COMET ISON's sun dive climax: RENDEZVOUS with DESTINY NASA has released a nifty video of Comet Ison as it makes its way inexorably towards its closest encounter with the Sun in just over three hours now at 18:44 GMT, 28 November. STEREO image of Ison approaching the Sun. Pic: NASA Made up of pictures from the Heliospheric Imager of the agency's STEREO-A (Solar Terrestrial …
I'm pretty sure that what you see in the videos is taken from a sattelite in heliostationary polar orbit above the sun. That disc in the center of the video is actually a physical shield that blocks direct sunlight (which would otherwise obscure the whole image), leaving only reflected light and glowing high energy particles visible.
You'd have to put a satellite in polar orbit above an alien star to do the same thing in another solar system.
> heliostationary polar orbit above the sun.
Such an orbit does not exist and the only one to go "Sun poles" was Ulysses and that took a lot of slingshotting and was over fast.
At The Mission, we read:
STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP). The mission, launched in October 2006, has provided a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - have traced the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth. STEREO has revealed the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids, and help us understand why they happen. STEREO is a key addition to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejections with its unique side-viewing perspective.
So we have two sats, at 1 AU (i.e. Earth) orbit, and I would bet at the Lagrange Points.
The Jimbo's Horde page has a nice explanation, which leads to this picture of the STEREO's pair current location. So not at the Lagrange points.
To think that the budget for this probably had to be horse-traded over.
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
when an object passes infront of a star, the light blinks, if it happens twice, there is something in orbit
working the heliospheric lmager into long distant photos, an orbitting object could be in any position given the fact hubble can take a photo of a star 16 million light years away with a 6 month exposure time
@AC
That depends on where you are observing from.
Hard to explain it simply but i will try. Imagine a clock face with two circles one large and one small. One the small circle imagine Mercury at 9am and Earth at 11am on the outer circle. Of course the sun is in the middle. Now view all three from the perspecitve of 6am and you will see that Earth appears to be closer to the Sun.
I have read the comments above and was also wondering if that was comet Encke traveling vertically in the background but even more interesting to me was this... I find it unbelievable that no one seems to be concerned about the obvious increase in solar light and intensity as the comet approaches. In the first video there appears to be an obvious interaction going on between the comet and sun. Watch it again and you will see the sun getting much brighter as the comet approaches brighter but the field of view does not appear to change. Am I the only one seeing this? Isn't anyone concerned about the apparent huge CME blast occurring at the 6 second mark on the 2nd video?
Just wondering?
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