Can you please explain stellar parallax to me? I'm "Cornfused".?
408710
Hold your arm out in front of you with your thumb pointed up and look at a distant building (or whatever). Now look at your thumb with one eye,and then the other, going back and forth between the two eyes. The thumb will appear to jump back and forth on the building. This is parallax. If you hold your thumb closer, the jump looks larger and if it is further away, the jump is smaller.\n\nThe same thing happens when you look at nearby stars (thumb) compared to much more distant stars (building) from different ends of the earth's orbit (eyes). The main difference is that the amount of the jump is very small since the star is so far away. It turns out that the angle of the jump is haved if the distance to the star is doubled. By knowing the size of the earth's orbit and the amount of jump, we can determine how far away the star is.
700963
Thank you very much for the link you gave. I read this news yesterday night on Yahoo. I have forgotten about this until you have remind me. Thank you again.  \nIs there any other way for us to view it other than using a telescope? I don't have a telescope.
329379
Greetings,\n\nYou will sometimes see pictures of stars with points, reference to the link below.  The gentleman who took the picture placed string in a cross-hair pattern over the objective (the opposite end from the eyepiece) to make the points of the stars.  When he was asked why he does this Mr. Russel stated that he just like the way it looked.\n\nThe points on stars in most photographs are generally derived from either slight overexposure or the telescope being out of collimation slightly.\n\n-matt
1122982
Debatable. It does just look like a bunch of rocks...what is stranger though, is why NASA keeps doctoring the raw images before releasing them to the public? A good example of this is the 'true' colour of mars. It's not a 'Red Planet' at all-it has a blue sky for one and why are some things masked over? Hmm...
820789
It is French... and it is not good. It looks like a translator was used.\n\nIt seems like it is supposed to be something like this: In place of taking certain images from the star. It has put more on it. Ok at I can say I at least tried.\n\nDoes not make much sense.
905593
zee_prime's got a good answer there.  Very precise and correct.  I'm gonna take another approach to it, though, and try to make it intelligible for those who don't have a lot of math or physics behind them.  My answer'll be correct, too, it'll just use smaller words--and more of them!  (-;  \n\n~~\nPARSEC:\nA parsec is a standard unit of astronomical distance equal to 3.26 light years. It is also the distance a star has to be from earth so that its parallax is one arcsecond.\n\nOuch!  What the heck does all that mean? \n\nFirst off, we need to know about "parallax".  Parallax is easy.  It's just the change in the apparent position of an object when your position changes. \n\nA great example is easy to show: hold a thumb up in front of your face, about 20 centimeters away. Close your left eye, and move your thumb so that while looking through your right eye it is lined up with some distant object like a tree. Now close your right eye and look at your thumb through your left eye. See how it no longer lines up with the tree? That's because the angle formed by your eye, your thumb and the tree has changed. That angle is called the parallax angle.\n\nParallax angle depends on two things: (1) how far apart your eyes are (the baseline), and (2) how far away your thumb is. If your eyes are really far apart, the angle gets bigger. If the thumb is held farther away, the angle gets smaller. \n\nWhen you are in a car and you look at trees nearby, they appear to race past you. Far away trees appear to move slowly. This is because for the nearby trees the parallax angle is large and so it changes rapidly if the car moves a little bit. Trees farther away appear to change less as the car moves along. Their parallax angle is small. \n\nThis parallax method has been used for over a hundred years to find the distances to nearby stars. The Earth has an orbit about 300 million kilometers across. That's a long baseline! Even nearby stars will appear to change position due to parallax when you have such a long baseline. \n\nAstronomers needed some sort of unit to measure this change in position. What they decided was to make a standard unit for the distance. A star at that distance would change position by 1 arcsecond due to parallax. The distance is 3.26 light years, and is abbreviated parsec for PARallax SECond. (Ummm, one arcsecond is 1/3600 of a degree--which comes from 360 degrees of a full circle.) \n\nStars farther away than one parsec would shift by less than 1 arcsecond, and closer stars by more. The nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, which is about 4.3 light years away, or 1.3 parsecs away. That means that even the closest star has a parallax less than an arcsecond. Stars out to a distance of about 100 parsecs have had their distance measured this way. \n\nTo imagine how small a shift that really is, imagine someone standing 125 miles (about 200 kilometers) away from you and then moving to the left by one centimeter. That is the same shift! \n\nGot it?
704747
I live in Washington State USA & have the same problem as you trying  to observe the stars in this land of clouds. Here is the best way. Always have your astronomical gear at the ready to transport to your favorite dark sky, higher altitude observing site...a hatchback car is nice & shouldn't call for a larger vehicle. On the spur of the moment when the skies clear, be on your way to observe! You must do it this way in a cloudy clime. If you plan for future days to observe, you will lose 75% of your nights because of clouds. Yes, this means that astronomy observing must be highly prized in your life. Don't worry. It will pay off. You will have viewpoints, emotionally, mentally & literally in your life to develop a powerful philosophy. Get ready to be surprised by the universe & life. As best you can, share the stars with a friend(who also can take off at a moments notice...ha ha ha).
37735
Stars are like our Sun. Not comets at all. Comets are dirty, big snowballs that have no light at all. The twinkling comes from heat radiating from earth which makes the light spectrum shift in different colours. Symbols that represent something doesn't often look like the original. Take the symbol for a heart for example. But it's easy! :) Try to draw a immensly huge boiling, burning piece of gas that throws tons of particles out from it in lightning speed and see if anyone understands what you drew. Now try to make it into a character that you can type on a keyboard :)
44346
This is a good question, and something that people are still working on. This is in general a complicated question, but I will try to give you a couple of ideas about where to start. \n\nOne method is the method of parallax; if you hold your finger in front of your face, and move your head back and forth, the apparent motion of the scene behind your finger relative to your finger tells you something about the relative distances involved. If you know how far you moved your head, you know even more. \n\nAnother method uses the doppler principle and Hubble's law. Stars that are moving away from us end up with their colors being shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. Stars moving towards us have their colors shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum by the Doppler effect. Hubble's law, which has been verified a few ways, is that the faster a star is moving away from us, the further away it is. \n\nAnother thing that goes into these estimates are the laws of gravity and motion, like Kepler's laws. We assume that the objects we are looking at have to obey these physical laws (or sometimes more accurate ones like those stemming from general relativity).\n\nOf course, sometimes mistakes are made and later information forces scientists to revise their estimates. But hopefully after a few years, the estimates about distances in space become more and more accurate.
970358
Your life may look like crud at the moment, but it will improve.\n\nSadly, the stars suggest that the cookie was wrong. Those clouds are settling in.\n\nGood luck!
1145113
This should help you:  http://www.le.ac.uk/physics/faulkes/web/stars/o_st_overview.html
519781
OMG, definitely...when was the last time you looked at the sky?  Sun, stars, rainbows, moon.  Relax and begin to enjoy the things that are truly free.  Dont agree on the subjects of friendship, love, etc.  They are usually outrageously priced in the emotional category.
772042
The light could have been better than usual - I've spent evenings in the desert out here stargazing and seen around that many some nights...given the number of satellites up there, not to mention other junk, I'd say that you had a good viewing, but that it's probably nothing out of the ordinary.
676578
It is where you want it.\n\n"Second Star to the right, and straight on til morning"  is how you get there.\n\n"If you close your eyes, you may see a pool of lovely pale colors. If you squeeze them tighter, the pool will take on different shapes, and the colors will become brighter - so bright, that in a moment they'll go on fire. And in that moment, just before they do, you will see Never Land."  Is how you can see it, if only just for a moment.
574884
I thought everyone saw those thingies!!  Are they unusual cause I've seen them all my life? It's like, you see them out of the corner of your eye but when you try to focus on them, they move away.\n\nSeriously, I thought it was normal!  I have 20/20 vision, BTW.
330623
The spiky shape you perceive is due to imperfections in your own eye. Twinkling, which is due to turbulence in the atmosphere, also adds to the spiky look.\nThe spikes you see in some photographs are due to diffraction from parts of the telescope used to take the pictures.
217820
Not often enough. When I was homeless living in my car, I would study the constellations, try to remember the name of each star in Orion. I had a star chart. If it were not for thieves, I would live in a tent again, watch the possums and raccoons come out at night, feed and watch the birds by day, and stare into the stars at night. My dream home though would have a lighthouse top with windows all around and a telescope. Enjoy your time outdoors, and try to learn the names of as many stars as you can, for me. I don't know when or if I'll ever get the time to enjoy them like I once did again.