Astronomy Question

PanaGo

PanaGo

Temporal Novice
Hey guys, just a quick question for anyone that may know. Supposedly we had an old photo of a guy walking on a mountain during the night. Could an astronomer tell us what year or ever the month, the photo was taken just by looking at the position of the stars on the sky?

Thank you in advance!
 
Pana,

Sure. At least in theory you can.

Doing it with a photo might be a bit of a problem. You have to have identifiable stars in the photo and the angle between the horizon and star might be inaccurate. If you get lucky and have two planets, say Saturn and Jupiter, in the photo you can measure the angle between them, look at identifiable stars in the background and probably get the date down to a month or two maybe less. It depends on just how accurately you can measure the angles between the bodies in the photo and whether it is an accurate depiction (undistorted) of the sky when it was taken.

Having two planets in the photo is probably to most accurate situation. They will line up in the configuration in the photo quite often - from once every few years to once every 12 years. But when they line up in that configuration it isn't always in the same place on the celectial sphere - the stars in the background will not be the same. So that's the kicker on fixing the right year and month...the alignment of the planets plus the starry background.
 
PanaGo,

You're welcome.

I probably should have added, because this is a time travel board, that it might be very difficult to tell whether or not the photo had been PhotoShopped or GIMP'ed to "paint us a picture" of a would-be time traveler's proof that/he was "there" in 1776 (or whatever year the photo of the sky was supposed to depict).
 
I remember in the "Lost in Space" movie (which nobody saw), they finally figure out where they are as well as *when* they are by looking at star charts. Which isn't to say that we should base real science theorems on what we saw in (bad) movies, but it's clever.

Raul/Mop
 
I did see the movie on HBO(?). You're right, pretty bad movie. It was based on a pretty bad TV show so it was historically accurate. Gotta love Irwin Allen.


But looking at star charts was clever and correct.
 
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