Starship Asterisk*

Does the 100 kilometer/sec accommodate movie taking of this event?

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070811.html

I guess it could be done on an extremely long time lapse.

Spitzer (the telescope that took this image) has a resolution of 1.2 arcseconds per pixel. At the distance of 450 light years to HH49/50, that means each pixel covers 0.0027 light years, or 25 billion kilometers.

So to see features move across one pixel would take 250,000 seconds, or about 3 days.


Oops...There's a mistake in the APOD. The link from the caption to the image hosted on spitzer.caltech.edu says that's 100 miles per second. So the make that about 2 days per pixel.

iamlucky13 wrote:I guess it could be done on an extremely long time lapse. ... So the make that about 2 days per pixel.

That's no so long. It would make a great animation.

True, but Spitzer sees a lot of demand from astronomers. You'd have to make a pretty strong science case to keep turning it back on that subject every couple days for a year or so (enough to make a 12 second clip at 15 fps).

Maybe we'll eventually see a longer term clip...say exposures taken on one month intervals, but I wouldn't count on it.

It turns out the observing schedule is published online. I guess if anybody were interested enough, they could check to see if this target shows up multiple times, but there's a lot of obersvations there:

http://ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/approvdprog/sched/