NASA's 'New Horizons' spacecraft sends back images of stars from its Parallax Experiment

NASA’s New Horizons craft has captured pictures of nearby stars that appear from its unique vant point - about 4.3 billion miles from Earth. Interestingly stars appear to be in different positions than one could see from Earth. 

This is first time this kind of "parallax effect" has been achieved using a craft. Scientists have been using this “parallax effect" for a long time. This effect depicts how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations in order to measure distances to stars.

scientists at NASA said that one can imitate this by holding a finger about an arm's length and watch it jump back and forth when you view it successively with each eye, release by NASA stated.

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“It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Coloro.

“And that has allowed us to do something that h never been accomplished before — to see nearest stars visibly displaced on sky from positions we see m on Earth", Stern said.

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New Horizon craft on April 22 and 23, turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of 'closest' stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, revealing how y appear in different places than we see from Earth. “ human eye can detect se shifts,” Stern said. 

When New Horizons ims are matched with pictures of same stars taken on same dates by telescopes on Earth, parallax shift is instantly visible. combination produces a 3D view of stars “floating” in front of ir background star fields.

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 “ New Horizons experiment provides largest parallax baseline ever me -- over 4 billion miles -- and is first demonstration of an easily observable stellar parallax,” said Tod Lauer, New Horizons science team member from National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astromy Research Laboratory who coordinated parallax demonstration. 

" New Horizons craft is truly a mission of firsts, and this demonstration of stellar parallax is different," said Kenneth Hansen, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Hequarters in Washington. 

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