ollypenrice

So... I realize that it's possible that nobody has proven that our sensory experiences are the same. However, I also know that there are countless examples of shared responses to shared sensory experiences. Certain colours clash. Having your fingernails torn out is horrible. Middle C played where it wasn't meant to be will sound wrong. 'Out of tune' makes sense. Chocolate and onions don't go together. This list could run to millions of examples. Are we to believe, therefore, that by some remarkable conincidence, the relationships between these non-shared experiences are consistently unaffected by their not being common? Yes, you can argue this but - be honest - are you not flying a kite in doing so? Does it not make a lot more sense to suppose that, in our genetically similar bodies, we have highly comparable responses to identical outside stimulii? Test yourself. A peer reviewed paper is set to appear, saying that it contains a clear answer as to whether or not your red is more or less someone else's red. You have a chance to place a bit on the outcome. Do you really bet on the the side that says we all have significantly different reds? I don't believe you will and I do believe that, if you do, I will take your money. Olly

Possible, certainly. But not all limes and lemons in nature are all that acid in colour. Olly

The term is widely used in design. To explain it, I'd show you one whch, I think, would make my point. ACID OCHRE Olly

I thought my Tak FSQ was a brilliant scope and probably the best 4 inch imaging refractor on the market. There is no other comparable scope I would buy (and I mean the old fluorite one, not the present one, which I would not buy.) It wasn't perfect, though. Bright stars would bloat slightly and many had a diffraction artifact in the form of two dark beams, possibly from pinching. When these were pointed out to me I would just say, 'Yes, I know. Now look at the picture!' I make my living on reputation so gaining a few bob when selling on a bad used product would be idiotic on my part. It sits in my loft till someone who'd like it takes it away for free. Olly

I'll have to go and read up on this debate but I think the suggestion that we have no common colour experience is not credible. You give an explanation for colour warm and colour cold. What about 'acid,' often used to describe yellow and green? Or 'astringent?' Or 'bland.' The fact that we can and do use these metaphors in art and design strongly suggests a common experience to me. It makes little sense to think that someone might share my perception of a colour being 'acid' without some further commonality of experience. Concidence can only take you so far. Olly

I don't buy into mythical scopes either and my enthusiasm for the TEC predates its current perceived position as a full on premium apo. When it first appeared it was mostly remarkable for its price, offering good apo performance at well below the cost of the 6 inch AP or Tak, while having a lion's share of the aperture. Being oil-spaced and 140 rather than 150 gave it an enormous price advantage over Tak. I started using one myself a little over ten years ago, initially in visual and imaging but latterly only in imaging. I thought it was great visually and very good for imaging - though blue stars tended to bloat when very bright. I then started using the flattener and, although TEC insist that it doesn't, the flattener stopped the bloating in its tracks. The field illumination is also staggeringly even over a 35mm chip but it is designed for medium format, so no surprises. As an objective observation of its imaging prowess, a set of 10 minute luminace subs with Alnitak a little off-centre, a pure log stretch which brought the Horse and Flame into clear view, still saw Alnitak cleanly split as a double. This is extraordinary. My Tak FSQ106N gave Alnitak as a huge, sprawling blob needing differential processing to reveal it as a double - with difficulty. Olly

Would you say that about the musical scale, though? Olly

While there are purist and technical arguments over whether or not we can know that we experience the same thing when we see a colour, I think these are best seen as arguments about argument rather than about colour perception. I can think of a large number of reasons for concluding that we do experience something at least very similar. Firstly, we soon identify those people who don't share the majority experience and call them colour blind. We can make tests like the Ishihara which strongly suggest a common experience, firstly among the majority and then, to a large extent, among the colour blind as a sub set. It is also hard to imagine how the visual arts would work without a common experience. And then, given what we know of ocular physiology, we'd have to ask why we would not have a common experience. This may leave room for debate but, as I say, I think that debate is more an exercise in philosophical method than in anything else. (My father was a perception theorist and dismissed the idea of a non-shared colour perception out of hand. Alas, I can't remember why!) There are also people who argue that there is no analogue underpinning to perspective as a form of visual representation. They suggest that it is a learned and arbitrary code. Pah: if you believe that, you'd believe anything! Olly

They're with my specs in that case...

If time isn't quantized, does that mean we can take physics right back to the beginning? That missing bit during the first 10^-44 sec was really bugging me... lly

TEC 140. Superbly built, wonderful views, corrected for visual (but a stunning imaging scope with the dedicated flattener.) A really great scope entirely free of Hospital Green and flashy red anodising! (Yikes, I hope Jeremy doesn't read this...) lly

In my view it's a mistake to think about the telescope in isolation from the camera. Ten or twelve years ago I felt that a 1 metre FL fell into a no man's land between a galaxy and a nebula imager. Since then, though, pixels have become smaller and a 1 metre FL will now give you an image scale and resolution which will probably reach the limits of what your seeing will allow. Indeed, we took this recently at a FL of just 400mm. You'd want more for a dedicated galaxy scope but this shows how the need for long focal length has diminished. https://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/Galaxies/i-Sbc5zmk/A With a metre I took this, and that's with pixels which were quite large by modern standards. https://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/Galaxies/i-d5BBZQp/A What we don't know is your camera, but what we do know is that an image scale of around 1.3 to 1.5"pp is likely to be optimal. That means that there may be an easier option than the very difficult RC. When sorted, they are good. They can, however, defeat some owners. Olly

I like your lottery argument, which I think is a more elegant presentation of my doubts about the validity of 'fine tuning,' than mine - if I have read you correctly. Someone has to win the lottery but that does not mean that the question,'Why me?' is a valid question unless you can accept the answer, 'Because you were the 1 in a 10,000,000 to 1 chance.' I also like your analogy with green light. Green is purely a sensory concept and yet it is meaningful to talk about it because it is a concept we share and which shapes our perception of the world. I've thought for a long time that time might be like this. So, regarding Andrew's point... ... I'm happy to agree. Time can exist for the same reason that green can exist. My question would be, 'But what do Strongles measure?' We don't know because we have never seen a strongle. However, I think strongles measure length on a different trajectory through the block universe. Or they may do, if there is a block universe. To take it further, maybe 'our universe' is one of many others in what we might call a 'block multiverse.' If the universe we see is the product of the way we see it, then we have the perfect answer to question, 'Why are we here?' and all need for fine tuning (if ever there were any) would evaporate. We would be 'here' because 'here' is what we made when we perceived it. Olly Edit: 'This is a great thread, we should be paying for this ! Jim ' Absolutely! All royalties to the OP. (Now there's a coincidence: O Penrice. How did that bit of fine tuning come about?)

The sense of energy in this rendition is potent. Olly

This one would be my bet for a productive discovery. Lee Smolin suggests a mechanism in his book The Life of the Cosmos. Even if his hypothesis is incorrect, I like his way of thinking about it. Essentially he envisages a Darwinian mechanism which favours the evolution of star forming universes. Olly

There's the rub. I have always struggled with the anthropic principle, not because I don't understand it but because I don't see the need for it. It seems to me (perhaps wrongly) that it is born of a spurious need to account for something which 'just is.' Olly

They do, I agree, but so do the parameters applying to my knocking the vase off the table if I look back through the accident expecting those particular fragments to be created. The outcome of the falling vase has incredibly specific consequences - say, one thousand three hundred and forty one fragments of shapes x, mass y. It takes very specific initial conditions to produce them, yet they were formed without any fine tuning. We simply accept that those were the fragments produced. So why do we have trouble accepting that the big bang happened to produce what it did? Olly

Many cosmologists have discussed the fact that, to produce a star-forming (and therefore life-bearing) universe, you need to fine tune the physical parameters to a remarkable degree or it won't happen. My question is this: do we have to regard this as remarkable? If I knock an Etruscan vase off a table and smash it, I would have to fine tune the physical parameters to an impossible degree to replicate the same fractures and the same fragments if I knocked a second one off the table. If I did so, I'd rightly consider it remarkable - but that is because I have a particular outcome in mind when I look at the second event. The fine tuning is needed in order to meet my expectations. However, if I have no expectations there is nothing remarkable about the way either vase breaks. If this is not analogous with looking at the processes behind star-forming, life-bearing universes, why is it not? The vase smashed as it did. The universe evolved as it did. If we have no expectations in studying this evolution, why is there anything to explain? Olly

I did start doing this, in fact, but there were so many that I got fed up with it! Since the stars weren't very big anyway, I decided to use StarX only for the tidal extensions. Olly

This is a field particularly full of tiny, hardly-resolved galaxies so I think it was a difficult one for StarXT. It did spare some of them but I felt the image lost too much of its character without the rest. Since there are no really bright stars, and not many moderately bright ones, that I could reduce them manually fairly quickly. I don't have Starnet2. However, the very clean, smooth starless layer was good for lifting the tidal streams smoothly. There are a few other galaxies with tidal streams which would be worth trying in the RASA. Olly

M63 is a flocculant (as opposed to 'Grand Design') spiral with faint, extensive tidal streams. The imager foolish enough to obsess over bringing out these tidal streams will find himself spending hours and hours attempting to do so without running himself out of dynamic range for the rest of the image... BlurXT was good for the galaxy but Star XT wiped out too many of the small galaxies which abound. In the end I was able to use the StarXT version just to enhance the tidal streamers. This is LRGB, 25 hours of CCD data from the TEC140. I reckon this is a target for the RASA, this year. Olly

Yes. In Photoshop I'd just bring the saturation down in the brown dust - but that's just me. It's a really nice Rosette. (By the way, it sent me back to my recent RASA version and I brought up those interesting chocolate browns to which this image alerted me. It was worth doing.) Olly

Now I think that's really talking. The only thing I'd be wanting to do if it were mine is ease down the green in the brown, dusty parts. Not globally, though, because green is already low in some of the darker parts. Olly

Beware of buffoons on U-tube! It is full of people heaving this way and that on an assortment of sliders till they 'get something they like.' Look out for Adam Block and Warren Keller, who can be relied upon. Olly

All sorts of dangers threaten our security. Telescope thieves in the middle of wheat fields rank, in my view, somewhere beneath velociraptors accidentally revived from the fossil state by a bolt of lightning. Fear of the dark is essentially irrational, though not entirely. Our eyes are our primary source of information and we are genetically programmed to be nervous when they don't work - such as in the dark. We don't have to let ourselves be dominated by this programming because we are rational beings. As such, we can reflect on such dangers as... - road traffic accidents - accidents in the home (very common. Bathrooms are particularly dangerous and don't mention staircases or roofs.) - muggings. (For some reason, muggers prefer city streets to isolated wheat fields.) - falls. - DIY. (Chopsaws, angle grinders and chainsaws are a particularly good bet, but don't underestimate nail guns, drills, hammers, screwdrivers...) - walking while carrying glass. Moving a few thousand bullet points down this list, you are in your field. You see someone coming towards you. You take out your mobile phone (though a half-chewed bacon sandwich would do in the dark) and, in the unlikely event of it not being an irate farmer, you say, 'Your photo is already on the cloud.' Think it through. Your wheat field may be the least dangerous place you ever visit. Olly