5 ms·

This makes me wonder, do extra-solar space probes need to adjust their star charts to account for a change in their related location, or is the change negligibl

• icegreentea2 3y ago
  If you knew you were going extra-solar, you would want to pick guide stars with minimal/immeasurable parallax over the scale traveled. A naive worst case scenario would be not negligible. For example, Proxima Centuri has a measured stellar parallax (from Earth - so across a 2AU distance) of ~0.8 arcseconds. We were able to measure that parallex from the ground by the mid 19th century. Abusing small angle approximations, that implies that each ~arcsecond of shift you encounter could potentially mislocate you by ~2AU...
  • dylan604 3y ago
    close enough for horseshoes, on a cosmological scale. pretty much a ringer!
• wolfram74 3y ago
  As others have noted, depends on which stars you're using as reference points. We've done some interesting long-distance parallax stuff at the demo scale, new horizons took some pictures last year to that effect. https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/nasas-new-horizons-conducts-the-first-interstellar-parallax-experiment/ https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/nasas-new-horizons-conduct...
• dylan604 3y ago
  Have you ever seen the 3D views of where stars in the constellations are in relation to each other? These kinds of videos are something that I think really helps esoteric concepts become much more widely understood, and I'm constantly jealous of them from the position of going to school vs "back then" when I was in school. Here's Orion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD-5ZOipE48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD-5ZOipE48