Slashdot Mirror
Amateur Astronomer Grabs Amazing ISS Picture
The Bad Astronomer writes "Ralf Vandebergh is an amateur astronomer, and using a simple telescope with a video camera attached to it, he took an incredibly detailed picture of the International Space Station. You can easily see the recently-installed truss and solar panels, as well as the Space Shuttle Discovery docked to the station."
IT DOES EXIST!!
Does it mean that the moon landing happened too?
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
He has a number of photos posted at Cloudy Nights in the "Planetary and Solar System Observing" forum.
He basically used a method reminiscent of a technique used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of planets and asteroids: take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.
The principle behind it is pretty simple. When it comes to seeing nearby planets (Pluto and friends are obviously exceptions), telescopes are limited less by magnification and more by atmospheric distortion. What's not clear from the article is if this is a single frame grab (which is pretty cool but not an incredible technical feat) or if he managed to track it precisely enough to stack a few frames.
Thats no moon,it IS a space station give the man some geek points!
...you can see forever.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
You can view things up in orbit this way too. Just don't do it without the proper filtering protection.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's a football field, 200 miles away, traveling at 17,500 mph.
You try it.
It's blurry because it's taken through miles of atmosphere. That's why Hubble is in orbit and most observatories are on top of mountains.
most observatories are on top of mountains.
Not an easy thing to find in the Netherlands.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
I mean I wouldn't be surprised if he was getting pretty close to that limit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation To make that short I kind of remember this from my physics class that ultimately the limit on being able to differentiate between 2 objects depends on the size of your main mirror/lens and the wavelength of light you use. (IE a bigger main mirror or shorter wave length of light means you can differentiate between closer and closer objects.) If I remember correctly I did the math and found out that you'd need a mirror about 250 meters across to resolve the landing site on the moon from an earth based telescope. (But I can't remember if that resolution was 1 meter or 30.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com.nyud.net/badastronomy/2009/03/25/shuttle-and-station-imaged-from-the-ground/
/. in the last few years. I kinda miss the reliability. It seems like twice a day some poor website is blasted half way around the world because of /., why not use nyud.net some more?
Funny how nyud.net has disappeared from
Any sign of that bat?
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here.
It's a 10 inch mirror. I owned a 'scope like that for over 20 years, and it's a pretty decent instrument. It looked like a water heater; a foot across and two yards long.
*** Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer http://www.badastronomy.com
Probably a good deal of that blur can be removed though - there are some stunningly detailed images of area 51 from 26 miles away taken through a telescope using multiple images to remove the atmospherics:
http://www.dreamlandresort.com/area51/panorama_0608.html
Naturally this would be a little more challenging with the ISS since it's moving pretty fast through the scope - probably need a motor drive on it to keep it steady.
This time it was not a cromulent word to use.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Except it's not, it's the cheer squad ON the football field. And you're complaining because you can't see their tits clearly.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
Even though its on the other side, facing away from us.
They can lift the print of the guy who screwed it on too.
But the real feat is that they can make out the license plate of the car across the street of a suspected terrorist by enhancing the reflection on one of the space stations windows, on a cloudy day.
I used to enjoy TV. Its almost sad. I can watch a rerun of something like "Columbo" and I find fewer plot holes and more credible police work, more credible set designs, more credible ... everything, than I do on CSI. Sure in Columbo the villain was usually improbably or even implausibly ratting himself out... but compared to the routine violation the current limits of technology, and in many cases the known limits of even theoretical sciencce we are subjected to in the CSI's... Columbo is actually the more beleivable... by far.
I can't believe the government are allowing people to take these sorts of images. This is just a gift to the terrorists, they'll be able to see exactly which parts of the space station to target and may even be able to bring the whole thing down on a major population centre.
Unbelievable !
This is obviously a fake. If you look closely, you can see the wires holding up the space station! The only rational conclusion is that the space station was filmed in front of a live studio audience under strict NDA. Quick! Somebody notify Fox News! They'll do one of their award winning exposes. They'll probably even be able to get Geraldo to unmask the perpetrators!