Friday 22 August 2008

Pluto...not a planet, just a dot.

I noticed I could easily see 15th magnitude stars on some of my long exposure photographs (that's about 4,000 times fainter than anything you can see with the eye alone). Pluto is 14th magnitude, so it is 2 and a half times brighter than a 15th magnitude star. With Malc's help we found what I thought to be Pluto, but actually it was the fainter star beside the one I thought. This picture shows the STScI (space telescope science institute?) picture of the sky next to the photo of the same area. I think my picture shows Pluto. A tiny dot!

1 comment:

Dr Dan said...

For the record, if you want to know when this was - it was taken at about 2300 GMT on 29th July 2008

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