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

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

This is the first time this kind of "parallax effect" has been achieved using a spacecraft. 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.

The 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, the 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, Colorado.

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

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The New Horizon spacecraft on April 22 and 23, turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of the 'closest' stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, revealing how they appear in different places than we see from Earth. “No human eye can detect these shifts,” Stern said. 

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

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

"The New Horizons spacecraft is truly a mission of firsts, and this demonstration of stellar parallax is no different," said Kenneth Hansen, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 

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