Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy

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Astronomy This page is within the scope of WikiProject Astronomy, which collaborates on articles related to Astronomy on Wikipedia.AstronomyWikipedia:WikiProject AstronomyTemplate:WikiProject AstronomyAstronomy

To-do list for WikiProject Astronomy: edit · history · watch · refresh · Updated 2011-09-13 Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Article requests : Create and develop a requested astronomy article. Copyedit : Check for proper usage of "equinox" vs. "epoch" when discussing the coordinates of astronomical objects. Equinox refers to the precession of the coordinate system used. Epoch refers to the timing of an event such as an observation. Verify : For a minor planet article, compare the infobox data to a JPL Small-Body Database Browser query. For a star article, compare the infobox data to a SIMBAD query.

WikiProject Astronomy was featured in a WikiProject Report in the Signpost on 14 January 2013.

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Merged from old talk Old WikiProject Telescopes talk Topical archives Asteroid redirection 1 Category maintenance 1

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Today is the first light for this major new observatory and its LSST telescope. As it will be getting lots of attention, it's a good time to visit the article and update it as needed, please. Andrew🐉(talk)

They're expecting this survey to generate an average of a million bulletins a day, so this could be a source of a multitude of stubby articles. Praemonitus (talk) 14:51, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh no, don't tempt them! That said, it's probably worth updating the M49 and Triffid Nebula pages to show the new Rubin images: they're really nice. - Parejkoj (talk) 19:40, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to remind everybody that Panstarrs was expecting to find 10 million main belt asteroids and 20,000 Kuiper belt objects during their first ten years (2010-2020).[1] They ended up finding about 5% of that. There are a lot of expectations (VRO promises 5 million MBAs over ten years), but I don't believe it 'til I see it. Renerpho (talk) 23:21, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why didn't they find as many as they expected? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:42, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Sagittarian Milky Way: Hard to say for sure. For obvious reasons, I don't think they've ever publicly discussed that. PanSTARRS overall is successful, they just aren't meeting the expectations that people had in the beginning. I think we'd be doing well by taking the expectations/predictions for LSST with a grain of salt.

There were overly optimistic predictions (in parts because their models were bad, in part because they were too confident in their system), paired with a lack of infrastructure/manpower to deal with the data. There are a lot of objects in PanSTARRS's data that went unnoticed because their automatic detection algorithm wasn't up to the task, waiting to be picked up eventually, one by one, by someone manually checking their archive for precoveries.

LSST has put a lot of resources into developing their infrastructure, so hopefully the same issues won't befall them, but dealing with all that data will still be a challenge. Renerpho (talk) 03:28, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Compare what I wrote at Talk:Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory#Comparison_with_PanSTARRS_and_other_surveys. Renerpho (talk) 03:33, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A page that is actually a set index of many lists, but is linked on hundreds of articles, masquerading as a single list containing every exoplanet. Should we change every link from List of extrasolar planets to Lists of planets? "List of extrasolar planets" is a rather misleading title. 21 Andromedae (talk) 23:58, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Center of the universe#Requested move 19 June 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. CNC (talk) 20:22, 28 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article (666823) 2010 VR11 is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/(666823) 2010 VR11 until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 21:55, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article (679997) 2023 RB is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/(679997) 2023 RB until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 22:11, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article 2017 XX61 is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2017 XX61 until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 00:22, 4 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:History of the center of the universe#Requested move 7 July 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. CNC (talk) 20:11, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Aldebarium reverted one of several similar edits by @Theblackholeuniverse with a COI declaration. I agree with the revert on the basis of a non-mainstream point of view with no scientific secondary sources. If this belongs anywhere it would be Black hole cosmology, not in multiple articles. I think this claim is extraordinary; if this is important encyclopedic work it will be cited by others in time so let's wait. I think the other additions should be reviewed. Johnjbarton (talk) 03:00, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A single-purpose user, writing about a topic that is their user name? Definitely seems like CoI, and it's too new to have any critical response yet, so I don't think it deserves an article, nor mention in other articles. - Parejkoj (talk) 15:26, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Deep Impact (spacecraft) has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 15:57, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To coincide with the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR24) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (Amaldi16), there will be a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on 13 July. This will concentrate on pages connected to topics of the conference, primarily in gravitational physics, and biographies of researchers in the area. There should be some translation of pages, depending on the availability of international conference participants. Please expect a edits from several new accounts with IPs corresponding to the University of Glasgow. Expert Wikipedians will give some training at the start of the day. We hope the event will encourage some longer-term involvement in editing Wikipedia from participants. CPLBerry (talk) 11:46, 11 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:NW Puppis#Requested move 1 June 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 11:34, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Geocentric model#Requested move 7 July 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 04:18, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5#Requested move 7 July 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 04:21, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Lately I've overhauled two articles on irregular moons (Francisco and Trinculo), but ran into issues with displaying their orbit information on their infoboxes. I am using time-averaged ("proper") orbital elements of irregular moons from JPL's mean elements list, so for that reason I chose to use the proper orbital elements parameters of Template:Infobox planet (i.e. proper semi-major axis, etc.). However, the template is severely limited when it comes to proper orbital elements---there's no option nodal/apsidal precession period (which JPL gives) and the proper semi-major axis can only be given in terms of AU. I have proposed adding options for precession period and unitless semi-major axis for the infobox at Template_talk:Infobox_planet#Edit_request_16_July_2025---let me know what you think. In the meantime, some updated irregular moon articles use their own (inconsistent) workarounds---for example the infobox of Skathi (moon) uses JPL's mean orbital elements under the osculating orbit section, while S/2021 N 1 uses the proper orbital elements section with converted values.

In the meantime, many (often neglected) irregular moon articles use osculating orbits (e.g. Elara (moon)) sourced by the Minor Planet Center, which do not accurately describe the moon's orbit over an extended period of time (decades to centuries) because the moons of irregular moons are strongly perturbed by the Sun (see this paper). This needs to be made clear, but I'm not sure where to put such a disclaimer. Is there a WikiProject guidelines page for what to put in infoboxes, especially for moons? Nrco0e (talk • contribs) 22:51, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Due to their mutability and because not much data is needed to extrapolate the orbital evolution over time, I'd recommend using only the proper elements for irregular moons. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:44, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of new pages on astronomical objects keep popping up at User:SDZeroBot/NPP_sorting/STEM/Physics, then hanging there for months as they are not really physics, more relevant to this project. Can someone with WP:NPP rights please monitor and review these. Thanks. Ldm1954 (talk) 15:00, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

EpicCoder (talk · contribs) has made some strange edits to several astronomy/astrophysics articles. Some edits where already reverted, but some still remain (even in featured articles). Can somebody please take a look at them and remove wrong statements or, if there are correct ones, add appropriate citations? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 22:36, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]