• hey astrogeeks

    From Questor@21:1/5 to Hactar on Fri Apr 13 07:37:12 2018
    XPost: alt.fan.cecil-adams

    On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 00:37:19 -0400, ebenZEROONE@verizon.net (Hactar) wrote:
    My cousin's kid had something on his iPod Touch where you could point it
    at the sky, and it would tell you what you're seeing. That's impressive >low-light response for the camera. I have not used it, because it
    wouldn't make sense to run it on my iPod Touch, which doesn't have a
    camera.

    I believe those applications work by calculation, not image recognition.
    (I may be wrong.) Given the direction the device is pointed (from internal sensors) and the time of day, it determines what would be visible. If I'm correct, it will work if you point it below the horizon, or if the sky is cloudy
    or otherwise obscured.

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  • From Questor@21:1/5 to Hactar on Sun Apr 15 07:18:35 2018
    XPost: alt.fan.cecil-adams

    On Sun, 9 Aug 2015 13:53:26 -0400, ebenZEROONE@verizon.net (Hactar) wrote:
    Is this
    http://preview.tinyurl.com/ntbdmb4
    Pleiades? And is this

    No. It's part of The Kingdom, a series of digital matte paintings created by the French artist Seb Janiak.

    http://www.sebjaniak.com/photos/fine-art/the-kingdom

    Since it's a photo composite, it's not apparent to me what it really is.
    The stars do strongly resemble a wide-field image of the Milky Way, but I cannot
    recognize any specific parts of it. That's possibly because it's a long exposure image, and film responds differently than the human eye to
    different wavelengths of light. It also might be a very narrow field image that merely looks like the whole milky way. And it's also very likely a stitched-together image, so probably only the artist knows what it is.


    http://preview.tinyurl.com/pecq35s
    Andromeda? The thing that isn't the Moon; I have a handle on that.

    Yes. It shows the apparent size of the Andromeda Galaxy in our
    sky. It's not that bright, of course. Under reasonably dark skies, I
    can see a fuzzy ellipse that's about as long as the width of the moon,
    or about half a degree of arc. The Andromeda Galaxy (also known
    as M31) is the largest of the three major galaxies in our local group.
    It's somewhat mind-boggling that something that is 2.2 million light-years distant can look so big, or that it can be viewed with the naked eye.

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and_andromeda_relative_size_in_the_sky.html

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