Plus Perseides are starting.

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okay, report: good lord, Antares and Vega are offensively bright once you adjust to the dark. M4!! HOLY GUACAMOLE WOW! M4 by itself made being out tonight worth it! M80: cool, felt cool to find it, but it looks like any of the other tighter globs and I didn’t want to mess with switching to one of my narrow AFOV higher power eyepieces on my manual dob. May revisit once I invest in a higher power eyepiece with a decent AFOV. Epsilon Lyrae: hmm, am I maybe just not using enough mag? looks like a regular double star to me. Took the telescope for a slew through Sagittarius, for a laugh, was not disappointed. Breathtaking amount of stars there. Was all aboard the strugglebus making sense of Hercules’s constellation. Didn’t help that he was at the zenith, which made using the dob weird when looking for M13 and made looking at the constellation annoying after staring straight up like a turkey for minutes. Took some time to re-acquaint myself with Draco, Cygnus, and Aquila. Didn’t pick out any more DSOs, in part because I got annoyed with blowing out my night vision, even with the red light, on my charts. I’ve been fairly serious about the hobby for about 9 months now, and it seems like I saw way more satellites out tonight than I did when I stopped back in May. Bruh, the little bastards were everywhere.

Thanks for the answers (and time). It’s cool to learn these things. I could ask another 100 questions and still not understand half of it.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/33958431

There’s so much cool stuff happening in Astronomy at the moment.

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With the recent first light milestone for the Vera Rubin Observatory, it’s only a matter of time before one of astronomy’s most long-awaited surveys begins. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to start on November 5, and will scan the sky of billions of stars for at least ten years. One of the most important things it aims to find is evidence (or lack thereof) of primordial black holes (PBHs), one of the primary candidates for dark matter. A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by researchers at Durham University and the University of New Mexico looks at the difficulties the LSST will have in finding those enigmatic objects, especially the statistical challenges, and how they might be overcome.

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https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/114787286012161354 - this scientist reckons 0.2AU to Mars. Still 30m km. And thus about 100x further than the moon. But it only took Armstrong three days to do that distance! Could we slingshot between the earth and the moon a probe to reach it’s relative solar velocity and chase it down? Does anyone know the bounds of that?

This is phrased like the planets have some choice. It’s weird.

wiki/History_of_supernova_observation Animation showing the sky position of supernovae discovered since 1885. Some recent survey contributions are highlighted in color. [image: image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2Fa%2Fac%2FSN_Discoveries_1885-2019.gif]