New answers tagged amateur-observing
2
Most likely you will not see much detail except that they are a really tiny disc and don't wobble like stars.
The moon has an apparent diameter of 30' (half a degree) in the sky. Mars' apparent diameter varies between 3.5" and 25" (so about between 1/1000° and 1/120°). Thus at closest approach Mars is still about 60x smaller than the moon, ...
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Large objects can be very faint if they are far enough away. So large objects wouldn't necessarily be discovered a long time ago. The object you mentioned is very faint and required a long view time to acquire enough photons to "see" it. As stated in a comment by @Pierre Paquette, the object was viewed for over 59 hours.
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Amateur equipment is good enough. But you cannot detect it with a naked eye.
The change in flux for a passing exoplanet in transit is roughly 1%...2% at most for the larger exoplanets - and it is a gradual change. That's a change you do not notice with the naked eye, but it needs photographic equipment to create a sequence of images which allow analysis of ...
5
Can exoplanet transits be detected visually with amateur equipment? No. The magnitude change is too small.
With proper equipment, transits can be detected by amateurs. For example, American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) members are collecting data according to the page Exoplanet Section.
ANNOUNCEMENT: With the launch of TESS (Transiting ...
3
My first telescope was made from the lens and eyepiece of an old discarded pair of binoculars. I used a paper towel roll cardboard tube with the objective taped on the front and a flat, circular piece of card stock (with radial cuts near the edge for folding) taped over the other end. It had a hole big enough for the eyepiece to fit, and pieces of tape ...
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Of course transits are observable with telescopes; this is the main method for detecting exoplanets, see Wikipedia's Methods of detecting exoplanets; Transit photometry.
Unfortunately, they can do this only with powerful equipment. The magnitude change varies from 0 to 0.03. This can't be seen with, for example, 700 mm telescope. Thus, 70 mm telescope ...
2
The image of Draco has definitely been altered. Most of the stars in Draco are quite faint, even the ones making the dragon shape, whereas in the image they are all shown as bigger/brighter than the stars in Ursa Minor (the quadrilateral in the middle with 3 stars trailing down to the lower left. The last of the 3 is polaris, which is in reality brighter ...
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Perhaps use a phone app instead of a web page. Lordparthurnaax and I both recommende skEye, you can vary the brightness. A phone will rotate and map the sky it's directed towards. I learnt all the constellations and major stars. Search for astronomy on your app store. Here are the search results for Google Play Store.
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I think your requirements can be met by Stellarium. It is a freely available open-source planetarium software available for PC, and can be used offline.
There is also a web version, which you can try out here.
You can filter stars out by pollution levels, as illustrated in the stellarium wiki.
Here is an Astronomy Stackexchange answer on matching the ...
-2
If you know somebody who still owns floppy disks, you might consider recycling their inside as filter. Please test before relying on them for protecting your eyes. I did use them during the last solar eclipse as filter for my analog camera with reasonable results.
References
https://www.instructables.com/Floppy-Disk-Sun-Filter/
0
Was it at 2212h? Could it have been 2222h? :-)
Stellarium says that GLOBALSTAR M077 passed close by and was moving in the correct direction:
However, as James K points out in a comment: the Moon wasn't above the horizon at the time you specified. Could you have got the date wrong?
To try finding it yourself with Stellarium:
In Stellarium open the ...
5
Variable stars might challenge this. A distant Mira type variable or recurrent nova could have been at its minimum when the (for example) Gaia catalogue was being assembled, but appear in an amateur photographs.
These stars undergo very large variation in brightness. Mira can increase in brightness by 8 magnitudes, so it is not inconceivable that an ...
1
Following howstuffworks and my own metereological intuition, the key effect for stars to twinkle seems less the pressure or size of the atmosphere but rather if different layers (usually of different temperature) exist, and if the gradiant between the layers is steep enough.
Light passing through zones of differently dense air on its way to the observer lead ...
2
Back in the "good old days" (the 1980s), a lot of discoveries were made by amateurs. Transient phenomena such as comets or supernovae were spotted by amateurs. This was possible because the bottleneck in making discoveries was the human eye and brain. You needed eyes to look at the sky, or pictures of the sky. Computers couldn't process images ...
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Zooniverse has a citizen science project called Exoplanet Explorers that used volunteers to examine data on exoplanet candidates. It was so successful that it has now run out of data, but there are other space projects that are looking for contributors
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Basic rule: do not ever have a light-gathering instrument between your eye and the Sun, and think very carefully if pointing it somewhere where it might pick up specular reflections of the Sun (e.g. casually abusing it to look at some distant paragliders, where you can suddenly get the reflection of the Sun on a window).
Do not trust filters or aperture ...
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The only thing you need to protect your eyes from is the Sun. A lunar eclipse, no matter what phase it is in, is not dangerous to look at. A partial or an annular solar eclipse are dangerous because the Sun is still visible. A total solar eclipse is perfectly safe to look at—however, as the phenomenon starts and ends with a partial eclipse (as the Moon ...
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Moving away will help. If the mountain is very steep, and you are standing right next to it, you can only see objects that are directly above or behind you. Example: if the mountain is 100 ft tall, and you move 100 ft away, then you can see objects in the sky that make a 45 degree angle off the horizon. Angle = inverse tangent (mountain height / distance ...
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