6 ms·
Astronomical time lapses are fascinating and there should be more.
by tocs3 9mo ago
Astronomical time lapses are fascinating and there should be more.
- dylan604 9mo agoyou are free to create your own as NASA observatories release their imagery free to the public as they were paid for with the public's money from taxes. the problem with creating timelapse videos would be if the platform viewed the same object at least annually to see the changes.
- tocs3 9mo agoI have often thought about looking through archives but has not been easy for me (don' know how to) search though years of data for multiple views (years apart) of the same objects. I have been wondering about binary star systems. I think some of them are human scale orbital periods.
- dylan604 9mo agoI did this for SOHO to create timelapse footage of a specific filter. It was the first time I weaponized the use of cUrl (I guess officaly making me a hacker at the same time). The SOHO archive is very easy to parse as it has a very structured folder layout. I would hope that the other platform archives are similar.
- zelon88 9mo agoPart of the reason you don't see them more is because commercial satellite mega-constellations (like Starlink) work against long exposure times by literally clouding and brightening our view of space. (1) 1) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09759-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09759-5
- dylan604 9mo agoNot really sure how this has anything to do with space based platforms like Chandra (which is x-ray) and Hubble which is well above Starlink. Also, Starlink is only a couple of years old to be problematic, but the ground based observatories have had clean skies for decades before. This just really feels like someone trying to interject a pet peeve. Whether the peeve is valid or not, it's not the problem here.
- zelon88 9mo agoIt's relevant because ground based satellites add observational capacity. If a ground based telescope can't get a good view, that's when you queue up Chandra or James Webb (Hubble is not the same type of telescope, and it's workload is not interchangeable). Astronomers have thousands of interesting things they would like to point their telescopes at. There are thousands of capable ground stations that could take the easy targets, and only 2 x-ray satellites which should be used only for the highest value targets where absolute clarity and resolution is required. But if you start obstructing those ground stations, the workload must be taken over by just 2 satellites. Ground stations are valued because they help solve the capacity planning problem. More usable telescopes === more observation time. Having more ground stations frees up the 2 satellite telescopes for truly stunning shots.
- dylan604 9mo ago> Chandra or James Webb (Hubble is not the same type of telescope Chandra and James Webb are not the same type of telescope either. How is this relevant?
- ianburrell 9mo agoHubble is actually the same altitude as Starlink, 340 mi. There have been proposals to boost Hubble to higher altitude so it doesn't reenter next decade. But since Hubble doesn't look towards the Earth, it won't see as many as from Earth.
- sawjet 9mo agoAstronomical objects that visibly change in human timescales are pretty rare. A naked-eye visible supernova remnant was one of the first clues that challenged the idea that the heavens were static, permanently set by God.
- dylan604 9mo agoOne of my favorite examples of astronomical timelapse is the motion of objects around SagA*. That I think might be the first example I saw. I'm not sure if they set out to make multiple observations specifically to map this motion or if it was something saw they could do from existing data. S