This animation details Pluto’s path through the night sky as it reverses from retrograde (westward) motion to direct (eastward) motion.
What started a month ago as a fun little look at Pluto really took on a life of its own! This animated image represents many weeks of collaboration to map the progress of Pluto through our night sky. The ad-hoc collaboration team was brought together on the Solar System Imaging & Processing subforum on Cloudy Nights. Since starting the venture in the first week of September, we managed to battle our weather and equipment to come up with a nice little sequence.
A link to the original conversation and additional images:
Ad-Hoc Pluto Sky Path CollaborationIn this animation, each individual Pluto image is the result of an observation by a member (or multiple members) of the team. Images were registered to the background star field and the representation of Pluto is from the original image. This keeps an honest traceability back to the photons that left Pluto.
Joint work contributors:
Kevin Beverage
Damien CannaneDarin EvansJason GuenzelDJ Hanson
Sven HoffmannBig thanks to Darin for coordinating this at the start. It was a fun one, and probably not finished yet.
Enjoy!
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