Green Baron

A structured interstellar molecule cloud is proposed as well, it is actually not that improbable, at least more probable than aliens :-) One day we'll know. Or those after us. Or not. Who knows :-)

People are working on it, but no news yet. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/star-spurred-alien-theories-dims-again

That looks good me thinks, probably what the seeing permitted. I don't see much distortion in the picture, at least less than before. The blowups from the far edge show only a very slight coma. So maybe a few millimeters more and you are fine ? Yes, try the 105 (or 115mm ?). As usual the "generic" thing might have similar data compared to the original ... Am a little jealous. Still cloudy here. But i bet the sky skill will be clear when the moon comes out again ...

How about the starbord cloud ?

W T F ? I got it :-) I don't participate in the guessing until more is known. I have not seen any more publications on KIC 8462852 or any other dimming star in the last half year, and i actually find the waiting for more serious thoughts an this more thrilling than the speculations about aliens, superstructures and sunken civilisations (which btw. all are human concepts). :-)

Well, to be precise, it may well be but it is not sure whether there is a cloud or some"thing" that periodically moves in the line of sight. This solution is advertised by many, often in conjunction with a colourful picture, but it is not the only one. Right now far too little is known about possible causes, including processes inside of stars, and speculations sprawl.

It's still in court. Last year they said that they want a decision until May this year or they'd go to La Palma. But then the term was extended until next April (2018). Meanwhile some parts are being made, like mirrors, instruments, material science, tools, control units, .... This can take many years until all the research is finished and results can be transformed into something that makes a noise when it is dropped (like a tank lid, NASA :-)). As far as i am concerned they can leave the peak of Mauna Kea to the deities and spirits and build that popeye right here. I would of course report from the construction site if the forum is still running by then. First light for E-ELT is planned for 2024.

Oh, that's a surprise. So, imaging is postponed ? Are you not content with the Nexstar or Meade 2080 ? Or just a collector :-) ?

I as well halt when ambient is below -20 .... :-)

E-ELT construction has just begun. The mountain was already decapitated and levelled. Site with webcam: http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/elt/ TMT hurry up !

Well, right now, concerning dimming stars, we are in a state of "searching for an explanation". Maybe a few models need to be reworked, idk. Aliens would close the case immediately but then we'd have a problem in the future: What is done by aliens and what is natural ? That'll be a bad bad day for natural science as everything could be done away with as "made by aliens". That's what i'm (and others are) "preaching": he who let the aliens out of the box in the context of yet unexplained phenomena didn't serve science well, in contrary. And i fear that as data of telescopes etc. come in, the pile of open questions will grow.

It is probably a mistake to think that something external is dimming these stars. Just because we find almost all of the et planets by means of the transit method doesn't mean that every lightcurve dip from a star is the result of something occulting it.

Heeding the advice i now have an old eee pc. Paid nothing for it but gave the promise to buy my next pc there ... :-)

I think i can tell how i came to that thing without being sued for keeping an artefact that legally should belong to the community. I mean, it is a ubiquitious early/mid neolithic tool in the area, no new insight can be expected from it, the museums are full. Even the material (amphibolite) is just what someone would imagine if the word "Schuhleistenkeil" fell. Germans are great in connecting otherwise unconnected nouns to wordmonsters. And it's a nice story :-) It was during an excavation of older stuff (late ice-age, magdelenien) on an open field somewhere in Germany. The site was in danger of being totally eroded because of intense agriculture. It was known since years that a collection of late ice age stone artefacts existed there because after ploughing or a heavy rain new artefacts were recovered by the farmer and brought to the local museum. So it was expected that it was a place where a group of late ice-age hunters rested for a while to repair their equipment. A retired catholic priest, a hobby pre-historian who visited the small village museum saw the artefacts on display and, for fear that the place would be gone after two or three more seasons of ploughing but knowing that the officials would not find the time(*) and have the money to perform a thorough excavation called one of his friends, a professor of pre-history but without any budget. That is usually the case in archaeology if its not about mummies or dinos :-) That professor then immediately gathered a crew of 5 to 6 eager volunteers and two or three of his students and off we went during summer holidays (which are long in Germany !) and made a nice hole in the ground. And indeed we could reconstruct the remains of a small field camp of hunters, that might have been on the way back from a hunting trip to the north and were heading south were larger camps are known to have existed at the time. It was on a monday morning when i was early at the site that a local stepped up to me and gave me "a stone i found on friday night when i returned from the pub". He couldn't tell me where exactly that thing had been, but he said that it was partly covered with a black dark mass that he had scrubbed off. It is these cases that a friendly archaeologist suppresses his anger and rage about the fact that somebody has removed a piece from its context and eliminated the traces of workmanship (in this case probably the birch-tar of the fitting), sends a friendly smile to the nice contemporary who surely only had good thoughts in his mind (and probably a whole lot of C2H6O in his blood) and thanks him heartily for helping science out. I asked in the museum the other day and they told me that a neolithic settlement had existed farther up on the hill but all traces had eroded. So the piece was just washed down from there. The was no more space in the vitrine (it literally was a single room village museum) so the lady just waved her hand and murmured something like "keep it if you like, thanks for volunteering anyway". So i toddled off ... (*)Much manpower and all of the sparse budget was bound in rescue excavations along with the construction of high speed railroad tracks and motorways at the time. You know, 10 billions for high speed tracks but not even 5000,- for an excavation with volunteers, that sort of ... oh, politics, nevermind :-) Edit: just realised that i must say this just to calm my bad conscience. If you ever find an artefact, leave it where it is. Do not pick it up, clean it, or move it. If you feel like you should you can inform someone and they can see whether it is a new site or something that is already in the files.

Oh, sure it is impressive when it get's dark and cool during summer daylight. I was directly in the path of the totality 1999 in Karlsruhe, Germany. A cool wind was blowing just before and during dakening as the shadow helped the warm ground layer of summer air to rise up, but this was probably a local effect in the Rhein valley. So set up your equipment, but don't forget to watch ;-)

*sigh* Let's put it that way: if you just want to believe you go with the aliens and internet magazines, if you want to find an explanation, you go with science. And i believe in more findings when better technology is available. Until then, have your aliens :-) Again: you will not understand nature if you assume unnatural causes before having ruled out the natural ones. And we are far fom doing so. And the class of dimming stars (Tabbys is just pushed by the media) most surely have a natural cause. Edit: current generation telescopes are in service since 0-15 years. While some of the hardware was built slightly earlier, active and adaptive optics for example make resolution and precision much better than everything that was before. Also our understanding of the processes in stars in only very general and superficial, i can imagine that very much more is waiting to be found out. More and more unanswered questions will arise as data is recovered, and they will most probably lead to more and more colourful speculation and after the waves have calmed maybe even to explanations of natural processes ;-) With future generation telescopes like 30 and 40m main mirrors and many others that are planned or under construction, including space telescopes, very large baseline interferometry. [irony] We will have much more opportunity to speculate over hypothetical constructions or floating dead aliens around their own debris (how ridiculous !). Keep your enthusiasm for future opportunities :-) [/irony] Click bait generates money and maybe a certain reputation, but not knowledge :-)

My old gaming laptop finally took its place among the ancestors. It served me 6 years in which i didn't always treat it nice. That one had a windows partition that held the drivers for the ccd and the guiding software. The disks (an SSD and a classic noisy one) from the laptop are still fine, can read them perfectly, but i now need some sort of replacement for that thing. Will go to town tomorrow to search for a second hand laptop ...

Shoe-last celt, neolithic, so rather young so to say :-)

Oh, we have almost 60km tunnels through metamorphic rock (hard stuff) under the alps (Gotthard Base) and another one (Brenner Base) for completion around 2025 (65km), hard is no problem. Making a tunnel watertight in potentially moving ground is much more difficult. The Japanese know something about it (54km long 240m below sea level). Or the financial desaster Eurotunnel between Folkestone and Calais. Tunnels below the sealevel are very expensive. Tunnel boring machines these days can adapt to changing conditions while building a tunnel. They bore, plaster the walls with concrete and lay the rails; a ready tunnel is left behind behind.

No subway on or under La Palma island, not even planned. A McD opened two years ago but it isn't accepted well. When i last rode on a subway subway's didn't exist yet. No subway, no subway's, no sub I tried a subway sub one or two times when the alternatives were worse and need was high, it was awful. Taste only through sauces ... couldn't eat it all Too many bars here that offer fresh food. Many people actually grow their own vegetables in the garden. A sandwich with a fresh bread, onion, peppers, green salad, spices, goat cheese and spanish ham is done in minutes and a third compared to a subway sub in the subway despite of the high quality ingredients. Ah, oh, and quite a few 100 years old live here :-)

I'm astonished that they don't have a full team yet. 1000 photographers, scattered over the whole length of the US and maybe a few from abroad don't sound too many for me. Have all those mobile plastic lenses replaced real photography apparatuses :-) ? Or maybe those who will take pictures with decent devices are not planning to share them with google & co. *devilkerbal* ? Coronagraphic instruments need some preparation, time and effort .... Edit: for anything astrophotography, be it day or night, based on tripod and dslr with a nice lens, i highly recommend a programmable timer, maybe cableless. That makes things much easier as you probably collect hundreds of frames in a short time for stacking, video or choice of the best ...

Exactly. Such a planet would have no chance to form. And to answer you question, @sevenperforce, sure, contraction. Cooling would lead to higher rotation speed. If theoretically a body formed from a fast rotating disc with already a high momentum and cooling and contraction would bring it over the limit then it would fly apart edit: or loose mass from the equatorial parts until equilibrium is regained. But planets don't form like that, they from inside a disc by collisions and the disc usually has a sun in the centre. A central body from a disc could go through such a process, but i know of none and even white dwarfs or neutron stars don't rotate fast enough to overcome their gravity through centrifugal force. Edit: in exchange for the momentum gain they lost their atmospheres in the process of contraction. Btw. our gas planets rotate quite fast, which makes Saturn remarkably and observably flat. Now someone could claim that a series of well timed impacts adds to the angular momentum of a rotating body, but such a process is improbably, to say the least. A single impact that resets a planet forming process is far more likely. Earth almost had it, Mars maybe as well i read a few weeks ago from a paper that dealt with Mars' moons. But where star destroyers can fly through a big hole in a shell around a core with a ribbon in between there surely can happen strange things as well :-)

Amateurs certainly not. Though the first active systems are coming on the market. But to actually use the capabilities of a professional telescope yep, otherwise they'd always be limited to atmospheric conditions (comparable to a very nice 20-30cm telescope under good conditions). Discoveries of the last years were only possible through the use of active and now as well adaptive optics. Space telescopes play a role as well, but they aren't that many. The bulk is handled by terrestrial telescopes and that won't change in the foreseeable future.

German: "Rotzbremse" ... impossible to translate ... a contraption to confine the spreading of snot. :-)

Spectroscopy is a wide field. For an amateur and the visual spectrum there exist echelle, prism or slit spectroscopes to part the light into its wavelengths by refraction or interference. The recording instrument usually is a photographic chip, a ccd is more sensitive and the electronics more sophisticated than a consumer type dslr, that's why they have their prices though they are comparably simple. An echelle ("ladder") or prism let more light pass than a slit so exposure times on the recording instrument are shorter. Nevertheless, if you want a decent bright spectrum you must wait several times as long as if taking a photo of the whole spectrum at once, or a single colour like R, G or B. How many photons ? As @Steel said, the more the better ...