celestiary VS aladin-lite

hmm.. right.. if the angle of deflection is low and the star is close enough that its light and deflected light show up very close together. My intuition is this is not the case... remember Eddington's test of relativity was for deflection of starlight around our Sun. We're really close, yet it was observable with the moon obscuring the main sunlight.

the article[1] says "For light grazing the surface of the sun, the approximate angular deflection is roughly 1.75 arcseconds." So, what, we take the arcsin of 1.75 arcseconds to get the apparent divergence ratio, and multiply that by distance to stars? As long as that value is larger than the aperture of your camera, then you don't get competing light? Or maybe you'd need something like the TESS satellite, where you have a screen specially created to only allow certain beam transits into your detector.

I've worked with a nearest 10k stars database (https://celestiary.github.io/#sun) and the edge of that is about 2k light years away. So very roughly, let's say there's 1/8th of those in a certain direction... so you get.. what? some 2k sample points towards some distant object? But really most of them wouldn't deflect that object's light towards Earth, but usually over or undershoot.

Don't really know how to put these together quickly, but is giving me some good food for thought!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

Thanks! Hmm.. not sure about that. I'm trying to jam it all around but can't get it to lock like that. If you can repro I'd appreciate a bug report! https://github.com/celestiary/web/issues

My own webgl port of Celestia, which allows zoom-out from Earth to the scale of nearest 10k stars:

https://celestiary.github.io/

Hmm, the demo has a little "live video" window of a rover's view from the Moon's surface. This seems like a good integration point for a web-based space simulator. I will be doing just this!

https://github.com/pablo-mayrgundter/celestiary/issues/19

2MASS colored

Aladin (Lite) has a bunch of survey data in various wavelengths and the options to overlay the source names from SIMBAD or GAIA.

And I might be worth looking at other sky viewers, such as Aladin Lite or the Legacy Survery viewer, often the images are cleaner for other surveys, e.g. in unWISE vs 2MASS.

Most of the sky is not full of nebulae, sure, but if anywhere would be dense enough to completely cut off visible light, the galactic center would be that place. And indeed it is! See for yourself - in https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinLite/ search the "galactic center" and see how it looks in DSS (visible light) 2MASS (near-infrared) and finally WISE (mid-infrared) - as you escape the dust clouds, the sky turns from a dark splotchy patch to a blindingly bright core.

The galactic center is invisible in optical due to dust. If you open Aladin Lite ( https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinLite/ ) and plug in Sagittarius A*, you will find a tiny handful of stars in front of a dense dust cloud. Switching the image source to DECaPS, you can see a faint red glow as the cloud becomes less opaque in very-near-infrared. Moving just a bit further into infrared with 2MASS, you can see the galactic center showing up in the near-mid infrared bands H and K (green/red). By the time you get to proper mid-infrared observatories like WISE, the entire galactic center is a blinding white, saturating every single band.

I've always liked this sky atlas site for looking up celestial objects. You can zoom in/ out and look up almost any 'static' object (stars, galaxies, nebulae, clusters, etc). OP's object is NGC 891 which you can directly search.

Check out the Aladin sky atlas. Can pretty much type in any constellation/ star/ nebula/ galaxy, it'l center to it then you can zoom in.