NASA’s New Horizons is so far away, its seeing stars from new angles
These anaglyph images can be viewed with red-blue stereo glasses (or 3D glasses) to reveal the stars' distance from their backgrounds. On the left is Proxima Centauri and on the right is Wolf 359. (NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/)Hurtling through interstellar space 4.3 billion miles from home, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has traveled so far that it has a unique perspective of the stars. On April 22nd and 23rd, the interplanetary space probe used its long-range telescopic camera to capture images of two stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. The images, which took 6.5 hours to beam back to earth, indicate that the stars appear to be located in different places in the sky than when we observe them from Earth. “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...