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When you enter into any new area of science, you almost always find
yourself with a baffling new language of technical terms to learn before you can converse with the experts. This is certainly true in astronomy both in terms of terms that refer to the cosmos and terms that describe the tools of the trade, the most prevalent being the telescope. So to get us off of first base, let’s define some of the key terms that pertain to telescopes to help you be able to talk to them more intelligently. The first area of specialization in telescopes has to do with the types of telescopes people use. The three designs of telescopes that most people use are the Refractor, the Reflector and the Schmidt Cassegrain telescope. The refractor telescope uses a convex lens to focus the light on the eyepiece. The reflector telescope has a concave lens which means it bends in. It uses mirrors to focus the image that you eventually see. The Schmidt Cassegrain telescope uses an involved system of mirrors to capture the image you want to see. A binocular telescope uses a set of telescopes mounted and synchronized so your view of the sky is 3-D. Beyond the basic types, other terms refer to parts of the telescope or to the science behind how telescopes work. Collimation is a term for how well tuned the telescope is to give you a good clear image of what you are looking at. You want your telescope to have good collimation so you are not getting a false image of the celestial body. Aperture is a fancy word for how big the lens of your telescope is. But it’s an important word because the aperture of the lens is the key to how powerful your telescope is. Magnification has nothing to do with it, its all in the aperture.
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Astronomers briefly thought Elon Musk’s car was an asteroid. Here’s why that points to a broader problem
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Seven years after SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s cherry red sports car into orbit around our sun, astronomers unwittingly began paying attention to its movements once again.
Observers spotted and correctly identified the vehicle as it started its extraterrestrial excursion in February 2018 — after it had blasted off into space during the Falcon Heavy rocket’s splashy maiden launch. But more recently, the car spawned a high-profile case of mistaken identity as space observers mistook it for an asteroid.
Several observations of the vehicle, gathered by sweeping surveys of the night sky, were inadvertently stashed away in a database meant for miscellaneous and unknown objects, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
An amateur astronomer noticed a string of data points in January that appeared to fit together, describing the orbit of a relatively small object that was swooping between the orbital paths of Earth and Mars.
The citizen scientist assumed the mystery object was an undocumented asteroid and promptly sent his findings to the MPC, which operates at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a clearinghouse that seeks to catalog all known asteroids, comets and other small celestial bodies. An astronomer there verified the finding.
And thus, the Minor Planet Center logged a new object, asteroid “2018 CN41.”
Within 24 hours, however, the center retracted the designation.
The person who originally flagged the object realized their own error, MPC astronomer Peter Veres told CNN, noticing that they had, in fact, found several uncorrelated observations of Musk’s car. And the center’s systems hadn’t caught the error.
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