Observe Far-Off Neptune at its Best for the Year #SpaceSaturday
With the fall of Pluto as a planet, Neptune takes the title of the furthest know planet in our solar system. It’s a cold blue sphere that doesn’t have the rings of Saturn, the big red dot of Jupiter, or a silly name. It is well-past the naked-eye range. But On September 16th, Neptune will be in a position to be observed with a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Here’s more from Astronomy Now:
Observers based at mid-northern latitudes have had a very long wait for Neptune to achieve a decent peak altitude. Indeed, not since the late 1940s has Neptune appeared as far north in the sky. It lingered long in the depths of the southern sky for most of the later half of the twentieth-century.
Neptune is a gaseous ice-giant planet with a radius of 24,764 kilometres (15,388 miles), four times wider than Earth though three times smaller than Jupiter. It lies so far away that all amateurs can see through a telescope is its tiny, 2.4”-sized disc. A telescope in the 100–150mm (four- to six-inch) class, operating at around 100x, is powerful enough to resolve Neptune’s tiny blue-green disc. Unfortunately, even a large telescope struggles to glean much detail on its rather bland disc, though high resolution planetary imagers should have more success, especially when using infra-red filters in conjunction with an infra-red sensitive camera.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Milton Survival Issue: Two New Python Versions, Visualize WiFi and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
