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Kepler Observes Neptune Dancing With Its Moons
New submitter Liquid Tip writes: NASA's K2 mission has the capability to stare continuously at a single field of stars for months at time. A new video shows K2 observations spanning 70 days from November, 2014 through January, 2015 reduced to a time-lapse of 34 seconds. During this time, we see some distant members of our Solar System passing through the K2 field-of-view. This includes some asteroids and the giant outer planet Neptune, which appears at day 15. A keen-eyed observer will also notice an object circling Neptune: its large moon, Triton, which orbits every 5.8 days. The fainter moon Nereid can be seen tracing Neptune's motion.
Honestly, I was thinking the same thing. Then I watched it.
It was much more fascinating than I expected. It not only captured Neptune/moons as it crossed the field of view -- it also captured Neptune retrograde.
While I never went beyond basic astronomy classes in college, when I was younger I was very interested in astronomy. I was a member of The Planetary Society when I was 10. I actually met Carl Sagan once (because of my young age and membership). I had a telescope which I spent hours seeing what I can see in my light-polluted skies. I made a "flip book" of nightly sketches of Jupiter and it's moons which when "flipped" showed the moons orbiting Jupiter.
When I watched this I was suddenly 10 years old again and excited about astronomy. If this isn't the definition of "nerdy news" I can't help you.