07-25-2019, 03:44 PM
HOTPE - thank you. I don't have too much to add. It'll be faint but the best chance to spot it is 2nd August as it will be at its brightest, the moon will be new and it's well before sunrise. The two other occasions where it's at its brightest (30th July and 1st August) are in twilight, so suspect it won't be visible to the naked eye.
As for the light sail, there is a project (mentioned in the article) to send a stream of nano-probes to Alpha Cen using an array of ground-based lasers. The technology is probably about 20 years away, so with a travel time of ~20 years and another 4 years to send the signals back to Earth, we're looking at possibly 45-50 years before we can expect to see close-up images of the star system.
As for the light sail, there is a project (mentioned in the article) to send a stream of nano-probes to Alpha Cen using an array of ground-based lasers. The technology is probably about 20 years away, so with a travel time of ~20 years and another 4 years to send the signals back to Earth, we're looking at possibly 45-50 years before we can expect to see close-up images of the star system.