Distance Calculations

[GaryN]

Some lunar surface astronomy images, finally!
(Image too big to dispay)
http://www3.telus.net/summa/faruv/4f007.jpg
Mission Frame: 27
Lunar Surface Exposure: 8
Target: Cygnus Nebula
Date of Exposure: April 21, 1972
Time (GMT): 18:11:53
Duration of Exposure: 10 minutes
Filter Type: Calcium Fluoride
Azimuth setting: 98°
Declination: 37.5°
Right Ascension: 320.7°
Elevation: 28°

About 100 star images and the Cygnus Nebula are visible in this exposure.

So, I do you think you will see stars with the naked eye?
http://www3.telus.net/summa/faruv/index.htm
Here is the authors explanation of how he got the files, and what
he had to do to extract the info.
In Search of Ancient Astronomy Images
http://www3.telus.net/summa/faruv/explain.htm

[allynh]

See, you just have to use the right equipment to shoot stars. The chest mounted cameras were never meant for that.

[GaryN]

Yes, allynh, maybe I was wrong, but I don't believe they had the proper
equipment until Apollo 16, when they finally got it figured out.
Here is the magazine from the 70mm Hasselblad UV shots from the orbiter,
showing Earth and the Moon. Notice there are no stars in the background
of any of the shots. Exposure settings, perhaps, but I'm not sold on that.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apoll ... azine/?131
(Interestingly, for UFO theorists, if you look at some of the Earth
shots, there are some little dots, which I thought might have been
background stars, but are not in the same position from frame to
frame, even though the Earth is at the same position in the shots.)
The only images of 'stars' they captured was from the FUVC device,
operated by John Young. It was built by the Naval Research Lab and
technical details, other than the camera inside, are unavailable.
Whats in that big, heavy, beast? It is a far UV device, and cuts out
all other light except for 2 Hydrogen emission bands.
http://www.myspacemuseum.com/alsepl1.htm
With this image we see the Earth and the Hydrogen 'glow', so are those
stars really stars, or planets with similar emissions? I think that is
what Katirai was getting at.

Somewhere in that device they must have been using an optical system
of some kind, diffraction focusing maybe, but even then it needed time
to gather enough to be visible. Also, very few of the images from those
experiments are available.
I just downloaded the 59 Meg Preliminary Mission Report, I'll see if
there is anything more in there.
I still don't think that you will be able to see the stars from space
without something similar to whatever is in the FUVC, never by eye, or
normal camera and lens.
Our atmosphere must be changing the incoming light somehow, too, as the
light will be a plane, or quasi-plane wave outside the atmosphere. I'm
way out of my depth, again, but I don't think Einstein ever got it all
figured, maybe I shouldn't hurt my head thinking about it too much.
Hubble, on the other hand, is not so much a telescope, but a tricked-out
photomultiplier, complete with lots of filters, gratings, and electronics
(which must introduce noise to some degree), providing data which is then
tweaked at headquarters to produce the stunning images we see on the Internet.
Here is about as good as Hubble can actually 'see'.

Ceres, in the asteroid belt, at 2.6 AU, and 975 Km Diameter.
Even at that distance, the image is very blocky, and it must already have
undergone some processing.

[Aardwolf]

Mankind has been fascinated with the stars from as far back as records go and probably even further. A handful of men finally get the chance to view these stars from another body far from Earth and not one wants to look up or take a photo of the view? Not one asked for an experiment or equipment to take a photo? I always thought NASA was quite interested in the stars. Didn't any ground staff or scientists propose an experiment to look up either?

[GaryN]

Hi Aardwolf,
I E-Mailed a number of NASA departments, including the mission
planning guys for the ISS 2011 EVA schedule. I asked them if they
could settle a question about seeing stars in space, and if they could
just get one of the EVA crew to move into the shadow of the ISS,
turn to face deep space and take a photo with a digital or film camera,
using the appropriate settings, which I'm sure someone at NASA must
have an idea of. Their reply? Why, not one, of course!

Back to distances...
I' have been looking at the Hipparcos site, very interesting to see how their
model of the distances of, and the associations between observed objects has been
changing. One result so far is the over-estimation of distances, only 25% or so
in some cases, but if any of those distances are used as a basis for calculating
more distant objects, then the compunding of errors really could be huge.
http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?proje ... age=poster
From another site:
(Hipparcos parallax measurements)

From these parallaxes, you get distances of about 3200 LY (Deneb) and 15000 LY (V762 Cas), respectively, so it looks as though V762 Cas is much farther. Its distance is very impressive -- about half as far as the center of the galaxy.
But when you look at the uncertainties in these numbers, things get much more confused. V762 Cas could be a lot closer than 15000 LY, or it could be much farther away. It could even be closer than Deneb. It's so far away that parallax is not a reliable measure of distance, and we would need another method of measurement to come up with a reliable distance.

And, of course, we have to realise that nobody has a good explanation
of what light is, or what a photon is, so aren't we really starting out
on shaky ground? For the further objects at supposed millions or
billions of light years, do we understand how light interacts with any
intervening matter, magnetism, electric fields? To many unknown unknowns
for my liking in this whole distance thing.

[fosborn]

Hi Aardwolf,
I E-Mailed a number of NASA departments, including the mission
planning guys for the ISS 2011 EVA schedule. I asked them if they
could settle a question about seeing stars in space, and if they could
just get one of the EVA crew to move into the shadow of the ISS,
turn to face deep space and take a photo with a digital or film camera,
using the appropriate settings, which I'm sure someone at NASA must
have an idea of. Their reply? Why, not one, of course!

I bet you will eventually get an answer. Anybody that has an email account at work and has a field job also, knows email is low on the priority list. At lest that's my experience.

You might also try the public relations channels too, more of their rice bowl. You'll get better priority.

Your pretty awesome, presuing something everybody takes for granted. I think that's how we break through our blind areas, to see things we never knew were there.

[GaryN]

Hi Frank,

Your pretty awesome, presuing something everybody takes for granted.

Or pretty dumb. Now I have to learn about aperture synthesis, and see if I
can find out exactly what computations they use.

The precision is astonishing. These stars are 34 light-years away and they lie closer together than do the Sun and the planet Saturn. Their separation in the sky is about 1/5000 degree.

The Hipparcos mission and subsequent computations have pinpointed the positions of stars with unprecedented accuracy. Hipparcos was not conceived as an imaging instrument, but the Lund team processes its data by the technique of aperture synthesis, originally developed for radio astronomy. The background ripple is a by-product of the method.

http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?proje ... ter#double

Interesting that the motion described for the above 'stars' is looking very
similar to the true motion of our Moon around the Earth. They also seem to
suspect a similar motion between Sirius A and B, but this is early days for me yet,
so that is just my present interpretation.

[jjohnson]

The Hipparcos catalog used a satellite to make geometric parallax measurements of thousands of stars, and distances to certain stars are known with better precision than previously. In Appendix 2 of the Hipparcos Catalog is the following graph depicting the measured/calculated distances versus the percent error. By the time the distance is out to about 500 parsecs (pc), the very least error in distance is 25%, and then only for that tiny fraction of the group hugging the rising bottom edge of the grouping.

The bulk of the stars is grouped around a "best-fit" error line running up along the elongated central dark lobe, crossing the 25% error line at roughly 250-300 pc. (1 parsec = 3.26 light years (ly) for those new to stellar distances.)

These are not insignificant errors, and Hipparcos only claims "acceptable" accuracy out to about 1000 pc, because beyond that the error values run into the thousands of percent. What this tells us that we only have a pretty good idea of how far the stars are from Earth within a radius of about, say, 1500 light years. It is estimated (how, I wonder) that our solar system lies about 30,000 ly from the center of our galaxy, so we can only guess the distance to stars that 5% or less of our distance to the galactic center. That leaves all the rest of the stars we observe in our own galaxy at unknown distances from us.

There are other distance estimating measurements. Astronomers are resourceful and smart, to say the least, in looking for reliable ways to obtain a reliable distance to things that are extremely large distances from us. The trouble is, one cannot know, really, how reliable the alternate methods are, because there isn't much in the way we can do to physically "check the answers". So-called "standard candles" are used to try to create a series of mileposts, including Cepheid variables and certain types of supernovas. Questions have been raised about the variability of those, too, so it is a little unsettling that distances to objects we can see are not actually as well known as the public trusts they are.

A lot rides on knowing distances accurately. We can't just bounce radar off a star or a galaxy like a cop with a radar gun, or a weather radar. All our theories about galactic brightness and diameters and power outputs of stars and quasars and galaxies are dependent on their distances from us. If we do not actually know the distance, we don't know the time, either. Hubble redshift as a distance/time "counter" was questioned by Hubble himself, yet it is widely adopted and used to explain apparent expansion of the Universe and the age of the most distant and therefore "earliest" galaxies, and much, much more. I think that a lot of the present cosmology, the standard model of astronomy, would need a lot of re-writing and reinterpreting if we knew the great distances a lot more accurately. —And that is wicked hard to do!

So far, we're basically limping along in that department, relying on assumptions and measured data with very large error bars.

[GaryN]

Thanks for your input JJ

A lot rides on knowing distances accurately. We can't just bounce radar off a star or a galaxy like a cop with a radar gun, or a weather radar. All our theories about galactic brightness and diameters and power outputs of stars and quasars and galaxies are dependent on their distances from us. If we do not actually know the distance, we don't know the time, either. Hubble redshift as a distance/time "counter" was questioned by Hubble himself, yet it is widely adopted and used to explain apparent expansion of the Universe and the age of the most distant and therefore "earliest" galaxies, and much, much more. I think that a lot of the present cosmology, the standard model of astronomy, would need a lot of re-writing and reinterpreting if we knew the great distances a lot more accurately. —And that is wicked hard to do!

Very well put. Wicked hard indeed. I don't think I'm going to spend any more time
trying to figure out what the true values might be, if all these scientists and
their models and computers can't get it right. Garbage in, garbage out.
If the Oort sphere is what I think it is, then I'll have to look into photon deflection
by a Coulomb field, and plane wave deflection at a dielectric interface to try and show
their long distance figures don't mean beans either. Could take a while.
Sucker for punishment you say?

[GaryN]

From Katirais book. Looks like the truth was hijacked quite a while ago.

The Detection of the Rotation of the Galaxies
If galaxies are actually planetary systems, then some of the visible galaxies must be very close to the Earth and have relatively small dimensions. In this case, we should be able to detect the orbital motion of the planets in these galaxies. In other words, the galaxies as a whole must be rotating, and the rotation must be detectable.
Was such rotation ever discovered? The answer is yes. In 1899, a Welsh astronomer, Isaac Roberts, discovered that the Andromeda galaxy was rotating.1 The detection of the rotation of the galaxy within a relatively short period of time proves that the galaxy is relatively small. If the galaxy were as huge as some have claimed, it would take hundreds of millions of years to make one rotation and it would be impossible for the photographs to show its rotation in such a relatively short period of time.
Later, the reputable astronomer, Adrian van Maanen also announced that he detected the rotation of several galaxies2 and confirmed Roberts’ findings3. Enter Joel Stebbins, who had studied the spectroscopic data on several spirals (including Andromeda), and came to the same conclusion that they were indeed rotating.4 In 1909, an English astronomer, William Huggins, announced that his studies showed that the Andromeda nebula was a planetary system5, similar to our solar system.6 Unfortunately, some prominent astronomers brushed aside these findings, because it did not fit their notion of the sizes and distances of the galaxies. They claimed that the detection of the rotation was impossible, because the detection of the rotation of such large bodies would require rotational velocities far in excess of the speed of light.
Since the prominent astronomers could not tolerate a conflict with their ideas about the distances and sizes of the galaxies, one by one they rejected various findings by Roberts, Maanen and others.

jj wrote:

We can't just bounce radar off a star or a galaxy like a cop with a radar gun, or a weather radar.

jj, you may have unintentionally come up with the answer to proving or disproving Katirais model.
If our nearest star is not a star, and what we are seeing is reflected sunlight, then could there be some way to send out a 'signal' of some sort that would be reflected back to us? If Sirius is 4 light years away, then we would only have to wait 8 years to find out. Could we use a space based laser beam, focused microwaves, or maybe a way to use our Suns light itself? If it is a Sun, the sent signal would be obliterated. Or is this NIAMI?

[GaryN]

Correction to above: 8 years and 16, not 4 and 8.

FUSE.
If the FUVC camera used by Apollo 16 astronauts was looking at earthly hydrogen emission spectra,
then the far UV should be where we look to see if objects like Sirius are stars or planets. Variations in the UV light, rather than indicating a variable star, would indicate changes in the UV producing charge-field shells of that planet. If we could synchronise these UV variations to a 16 year delay of noted radiant Solar events, that, to me, would be proof enough.

FUSE looked in far UV for a few years, but there has not been much deduced from its efforts, or if there was, it has not been common knowledge. Maybe it just wasn't built properly?

There are a number of potential anomalies that an investigator should check for in FUSE data. A few of the more important ones are outlined below, with links to other documentation for more details. A full catalog of factors potentially impacting FUSE data quality are given in Chapter 7 of the FUSE Data Handbook with the causes of these effects discussed in Chapter 4 of the FUSE Instrument Handbook.

http://archive.stsci.edu/fuse/fusecaveats.html

This is getting even more interesting. Something not right.
The Deuterium Puzzle.
http://archive.stsci.edu/fuse/scisumm/sci_d2h.html

[fosborn]

GaryN »So looking out from Earth, given the Oort sphere model,

So everybody is happy with the Oort Cloud?
I didn't think it fit in with EU comet theory?

[davesmith_au]

Frankly fosborn, I don't see what GaryN is even attempting to postulate, but whatever it is it doesn't seem to be consistent with EU at all.

The Oort cloud is a hypothetical repository for cometary bodies, it has never been observed, as is not required if EU is correct.

I cannot follow what GaryN is saying about stars, but it doesn't seem to be making much sense to me.

Cheers, Dave.

[GaryN]

Frankly fosborn, I don't see what GaryN is even attempting to postulate, but whatever it is it doesn't seem to be consistent with EU at all.

Have you looked at Katirais Book, Dave? I'm not postulating anything, it is Katirai
who is postulating, and I am looking into what he says, looking for the gaping hole
that it all falls through. All he is postulating is that we have been conned, or at
least that astronomers have misread their data and jumped to the wrong conclusions.
He believes he has the evidence to show that most of the stars we see are actually
planets, and any planets they are now seeing around stars are rather moons of those
planets.

The Oort cloud is a hypothetical repository for cometary bodies, it has never been observed, as is not required if EU is correct.

If Katirai is correct, then many of the stars we see could be Oort planets of
assorted sizes, along with irregular, cometary bodies. He has made a good case
so far, as even though he may not have solid proof, he can not be dis-proven, and
the references he quotes, cherry picked maybe, do provide support.
In my version of the EU, the Oort objects would be expected. You will just have to
wait until I complete my extension to Katirai's book, which picks up where he falls
down, which is his total ignorance of the plasma/electricity model. I don't hold that
against him, as until 30 months or so ago, I had not heard of it, and I have been
reading, and more lately of course, web-learning, about science and technology for
over 40 years.

I cannot follow what GaryN is saying about stars, but it doesn't seem to be making much sense to me.

Read the book maybe, see if it helps. I hope you find that big hole I'm looking for.

[allynh]

michael.suede has posted the book converted to pdf.

https://sites.google.com/site/cosmology ... ects=0&d=1

He's started a discussion down in NiaMi.

Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... 293#p48481

Have fun.