Beginner Astronomy – Part XV – Observing Pluto OK. I’ve avoided it as long as I can, but it’s the tiny little elephant in the room now, and needs to be addressed. Pluto was a planet for 66 years. I would wager that everyone reading this (or at least most of us), grew up with Pluto in the planetary list. In 2006, though, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. I’ll likely touch on the definition and reasoning in another article, but for today, we’ll just talk about what it takes to observe this little object. First off, Pluto is far away. Really far. It’s so far away, in fact, and so far out of the general plane of the major planets, that we’ve never even had a probe near it! Secondly, it’s very small. The distance around Pluto’s approximate equator is roughly the same as driving from our shop on Burrard Street, to the city of Sudbury, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Huron. So what does it take to see Pluto? You’ll need to start with an immense telescope. To bring it up to the angular size of our moon, you would need up to 106,000 times magnification. Even with a 6mm eyepiece and a x3 Barlow, you would need a scope with a focal length of 212 kilometers. There is, however, a way to indirectly observe Pluto. You will need a camera set up on your scope, and a clear view of the sky over the course of several nights. Take images of the same section of sky for several nights, and use a star trails program to stack the photos. All of the stars should stay in the same positions, except one. That one will track through the background stars… a wandering star, alone out in the inky black… that’s Pluto. 1930 discovery image of Pluto upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/c/c6/20130105125551!Pluto_discovery_plates.png A comparative image of Pluto’s inclined orbit thinkingscifi.files.wordpress/2013/02/plutos-orbit.jpg
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 07:39:01 +0000
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