Colin Stuart 🔭

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The lobster-inspired Einstein Probe is now in my Museum of Cosmic Curiosities.

It’s a growing collection of strange and profound artefacts from the history of astronomy and space exploration.

museum.colinstuart.net

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Unlike human eyes, lobster eyes reflect light instead of bending it.

By copying the microscopic structure inside a lobster’s eye, astronomers can focus faint X-ray light across a vast field of view.

Image: Shizhang Ma et al

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The Einstein Probe is an X-ray telescope built by China with ESA involvement.

It can scan nearly the entire night sky in just three Earth orbits, which demands an exceptionally wide field of view.

To achieve this, it uses lobster-eye optics.

Image: EPSC, NAO/CAS; DSS; ESOP

This telescope has lobster eyes.

Astronomers copied a crustacean’s vision to survey almost the entire sky in X-rays.

All to catch black holes feeding and neutron stars colliding.

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#astronomy

Image: China News Service/Cédric Peneau

That eerie blue glow is Pluto’s atmosphere.

New Horizons was looking at the dwarf planet backlit by the Sun.

Pluto is the only object beyond Neptune with a known atmosphere.

It’s mostly nitrogen, but the pressure is just 1/100,000th of Earth’s.

#astronomy

Image: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

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The first space-ready chessboard is now part of my Museum of Cosmic Curiosities.

A growing collection of strange, ingenious artefacts from the history of astronomy and spaceflight.

museum.colinstuart.net

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The match lasted six hours.

Only 35 moves were played.

It ended in a draw.

You can even replay the game today on chess.com

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And so the first ever chess game in space was played over orbits 141 to 144.

Cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolaev and Vitaly Sevastyanov played in orbit.

Nikolai Kamanin and Victor Gorbatko played on Earth.

Moves were radioed back and forth.

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Klevtsov devised a chessboard with grooves and rails.

The pieces could slide, but they wouldn’t float away.

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Magnets were the obvious solution.

But magnets risked interfering with onboard equipment.

So for the Soyuz-9 mission in 1970, the Soviet space agency turned to engineer Mikhail Klevtsov for an alternative.

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When it comes to chess, weightlessness creates a big problem.

How do you play when nothing stays put?

The pieces would simply float off the board.

Astronauts played a game of chess in orbit against opponents on Earth.

This is the story of bishops, rooks and rocket ships.

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#astronomy #history

Image: Chess Museum of the Central Chess Club, Moscow

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Tewfik belongs to a family of comets known as Kreutz sungrazers.

They are fragments of a larger comet that broke up around 1106.

The Great Comet of 1843, seen here above Tasmania in a painting by Mary Morton Allport, was also a Kreutz.

In 1882, a comet appeared as the Moon blocked out the Sun during a solar eclipse.

As the eclipse took place in Egypt, astronomers named it Tewfik after the local ruler who had offered them such gracious hospitality.

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#astronomy

It happened again in 2015 (with Europa, Callisto and Io).

The next triple eclipse is due in 2032.

Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team

Jupiter experienced a triple solar eclipse in 2004.

The Sun simultaneously cast the shadows of three different moons - Io, Ganymede and Callisto - onto the planet.

Two of those moons can also be seen crossing Jupiter’s face.

Image: NASA/ESA/University of Arizona/E. Karkoschka

#astronomy

Good point.

Maybe they specifically chose Worcester’s because it had enough words.

The 1860 version averaged 58 words a page which is pretty close.

Ball’s book Starland (pp267-269) is the only reference I can find and it’s a bit light on further details.

Dust storms can envelop Mars so comprehensively that only its tallest mountains peek through the gloom.

Left = May 2018
Right = July 2018

Image: NASA

#astronomy

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This ingenious workaround - and the dictionary it relied on - now live in my Museum of Cosmic Curiosities.

It’s a growing collection of strange and profound artefacts from the history of astronomy and space exploration.

museum.colinstuart.net

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Let’s say your new comet was 123 degrees and 45 arcminutes around the sky.

You turn to page 123 and find the 45th word - which Ball says is “constituent” - and send just that word by telegram.

Other astronomers could then reverse the process to recover the co-ordinates.

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The astronomers hatched a clever plan.

They all bought the same edition of Worcester’s dictionary.

Coordinates would be encoded as words.

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So the astronomers turned to the telegram.

But telegraph operators kept mangling messages full of numbers and celestial coordinates.

Something had to change.

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Sending a letter was just too slow.

Irish astronomer Robert Ball put it perfectly:

“Comets often move faster than Her Majesty’s mails.”

The postal service simply couldn’t keep up.

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In the late 19th century, astronomy faced a communications crisis.

Comets are fleeting.

Spot one and you don’t have long to tell your fellow astronomers before it’s gone.

Victorian astronomers used a dictionary to send each other secret messages about comets.

This the story of how - and why - they did it.

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#astronomy #history

This is a baby solar system being born.

Emerging from a womb of interstellar gas, a bright new star glows at the centre.

It’s surrounded by a dusty black band called a protoplanetary disc.

Gravity can sculpt this material into orbiting worlds.

Image: NASA/ESA/L. Ricci (ESO)

#astronomy

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… and Neptune (5 rings).

Jupiter also has rings (4).

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI;

Saturn isn’t the only planet with rings.

Here’s James Webb’s view of Uranus (13 rings) …

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#astronomy

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Fair point about the black drop effect limiting precision.

But compared to pre-1761 values, the 18th-century transits narrowed the AU substantially (~10% -> ~0.5% uncertainty).

Eros later improved it by more than an order of magnitude (~0.03%).

Ring galaxies are ridiculously rare.

They make up less than 0.1% of all galaxies.

And yet, look closely, there’s another ring galaxy in the background.

Image: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

#astronomy