrial processes. It is also frequently readily available at scientific ...
honestly tho, I try to focus on one thing per day as far as questions and answers here go ... sure, it sometimes happens that we'd get more questions about nearly the same thing, but I do like reading about such stuff... sometimes too much and then need to hurry with real work LOL
And Wikipedia ... well, it's useful for references mostly, and sadly often wrong, so I wouldn't recommend it as a sole source. Unless it's just too convenient not to use it and it happens to be spot on ... but we did have some funny incidents on Astro.SE with too eager members trying to answer Wiki style
Any and all sources, particularly when we are quoting from another website, journal article, book etc. must be properly attributed to the source.
Attributions can take the following forms (and folks are welcome to add to this):
A link to the web source, this should contain the name of the arti...
@RealzSlaw well that's just the thing, when you start browsing through its suggested revisions on some articles that are clearly misleading, you then realize that many have tried before with no success and it just ended up in endless discussions between them... I don't like that approach, I much prefer this one on Stack Exchange then, with many answers and people can upvote the one they found most useful
Sort of it does, but I don't consider it as an authority on anything really ... I think it's still a healthy mindset to doubt its accuracy, especially on opinions and digests.
it is a useful resource, don't get me wrong, it's just ... well, like it was said many times in our meta, that you still have to stand by what you've quoted, and know why
I know :P And no, I actually am not even close to being all too anal with everything. But security is one of those things that either you get it right, or you should've left it to someone else
NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, inside a payload fairing, is hoisted to the top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41. The move and hoisting operations mark another major milestone for the launch team as everything proceeds on schedule to launch Nov. 18, when…
well every time I had a C++ q, it wasn't a trivial question, and I never got an answer (in that channel); instead, I would end up helping everyone else for a few hours :P
@Everyone When I started with Scala, I just learned the key syntactic differences and started writing Scala-fied Java, while I slowly learned the rest. On Coursera, they had a functional programming course in Scala that was quite enlightening.
@Everyone I believe that takes into account the fact that as the masses become closer to equal, the smaller body starts exerting significant gravity on the larger body.
I would like to discuss with some civility a recent action that has occurred in the Root Access chatroom. First, allow me to catch everyone up on the facts of the situation:
Overview
Q: What happened? A: Please see this message in Root Access chat. This decision is the primary reason for askin...
@Undo TL;DR but I tend to agree with @balpha more. Plus, last time I was in Root Access (might be a few months ago) the bot wasn't named "ChatBot John Cavil" but just "John Cavil"... Now, I did recognize the name as one of the bot models from Battlestar Galactica, but I still said hi back to it when it greeted me, and I honestly hadn't a clue it wasn't a genuine user.
And yes, while fun, some of its functions are stepping over the line of good taste, if nothing more
well it did confuse me personally, when I was first time in the room ... I really didn't have a clue it was a bot, until someone told me that I'm being courteous to a JavaScript LOL
also Super User chats have way more traffic than this one or the Astro one
i.e. if anyone would get confused over it, chances are someone would be here to explain it too ... and we didn't run it while nobody was here either
ubuntu@ip-10-147-225-200:/var/bot/so-chatbot-driver-master$ ant
Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/lib/tools.jar
Buildfile: /var/bot/so-chatbot-driver-master/build.xml
create_run_jar:
BUILD FAILED
/var/bot/so-chatbot-driver-master/build.xml:16: destination directory "/var/bot/so-chatbot-driver-master/bin" does not exist or is not a directory
Total time: 0 seconds
Our Solar System is pretty straightforward. Roughly speaking, all the planets orbit in the same plane, most spin on their axes in the same direction in that plane, and even the Sun rotates in a manner consistent with all this. The small, rocky planets are closer to the Sun, and the big, gaseous planets are farther from the Sun. Simple. Now that we are finding planets orbiting other stars, many …
Any and all sources, particularly when we are quoting from another website, journal article, book etc. must be properly attributed to the source.
Attributions can take the following forms (and folks are welcome to add to this):
A link to the web source, this should contain the name of the arti...
I would like to discuss with some civility a recent action that has occurred in the Root Access chatroom. First, allow me to catch everyone up on the facts of the situation:
Overview
Q: What happened? A: Please see this message in Root Access chat. This decision is the primary reason for askin...
