Re: Planet X: MAY Coordinates [OT]

In Article <[email protected]> David Tholen wrote:
> Pluto is only 0.1 arcsec in diameter, so something
> smaller than Pluto will be smaller than 0.1 arcsec.
> You'd need something like a 40-inch telescope to
> have a diffraction limit less than 0.1 arcsec at visible
> wavelengths, and you'd still have atmosphere seeing
> as the limiting factor.

Do observatories view Pluto?  I assume yes.  What do they see?  If so,
then they can view Planet X.  Pluto is reflecting sunlight, Planet X
does not but has its own diffuse glow.  I quote from my rediculously
outdated and silly book, The Solar System, a Practical Guide (insulted
ahead of time to save David Tholen time):

     .. 1978 when Pluto's moon was found.  Work on the
    orbit of Pluto had been continuing at the United States
    Naval Observatory since 1930 in an effort to refine still
    further the pertubations in the orbits of Uranus and
    Neptune and to find, if possible, a tenth planet from its
    effect on the orbits of the outer planets.  To this end, a
    set of high-resolution plates of Pluto were made using
    the USNO's 155 cm reflecting telescope at Flagstaff
    over three nights in April and May 1978.  ... The image
    of Pluto had a bulge.  ... With confirming observations
    being made with the 3 m Cerro Tololo telescope,
    Harrington calculated that the moon had a period of 6
    days 9 hours and was 20,000 km from the surface of Pluto
    ... Pluto was found to have a mass of .0002 Earths.

The Zetas have stated that Planet X has 23 times the mass, and is 4
times the diameter of Earth while at 18.74 Sun-Pluto distance.  Van
Flandern, during the search for Planet X in the early 1980's, stated he
computed it to be up to 5 times the size of Earth while at 50-100 AU to
account for the perturbations in the outer planets.  I quote:

    Astronomy, Dec 1981
    Search for the Tenth Planet

        Astronomers are readying telescopes to probe the outer
        reaches of our solar system for an elusive planet much
        larger than Earth. Its existence would explain a
        160-year-old mystery. ... The pull exerted by its gravity
        would account for a wobble in Uranus' orbit that was
        first detected in 1821 by a French astronomer, Alexis
        Bouvard. Beyond Pluto, in the cold, dark regions of
        space, may lie an undiscovered tenth planet two to
        five times the size of Earth. Astronomers at the U.S.
        Naval Observatory (USNO) are using a powerful
        computer to identify the best target zones, and a
        telescopic search will follow soon after. ... Van Flandern
        thinks the tenth planet may have between two and five
        Earth masses and lie 50 to 100 astronomical units from
        the Sun. (An astronomical unit is the mean distance
        between Earth and the Sun.) His team also presumes
        that, like Pluto's, the plane of the undiscovered body's
        orbit is tilted with respect to that of most other planets,
        and that its path around the Sun is highly elliptical.

In Article <[email protected]> David Tholen wrote:
> Magnification is simply the ratio of the focal lengths of the
> primary and the eyepiece.  Simply changing the eyepiece to
> one with a different focal length can change the magnification.
> There are more amateur telescopes designed to change eyepieces
> than "observatory scopes".  The latter rarely have eyepieces
> nowadays.  They hang a CCD camera at the focus and get whatever
> image scale corresponds to the focal length for that focus.

If we're dealing with a sighting of an object AS SMALL as Pluto in the
sights, at present, then what kind of equipment is required, by amateurs
to view Pluto as other than a pin-point of dimly reflected sunlight?