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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 ...

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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 ...

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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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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 ...

4

Telescopes magnify, they don't bring you closer. So if from Earth Jupiter has an apparent radius of 0.01 degrees (measured as an angle because it is the apparent size) And if Saturn has an apparent angle of 0.005 degrees, then if you magnify 100x then Jupiter will have an apparent size of 1 degree, and Saturn would have a size of 0.5 degrees. Magnification ...

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For what it's worth, I just got a shot of what looked like a 5th Galilean moon near Ganymede tonight (from South Florida). Here's a quick, unprocessed image. I thought I was going crazy seeing an extra moon (in the correct plane) that kept showing up. But looks like it's HIP 99314 (2nd dot to the upper left of Jupiter).

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I suppose you mean in three dimensions, but anyhow… Yes, Ptolemy did know that planets move also in latitude, not only in longitude, and thus the Almagest includes sections for how to predict the latitude of a planet for a given moment. In fact, Book XIII of the Almagest is entirely written about this specific subject of the latitude of the planets.

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A few sources come to mind to add to MAST and Sloan. Data releases from the SAMI Galaxy survey, which contain (or will eventually contain) emission line spectra for about 3500 galaxies. The papers for the first two releases can be found [here] and [here]. Another (smaller and older) dataset can be found at the Penn State Center for Astrophysics. It contains ...

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The answer is a strong maybe. The International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA) produces predictions for such events. Their webpage Major Planet Occultation Predictions lists the occultation of HIP 99314 by Jupiter, but it does not list an occultation by its moon Ganymede. Date U.T. Durn Star Star Planet y m d h m ...

2

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 ...

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 ...

2

Dark Energy Survey data have yielded several TNO discoveries. Bernardinelli et al. 2020 describe their method in detail. First they compute a trial orbit from images where a transient object was detected. Then Final validation of the reality of linked orbits uses a new "sub-threshold confirmation" test, wherein we demand the object be detectable ...

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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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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 ...

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All stars have to cover an angle of 360° in one sidereal day. is close but incomplete; we should really say that right ascension covers 360° in one sidereal day. Let me state that analogy: Imagine that you are near the north pole. You start walking with the velocity of 5 km/h to the east. In a short amount of time, you are at the beginning. You went through ...

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You can differentiate between planet (Did you mean asteroid? Planets are quite bright.) and noise quite easily. Just take three pictures of the sky and they will be probably quite noisy. If some spot changes its position on all three pictures, then this is some near object (astronomically near). You can additionally verify it if its trajectory is line or not....

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I'm going to make the assumption that the "aperture" of the instrument refers to the width of a fibre that feeds a spectrograph (I can't think of any other plausible scenario). What you want is to enclose the most power you can within a 2 arcsec diameter in the telescope focal plane at the wavelengths of interest. One confounding effect is the ...

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Not being an expert in star formation, I found a well-written paper summary from which I conclude that typical star formation rates range between $6 \ldots 24 M_\odot / yr$. The blog quotes the following graph by M. Boquien, V. Buat, and V. Perret, see https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5792 In this paper we investigate in isolation the impact of a variable star ...

1

Saturn has a diameter of about 116,000 km and is about 1.4 billion km from Earth. For Jupiter, the corresponding numbers are 140,000 and about 800 million km (the distances vary somewhat as the planets move around the Sun. The size of the images of the planets is determined by the ratios of these, so Saturn is about $$\frac{116000}{1400000000} = 0.00008$$ ...

1

Luminosity function Your approach is in principle correct, but would give the number density $n$ of Lyman $\alpha$ emitters (LAEs) in a "luminosity volume". Usually, the comoving volume is used, since you can then more easily compare densities at different redshifts $z$. If $n$ changes with $z$, you then know that it's not just because of the ...

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The Celestron video #DearCelestron Series - How to Sanitize your Optics addresses this nicely. Product Manager John Riutta (responsible for binoculars, spotting scopes, microscopes, and outdoor electronics at Celestron) demonstrates how to clean your binoculars, telescope, and microscopes between users. In addition to gloves and masks the demonstrate the ...

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Some extensive search e.g. with scholar.google.com led me to a manuscript from October 2020 entitled Design and Characterization of 275-500 GHz Corrugated Horns and Optics for a Wideband Radio Astronomy Receiver which already has all the information in the title: It looks like there is current development towards another 500 GHz receiver. The question ...

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If (and it's a big if) your sample is unbiased, that is, random, and if the population sampled is large, then the percentage sampled is completely irrelevant - only the absolute number of samples matters. 100 drawn out of 1 000 000 is almost exactly the same statistically as 100 drawn out of 100 000 000 - or 100 drawn out of infinity for that matter! How ...

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