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Losing Polaris

Freff

By Freff
in The Astro Lounge

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Freff

Freff

Posted
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My garden is south facing with our scope setup just a few yards from the rear of the building. As it is I can just see Polaris enough above the main roof to align the mount. Unfortunately, at present this is the only convenient place to view from.

How long do you think it will be before I lose Polaris behind the roof, making it impossible to do a polar alignment.

Hope this makes sense, I've been trying to use different astro software to figure it out but getting nowhere. :D Many thanks.

Tony

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notepad09

notepad09

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If you can see Polaris now, you should be able to see it forever. Well, until the Earth's inherent wobble tips the north pole away from Polaris, but there's no need to worry about that for a few thousand years. :D

See, Polaris is polar aligned (as you pointed out), so for Polaris to move on a day-by-day basis, the north pole would also have to move as much. And that won't happen.

The only thing of concern is that Polaris does have a tiny bit of wobble to it each night, but unless it's already half hidden by the roof it shouldn't be an issue.

Hope this answers your question!

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yesyes

yesyes

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It's not so much the seasons but the time of day. Polaris is about 1 degree away from the celestial north pole. Do during the course of 24 hours Polaris describes a circle with a 1 degree radius around the pole. That's also the reason why in a polar scope the small circle that Polaris is supposed to go into is slightly off-centre by 1 degree.

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Freff

Freff

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Yesyes thanks for that.

I realise the axis "wobble" discribes a circle hence the calibration of the polar scope. But for some reason I had in my head that a small drift occured during the year.

I'm glad it doesn't, I have polaris at all times. :)

Tony

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yesyes

yesyes

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It probably does drift a bit. Nothing is *really* always at the same place. And Polaris seems to be coming toward us at 17km/s. But at these distances it would take several generations to even notice a difference. Nothing to worry about in our lifetime. :)

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Skybrowser

Skybrowser

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We are all doomed indeed and M31 is on it's way to splatter us much faster than Richard Hammond's Porsche. Doomed - we're all doomed...in a billion years, give or take a billion.

By the way billion is a HUGE number. If you started counting in seconds from 1 to 1 billion - do you know how long it would take? OK smart alecs, a billion seconds which is, in fact, almost 32 YEARS. Try it....where's that calculator?

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Luke

Luke

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A while back I thought it would be lights out when galaxies collide, game over. But I saw someone on the telly a few weeks back say that actually colliding galaxies are not as game over as you might think, because the relative distances between the stars is so huge that it's very unlikely for most systems for things to come close enough to each other to matter that much.

At least that was what I think was being said!

Come on, Andromeda, bring it on!!

And the Andromeda galaxy is also coming towards us. One way of the other we are doomed.
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