dewline | Entries tagged with stars

I went looking and it turns out that Jérôme Lalande's star catalogue has been preserved and translated to English.

Having since discovered by such means that Lalande 8 - from John M. Ford's Star Trek novel The Final Reflection - is in fact a real star, I am now trying to find out what names or catalogue numbers that star is currently best known by. Any suggestions on the matter? Apparently, as of 1847, it was deemed to be in the constellation Cassiopeia?

Current Mood: nerdy

1. From The Atlantic's Science Feed: Transparent wood?

2. Our galaxy is stealing stars?

3. X-Ray binary stars are real.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: The House on CBC Radio

I've been digging around and am hearing from at least one reliable acquaintance that there IS a star that was named "Cincinnati" by some astronomer somewhere. Can anyone help me nail down its other, better-known names and/or catalogue reference numbers?

Current Mood: busy

Well, this was a quiet day too. The House reruns keep playing on CTV Drama upstairs, and for all the trouble I went to over the years to accumulate the DVD collection I currently have, I can't be bothered to watch a one of them yet.

No, for me it's Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap on Radio One right now.

I may be about to sell another book from my personal library. More on that tomorrow, maybe.

Rereading

dduane's Star Trek: TNG novel "Intellivore" and geeking out a bit - again - over the star name-dropping. Looking up "B Hydri" via SIMBAD is bringing up nothing. Should I go to AAVSO?

Current Mood: nerdy

This stuff catches my attention.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/radio-burst-proxima-centauri-09139.html

And then there's this other thing from Tau Boötis:

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/lofar-radio-emission-tau-bootis-planetary-system-09161.html

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: Home-for-now

The full hour.

Warning for language, if you give a damn about that.

Some of you need this. Right effing now.

Current Mood: angry

Since multi-stellar systems became a plot point in Star Trek: Picard's first season...I've been curious. I doubt that I'm going to have the time to explore deep-space astronomy to the degree that I want, and even so...

Kevin Jardine put out word via Twitter about these two systems - both five-star systems, literally speaking - getting some attention. I don't know if either system has planets orbiting any of their components, but the research paper's interesting to look at.

Printing it out for later reading. Meanwhile, back to the job search.

Sidebar:

For Kappa Tucanae...

http://starmap.whitten.org/index.php?x_c=30&y_c=-30&z_c=-50&xy_zoom=20&z_zoom=20&m_limit=&select_star=4106&image_type=normal&image_size=2000&max_line=0&trek_names=1

http://galaxymap.org/dr2/index.html?search=Kappa%20Tucanae&tileset=SGD&distanceEstimator=bj

For Xi Scorpii...

http://starmap.whitten.org/index.php?x_c=70&y_c=0&z_c=0&xy_zoom=40&z_zoom=200&m_limit=20&select_star=86902&select_center=on&image_type=normal&image_size=2000&max_line=0&trek_names=1

http://galaxymap.org/dr2/index.html?search=Xi%20Scorpii&tileset=SGD&distanceEstimator=bj

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: The Current on CBC Radio

Kevin Jardine just posted a progress report on his 50 Parsec Map Project today on Twitter. In the course of that report, he notes the proximity of HD 10180 - currently known to host at least six planets and suspected to host as many as three more - to Achernar/alpha Eridani.

Now, where does it get interesting for Star Trek fans?

Here, per a Memory Alpha entry caused by a reference in dialogue in the Original Series episode "Wolf in the Fold", written by Robert Bloch. (Yes, that Robert Bloch. The Psycho scriptwriter. And yes, that episode - adapted by Bloch from his 1943 Jack the Ripper-inspired short story is one of many that we can now see as Problematic in ways that were not clear to the eyes of the dominant factions of American society in the late 1960's.)

Anyway, Star Charts and Stellar Cartography put Achernar inside Romulan-held territories from 2161 - the end of the Earth-Romulan War - to at least 2387, and the destruction of Romulus and Remus that year. HD 10180 would be close enough - 15 light-years distant, per the planetarium-'ware Celestia - to be considered another Romulan holding.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: "Star Trek - Discovery" anthem - Jeff Russo (with elements by Alexander Courage)

Noting another essay from Phil Plait, this time about Fomalhaut's supposed planet...or is it an pre-planetary formation belt of material?

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/fomalhauts-planet-may-actually-be-a-dust-cloud-from-a-giant-asteroid-collision

And how many stars are components of the Fomalhaut system, anyway? I've read reports of anywhere from two to six stars being part of the system, and that doesn't seem to have been sorted out yet. As of this writing, the Wikipedia article devoted to that star's been rewritten to argue for a trinary. Fomalhaut B is AKA "TW Piscis Austrini", Fomalhaut C AKA LP 876-10.

Oh, something else I got pointed out to me via Wikipedia: the Castor Moving Group. Didn't know about that before, either!

Current Mood: nerdy

And there's much more than the features marked out on that image file as well!

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200329.html

This barely begins to scratch the surface of what we know in that corner of "our" sky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_in_Orion

More on other topics as the day continues...

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Ottawa Morning on CBC Radio

Since the system got name-checked on Picard this week, it seems a good moment to work up a blog entry linking to relevant informations about it.

SIMBAD:

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=alf%20Dor

Kevin Jardine's Galaxy Map:

http://galaxymap.org/dr2/index.html?search=Alpha%20Doradus&tileset=SGD&distanceEstimator=bj

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Doradus

Jed Whitten's Starmap Site:

http://starmap.whitten.org/index.php?x_c=-10&y_c=-130&z_c=0&xy_zoom=30&z_zoom=150&m_limit=&select_star=15002&image_type=normal&image_size=1500&max_line=0&trek_names=1

Current Mood: busy

Canadian Film and TV Unions' relations with the federal government and the political parties trying to run it:

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2019/07/25/canadas-film-and-tv-workers-launch-support-campaign-ahead-of-octobers-federal-election.html

TESS' first year of operations as a planet-hunting observatory in orbit:

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/07/26/tess-concluding-first-year-of-observations/

What's up with the O-Train Confederation Line?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/lrt-ready-trial-run-now-what-1.5224647

More later...

Current Mood: busy

Looking at this entry on Wikipedia at the moment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Georg_Wilhelm_von_Struve

That's the profile they currently have on the guy whose binary-star catalogue listings got prefixed as "Σ" when cited in articles in Astronomy, Sky and Telescope and Deep Sky Quarterly going back to my teenage years. I don't pretend to know all the star catalogues that have ever been published, and I doubt that I ever will. Even in this age of Wikipedia and SIMBAD.

But, while re-reading My Enemy, My Ally once more, I note that one of the "landmarks" of the story is a system catalogued as "Σ 285 Trianguli". And I find that SIMBAD doesn't really keep track of which stars were known by Struve catalogue numbers these days for whatever reason(s), but if there's a way to nail down which catalogues' listings the star is known by these days...?

Oh. If you're interested, here's the catalogue prefixes that Wikipedia currently knows to keep track of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_catalogues

Current Mood: curious

The most recent one had been crashing immediately upon start-up on my other MacBook (Not Pro), so this might be a serious improvement.

https://twitter.com/GaiaSky_Dev/status/1115608904728113155

Current Mood: nerdy

"The View" is the nickname given this star by designers and players of Elite Dangerous, an online space exploration game.

The star is real enough, but its distance may be up for debate. Elite Dangerous puts it at 1400 ly from Sol, but recent data from GAIA DR2 puts it much further out: 4348 ly, give or take a few hundred.

I'd be interested to know more, but my astronomy skills aren't what they could be...

Current Mood: nerdy

...and then I go back to work tomorrow morning.

Meantime, I'm puzzling over a question of star system placement for Trekkish purposes. Specifically, Hobus.

Noticed in the process of mulling it over, this Memory Beta page. Players of that game are expected to believe that planets orbiting any given star could remain mostly intact (habitability issues notwithstanding) after their host star went supernova?

Courtesy of Jed Whitten's StarMap site, the general neighbourhood of Hobus, reaching 600 lightyears above and below Arbitrary Galactic Equatorial:

http://whitten.org/index.php?x_c=30&y_c=-30&z_c=0&xy_zoom=15&z_zoom=600&m_limit=&select_star=2411&image_type=normal&image_size=2000&max_line=0&trek_names=1

I expect the GAIA DR2 data might make this both easier and harder.