That is tremendous, thanks for sharing. Congratulations to all the New Horizons folks! I look forward to our upcoming fly-by of the object that caused the occultation. With five different observations of the occultation I would imagine that they will be able to get some decent information on the size/shape of the object.

I have seen the transit of Venus but to see this a team find an occlusion that only occurs for milliseconds is is awe inspiring! Congrats to the people who made this happen!

> "A primitive solar system object that’s more four billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) away passed in front of a distant star as seen from Earth." Did they forget a "than" after "more" and before "four"? Or is it "a mere"?

should have been "more than". "Mere" does not make sense with a huge figure such as "four billion miles" IMO.

I think "mere" kind of makes sense at these scales? I mean the nearest known star (Proxima Centauri) is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. (Guess it depends on whether you're using "American" Billions or not...)

Given that you're talking about an object in our solar system, I think almost all astronomers would not use "mere" or parsecs.

Ah, missed the "in our solar system" bit :).

What are "American" Billions? I'm an American and AFAIK our 'billions' is the same as anyone else's.

I think it's answered by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

(I can't vouch for the specific wording, but search for "American".)

They just fixed it on their article. It is "more than".

Agreed. Four billion miles could be nothing in space-talk though, as most distances I see are in light-years.

Reading this I wondered that if NASA's New Horizon's team had actually struck gold, could they use the money in their budget to do more Kuiper Belt probes?

Or would it be diverted to the Shelby Launch System?

For a moment there, I was wondering what NASA was doing prospecting for gold in Argentina.

Can someone explain why they had to set up a temporary telescope in Argentina to get data from a probe? If the article explained it, I missed that part.

They used Earth based telescopes to find a more accurate information about MU69. In order for New Horizons to get good pictures they need to know exactly where it is, how big it is, and how reflective it is.

Ah, thank you for clearing that up.

NoJS users are becoming like vegans and arch users.

Not sure how it adds much to the conversation to point out that if you turn off the thing 95%+ of users have turned on something doesn't work.

The users already decided this one, I don't entirely understand it either but reality is what it is either way.

Arch Linux? Why? Though, I did switch from Gentoo to Arch, so I suppose I could be one of those Linux Vegans...

Agree here, I don't understand why arch users would be the target of that comment.

I switched from Ubuntu, and I find the experience pretty similar, by and large. Nobody screams about Ubuntu users.

If anything, by stereotype, I would expect Arch users to be "do it yourselfers". They are the "5%" of users by choice, and they figure out a way to make it work. In contrast to the GGP comment who wants everything to "just work" for him even though he's chosen to break things.

Seems to me like they're exact opposites.

I also don't think the arch stereotype holds true, anymore. I haven't had to fix a broken system or do any manual-update stuff in the couple of years I've been running arch. I think it has much broader appeal at this point.

>gentoo to arch

He's already too far gone lads, just let him go in peace

I think NoJS users are the opposite of vegans. Vegans scream that "Not eating animals works for me, maybe it works for you too!" rather than "Without meat my body does not work, could you change the nutritional requirements for humans?"

And there are 5 times as many people who get personally upset about another person's preferences to the extent that they blow right by the part about "...not why I'm writing this" and the actual comment that the poster made in order to post their anti-vegan and, for some reason, Arch Linux user screed.

Did you try rebooting your humour module?

I was riffing on the common joke about "How do you tell someone is a vegan? You don't need to, they'll tell you".

You forgot Haskell as well.

That is like saying "most of our customers use the drive thru, so we will COMPLETELY CLOSE our restaurant to foot traffic".

A hybrid approach is best, especially when this article is literally text and some photos.

I looked, figures I can find for the UK show that 98.7% of people have javascript enabled.

If I ran a restaurant and 98.7% of my revenue came from the drive through I'd seriously consider shutting the foot traffic part down.

Yea but having a hybrid doesn't just take care of that 1.3%, it tremendously helps those that are blind [1], the huge smear with different versions of JS, those that come in on mobile with JS enabled and then flick it off because your site broke for their random configuration of screen size and mobile browser, etc.

Finally, that's the UK. Students in India trying to learn about space may not have the internet speeds we're used to, and might browse with JS disabled because that's the literally the only way they can afford to without blowing data caps.

Anyway, you'll never catch me doing it unless I'm testing my own site, but it's definitely forward-thinking and kinda polite to have SOME sort of fallback for people without JS enabled.

[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57340/percentage-of-s...

Accessibility is way more important (to me) than noJS.

Given infinite resources I'd do all three but the with JS experience and accessibility matters more (to me).

Nobody is asking any miraculous things. Merely a dump of article contents without any formatting effort on webdesigner's part would do. Us "nojs vegans" aren't picky. Don't even need pictures, just the meat (I'm sure a pun of some sort could be made here) of the page.

I don't think that's unreasonable, given that the meat here is just plain text, something that web has been capable of delivering years before your javascript crutch became widely available.

> your javascript crutch became widely available.

Bit harsh, my personal blog has zero javascript.

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be a personal "your" aimed at you specifically, but rather than a general one.

No worries. For what it's worth I think 2Mb of JS to load text and picture is bonkers as well.