Astronomy

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I have very fond memories of using my telescope to look at the heavenly bodies..... what a sight.... breathtaking.....then she started closing the drapes.

Got to invest in binoculars, you not as conspicuous when using them.

A Ghilie suit helps too.

[TLAM Strike]

Had an interesting night with my new binoculars.

At 09:45 (My time) I spotted a satellite heading east though the constellation Cygnus (I was looking at Deneb at the time).

I also looked quite a bit at Altair and Vega.

I might go back out before bed since I hope to spot Neptune in about an hour once its over the tree line.

[Neptunus Rex]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

Slight thread hijack but I've been considering buying a pair of cheap binoculars for stargazing and wondering if anyone around here has had any success with them for that?

And no I am not planning on using them for searching the sky at night for Klingon invasion.

I started with bino's before making the high cost plung for a telescope.

Started with cheapo 5x22's. Moved up to more expensive Celestron Ultima 8x56's designed for night use. That's the key. Most run of the mill bino's are designed for day time use with small exit pupil width. If you hold your bino's at arms length away and look in the eye pieces, if the circle of light is small, small exit pupil. Bino's for night use have larger exit pupils.

I have an 8" SCT telescope, but I still use my 8x56's for quick stuff and wide field views.

How are the ones you picked up?

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

At 09:45 (My time) I spotted a satellite heading east though the constellation Cygnus (I was looking at Deneb at the time).

Amazing that you could see all of that detail during the day.

[Neptunus Rex]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

Had an interesting night with my new binoculars.

At 09:45 (My time) I spotted a satellite heading east though the constellation Cygnus (I was looking at Deneb at the time).

I also looked quite a bit at Altair and Vega.

I might go back out before bed since I hope to spot Neptune in about an hour once its over the tree line.

August 27th, Mars and Earth will be at their closest point. At 75X, Mars will look about the same size as the Moon does with the naked eye.

I heard there was a theory based on the red shift of distant stars that the universe is older than the 13-15 billion years we are used to.

I won't pretend to understand the reasons but it has to do with how far we can see into the past, and the theory of realativity.

The little I understand.....

That we can see 13.7-15 Billion years into the past, which sets our perception of the age of the universe. But another civilization sitting close to that 13.7 or 15 millions of light years away from us could see another 13.7-15 billion years beyound our visual/electromegnetic sight.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by The Third Man

That we can see 13.7-15 Billion years into the past, which sets our perception of the age of the universe.

Not necessarily. you must differ between two terms that astronomers differ between, too: the "universe", and the "observable universe". But every-day-language usually refers to the observable universe when only the term "universe" is used. I could very well be that the universe is bigger than we know, that there is something beyond the range to which we can see, or that indeed we need to think of multiverses: a high number of universes coexisting (I personally think this is likely, since it just would follow a trend in the way how our observable universe is structured hierarchically: star systems -> galaxies -> local groups of galaxies -> supercluster of local groups -> a web-like structure formed arouind huge voids by superclusters with 100 billion galaxies, this is our current image of the observable universe. In the observable universe we can look only as far away as the universe is old, due to the link of time and lightspeed: we cannot see light from a place that is more distant in lightyears than the light has had time in years to travel. This defines what we call the border of the (expanding) universe.

The Big Bang is just a model, a theory, because for the most it explains a greater amount of known info and observations, than other theories do. But a theory is only a shadowbox into which we put the poieces of our ideas and observbations accoridng to the system we see fit. If the box does not meet our needs or becomes too small, we chnage it for another that suits our needs better. The Big Bang theory has problems for me. It does not explain how and why (!) there should have been nothing, and suddenly somethign started to be. How could this be? Why even should this be? why isn't there just a big "nothingness" anymore? And if there is "something" that is expanding, what is beyond the border of this "something"? There must be something, else thinking of a borderline between something and nothing makes no sense. and a border there seems to be, else the universe would be unlimited in size (another hard to grab conception). However, I tend to beolieve that when we say "border of the universe", in fact we only talk about the border, the limits of our knoweldge about the existence of all "what is".

I cannot separate astronomy from spirituality, I never could. And the fact that not only we humans, but everything, all the universe as we are able to perceive it, is existing, is nothing but an unexplained and probably unexplainable wonder. We are irrelevant to the universe, that small we are. But here we sit, being able to use our brain to at least asking questions and reflecting about ourselves and this giant thing around us, and about the unsolved question of our existence, reaching out for what is so huge in dimension that it renders us completely unimportant by its own majestic size - and nevertheless we are capable to think in a language by whose terms (mathematics) what is essentially infinity becomes describable in finite terms. We might be unimportant to the universe, but neverthless this is what also forms our greatness - without which the universe maybe would not be what it is. If there is no witness who would hear the tree in the forest falling, then the fall is noiseless.

And the other qurstion: how many others witnesses there are, and what is their way of realsing the fall of trees?

The Big Bang is kust a model

That is how I feel. The more I think I know the less i know.


I know you are trying to help my understanding. But can you please understand my limitations and give me me a more concise explanation .

thank you so much for understanding my point and expalining your position.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by The Third Man

That is how I feel. The more I think I know the less i know.

A good scientiist, no matter the branch, always thinks something like this ^ . Leave absolute, ultimatie answers to religious dogmas - science, if done responsibly, never claims to produce ultimate answers - only tries to make best sense possible at a given time of what it observes, expressing it in models of varying but always limited persistence.

The more we learn, the more we learn how little we know.
Talking about humbleness!

I know you are trying to help my understanding. But can you please understand my limitations and give me me a more concise explanation .

Explanation for what? The nature of scientific theory? The model of Big Bang? The model of the observable universe?

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

Amazing that you could see all of that detail during the day.

Sorry 9:45 PM.

Originally Posted by Neptunus Rex

I started with bino's before making the high cost plung for a telescope.

Started with cheapo 5x22's. Moved up to more expensive Celestron Ultima 8x56's designed for night use. That's the key. Most run of the mill bino's are designed for day time use with small exit pupil width. If you hold your bino's at arms length away and look in the eye pieces, if the circle of light is small, small exit pupil. Bino's for night use have larger exit pupils.

I have an 8" SCT telescope, but I still use my 8x56's for quick stuff and wide field views.

How are the ones you picked up?

They are not bad. Its a Vivitar 7x55. They cost me only $5. I certanly see stars that I can't see with my eyes alone.

I dug out my old star charts and bought a flash light and some mozzie repellent and plan to go back out tonight since I have tomorrow off work. I just hope the clouds clear out.

[XabbaRus]

I bought my telescope at the wrong time.

Beginning of summer, which where I live means it never gets really dark. Darkest time is a 2am.

Also the weather has been rubbish, very cloudy.

I definitely will be keeping August 27th in my diary and pray the clouds go away. I just ordered myself a 2X Barlow which with the stock 10mm and 25mm eyepieces will help a lot.

Also got a T-Adaptor and T-ring for a Nikon so I can take my dads D90 and use that.

So for the time being I have been making do with using the internet to learn about the constellations.

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

I bought my telescope at the wrong time.

Beginning of summer, which where I live means it never gets really dark. Darkest time is a 2am.

Also the weather has been rubbish, very cloudy.

I definitely will be keeping August 27th in my diary and pray the clouds go away. I just ordered myself a 2X Barlow which with the stock 10mm and 25mm eyepieces will help a lot.

Also got a T-Adaptor and T-ring for a Nikon so I can take my dads D90 and use that.

So for the time being I have been making do with using the internet to learn about the constellations.

where it's never dark this time of year,But you can experience the Northern Lights,not so bad.Anyway they where links to interesting places, as we should have "if we used the Amazon" what has happened to them

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

I definitely will be keeping August 27th in my diary and pray the clouds go away.

That is Mars closest approach right? Lucky. All the cool stuff in summer is in daylight over here.

Don't forget we got the Perseids coming up next week.

So for the time being I have been making do with using the internet to learn about the constellations.

Same here. My plan is to learn and locate two or three interesting stars a night weather permitting. Tonight is Nu Draco, and Epsilon Lyra.

[Skybird]

when I was a young boy, a microscope and a telescope were dreams of mine. The microscope, though a bad one, became true, and we had an according hobby course at school, too, which was cool. The telescope still is a dream, but I wonder if it makes sense for me to try to realise it now. I think not, although i could do it now:

I have a balcony, even a calm one, nevertheless my place is relatively close to the city, with unfavourable street and house entrance lights nearby. Transporting such a thing on bike is - probably it turns it into a medium sized expedition. And light pollution in general is a problem these days.

I also wonder in how far it makes sense, if you are not really after just the experience of tactile manipulation of a small telescope. the number of opbjects that are available in virtual sky simulations like WorldWideTelescope is so immense that you could browse, move and zoom the material like in Google Earth for hours and days, getting images from much more professional setups. If you compare that to what you can get with affordable hobby telescopes, even if they are 200/1000 Newtons for example, I think kind of dissapointment is kind of preprogrammed.

These sites below are in German, but the headlines of each section identify the telescope's type and focus, and you can easily get a good impression of what kind of image you can expect from Saturn, Jupiter and Deep Sky objects if you use the various optics. This material helped me tremendously to decide that maybe i must not try to turn every childhood dream into reality, just to risk that the dream bursts in dissappointment. I feel gifted indeed that there is this plenty of picture material available via the internet, so much of professional material is formed up and glued together to create virtual skies to explore where you get the fascinating images that make your eyes go wide in awe. I again recommend to check Microsoft'S WordWideTelescope. It works like Google Earth, just for the sky, and when you (smoothly) zoom in, you get dozens of different optics from different sources, observatories, satellites, and from different sensor types, whiczh you can combine in one pic. I am currently somewhat training to make best use of this extremely powerful and impressive tool. It is one of the biggest discoveries i ever made in the internet, and it really frees me of any desire to buy a telescope.

I have a good 9X63 night-bino for hunters, however.

Telescope comparisons:
Jupiter: http://www.binoviewer.at/beobachtung...ch_jupiter.htm
Saturn: http://www.binoviewer.at/beobachtung...ich_saturn.htm
Deep Sky: http://www.binoviewer.at/beobachtung...ch_deepsky.htm

Worldwide Telescope: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx (take one of their tours for introduction! try webclient first, if you mistrust the installation!)

I anyhow must admit, that live observation is not what I am after, anyway. My interest in astronomy is to fresh up the basics I have learned long time ago and partially have forgotten again, and then go a bit deeper into a more academic approach on things, it is not the image part I am so much interested in, but the learning-the-stuff side of things, and the I-just-want-to-know-and-I-want-to-know-it-reasonably-well. My self-study project will keep me busy for several months to come, judging by the size of the book, the ammount of online material for the book, and the time I see I need to work through the first 40 pages and making according notes and really learning the matter by repetitions. So far I enjoy it tremendously. Once i am finished i so far plan to focus even deeper on sub-branches like astro pohysics and cosmology, maybe, or to embark on an accoridng self study for physics, at least some branches of it. I want to go one level higher than the wide range of quite good popular science books that vare available (like Hawkins has published them, Peat or Davis, but I also depend on the mathematical formalisations not beeing exaggerated - much more than just school math I find difficult to follow. It is not easy to find books on quantum and particle physics or relativity that match these criterions. So far I have found just one, on relativity, and that was more a school-level book. I also need it in German - the last thing when struggling with math and new concepots is to fight a battle with scientific English at the sideline. After all, I do it as a hobby only and want to get at least a bit of fun from it. The astronomy book, however, so far is fun pure.

My difficulty with higher maths has kept me away from ever considering to study physics at university seriously. More than the popular science books, but less than the university courses, math light, please, and as little as possible - that is what I need. Maybe the matter forbids that this criterion can be fulfilled. I found academical physics books to be awfully crowded with math.

Oh, I also have started to recapitulate school math, btw, and go a bit further than that. Just a bit.

[Skybird]

Hubble Deep Field - if this does not give you a shiver, let yourself bury, for you are probably already dead.