Reminds me of when I found out that someone at Goddard was teaching the spiders to do Black Hole graphics:

Jon Lomberg is also a great illustrator. His Milky Way galaxy was beautiful and we used it (with his permission) as part of the background of a poster we did for the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) more than 25 years ago. It's still on my office wall right behind me.

A new interstellar dust instrument (called IDEX) is launching this September on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). It is mostly observing dust that is roughly stationary with regard to the Very Local Interstellar Medium. I am DPI of IMAP. imap.princeton.edu/spacecraft/i...

Anybody who went to Caltech (or spent any time there) has to have Real Genius as #1 (δei).

Thanks. That is an interesting paper. I'm going to have to spend some more time with it.

Found the distant velocity (58 km/s), much larger than the proper motion (maybe 13.2 km/s, but there is considerable variation in different calculations). Still needs to be subtracted to get an accurate direction for the "source" of 3I/ATLAS.

Is there a plot of the 3I/ATLAS origin on the celestial sphere? Also, I see that the perihelion speed is ~68 km/s. What was it's original speed? I'm just curious about what's in that direction (after removing the Sun's proper motion).

I know about hyperbolic orbits, but it always struck me as odd. Would you say that 3I/ATLAS is orbiting the Sun? It is the continuation of the set of eccentricities, but by that definition, all nearby stars are, to some precision, in hyperbolic orbits around the Sun (as is everything).

Can you really call it an orbit? Isn't more accurately a trajectory?

Yes, and obviously so for anyone who has looked at SN shells. It is incredibly dishonest of the original poster to not say so.

Nothing but Imperial units for me 🙂

I love a lot of these books, but none of them is as good as Lord of Light - Zelazny.