EarthSky Community Photos

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Steven Bellavia
Mattituck, New York
06/24/2019

Equipment Details:

Small refracting telescope and a cooled astronomy camera.

Image Details:

[Dwarf] planet Pluto was imaged on two separate nights ... I'm submitting 2 images, one from June 24 and one from June 27. You can see that Pluto has moved in front of the star background between those 2 nights. Most of the motion you see is actually from the Earth, not Pluto, since our motion changes our perspective of the much-closer Pluto against the backdrop of the much-farther stars. (Pluto is approximately 40 AU's from Earth, while most of the stars we can see with our eyes range from 250,000 to over 100 million AU's away).

See the June 27 Pluto image here: https://earthsky.org/earthsky-community-photos/entry/18066

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