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Humans have been gazing at stars and other objects in the night sky for thousands of years, as is evident in the naming of many constellations, notably the largely Greek names used today. Hans Lippershey , a German-Dutch spectacle maker, is commonly credited as being the first to invent the optical telescope .
Human presence in outer space began with the first launches of artificial object in the mid 20th century, and has increased to the point where Earth is orbited by a vast number of artificial objects and the far reaches of the Solar System have been visited and explored by a range of space probes.
The human eye discards what it sees from split-second to split-second, but photographic film gathers more and more light for as long as the shutter is open. The resulting image is permanent, so many astronomers can use the same data. It is possible to see objects as they change over time (SN 1987A is a spectacular example).
The same happens with objects purposefully placed in space, such as satellites. Read more: ... A 6.5 magnitude is generally the dimmest object the human eye can see. The mini-moon's magnitude is ...
In astronomy, seeing is the degradation of the image of an astronomical object due to turbulence in the atmosphere of Earth that may become visible as blurring, twinkling or variable distortion. The origin of this effect is rapidly changing variations of the optical refractive index along the light path
Scientists have seen a powerful explosion from a mysterious, unknown object in space. Researchers do not know where the bright flash came from. But they believe that it may be something entirely ...
Distance measurements in astronomy have historically been and continue to be confounded by considerable measurement uncertainty. In particular, while stellar parallax can be used to measure the distance to nearby stars, the observational limits imposed by the difficulty in measuring the minuscule parallaxes associated with objects beyond our galaxy meant that astronomers had to look for ...
Hence, they are different from optical illusions, which are caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that (loosely said) appears to differ from reality. Because entoptic images are caused by phenomena within the observer's own eye, they share one feature with optical illusions and hallucinations: the observer cannot ...