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Originally posted by Phage
The high resolution versions should be available soon.
Originally posted by JibbyJedi
Originally posted by PunchingBag80
Thanks Phage...for clearing that up for me.
When does Elenin come into view of the SOHO LASCO C3 camera?
How much more definition will the STEREO-A camera produce?
How many more questions can I ask to really annoy Jibby???
Questions to annoy Jibby....
Why am I here?
Why I do I post here?
What am I really thinking?
Why do I...........?
Uh Duh......?
Too much Fluoride....I can't....uh........uh.....duh.....huh huh.......
(watches Beavis & Butthead)
P.S.- You're a tool...... annoy me? Just be yourself mate.edit on 4-8-2011 by JibbyJedi because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by spaceshrimp
Sweet find!
There is a detail that sticks out to me. The fact that there isn't really any picture of Elenin just by itself. As an example, I understand that a satellite is following Vesta so it's easier to get clear pictures.
But is it just because of where Elenin is in space right now that there is no clear pictures?
Originally posted by ngchunter
Originally posted by spaceshrimp
Sweet find!
There is a detail that sticks out to me. The fact that there isn't really any picture of Elenin just by itself. As an example, I understand that a satellite is following Vesta so it's easier to get clear pictures.
But is it just because of where Elenin is in space right now that there is no clear pictures?
There are plenty of clear pictures out there. I think people have unrealistic expectations about what they're going to see with a minor comet. They seem to expect hale-bopp-like images. That doesn't mean the pictuers aren't clear, indeed some of them have been spectacular in quality from a technical side. The comet itself just isn't that impressive visually. Maybe that will change around perihelion to some extent, but I'm not holding my breath. As for the STEREO images, thus far they all come from HI-2. It's a real stretch to even call HI-2 a "telescope," though that is the technical name given it in some of the literature. It has a 70 degree wide field of view though, that's almost like an all-sky webcam.
How many comets have you seen that large or larger on such a cam? Very few, if any. McNaught, maybe, if you could find a southern hemisphere cam doing long exposures back then. The only reason you can see it at all in that camera is because of how close the comet is to the spacecraft.
STEREO wasn't designed to hunt comets at large angular separations from the sun, so they're just using what happens to be on board and can be oriented at the comet just by rotating around the spacecraft's sun-facing axis. At the moment, that happens to be HI-2 with its 70 degree FoV. Eventually it will be HI-1 with a much smaller 20 degree FoV, but that's still much, much wider than the telescopic images you've seen of Elenin from earth. It'll roughly akin to looking at the comet through a telescope's viewfinder. Hopefully we start to see some of its tail, but at that point the tail will be facing more towards the spacecraft and the exposures they run on HI-1 tend to be shorter than HI-2.
Originally posted by Illustronic
The only photographs we have of comets are from NASA probes that flew by, Stardust came within about 540 miles from Wild 2 comet. No telescope is ever going to photograph a comet core unless it is inside of the comet coma or closer.