Moonshed

Name dropper! 😂

Lots of good advice given. I have not owned a Newtonian for many years, I have a Celestron SCT which are notorious for misting up on the inside of the corrector plate. However, some of my solutions may also help you hopefully. 1) Dew shield always fitted soon as set up. (Perhaps not so necessary with a Newt?) 2) A good blast with wife’s old hairdryer whenever necessary. 3) Never leave it set up with scope pointing upwards. 4) Set up in good time to allow to cool down, depending on where you store your gear. Mine is in a shed so that is not a problem. I have to say that my number one mist killer is the hairdryer, it is always close to hand when conditions demand. Nothing can survive it! Surprisingly it doesn’t affect observing or imaging after only a few seconds. I Hope you get it sorted out and proceed to enjoy your views of M42 with your shiny new filter 😃

You’re off to a good start Kelly, you even captured Polaris towards the far left of the image. I wouldn’t have thought you would get anything with those clouds. Well done.

People can only make their guesses on what they can see so your crafty bias trick will work. Another bias that would affect the outcome, this time a natural one. It could be that the stall is set up in such a way that people buying a ticket are inadvertently able to see the guesses made by the six previous entrants. This would affect the number they guess thereby skewing the result. There are many ways bias can be introduced either intentionally or unintentionally that will skew the average number guessed. When I was studying statistics at college some years ago I was surprised how difficult it can be for example to get accurate opinion polls on any given subject. Picking a representative sample, a large enough sample and applying correct weightings and so on. And I though guessing how many smarties was difficult 😂

I’m also pretty sure you are right about a Gaussian distribution/ probability bell curve, as this will show the same result as the mathematical average but with all the information displayed rather than just the answer.

So it boils down to this. If we have a large enough sample of average people they will on average pick a number that is close to the average. But are you an average enough sort of person who can on average give an answer that on average will be above average? 🤣

Imagine you are at a typical country fete and there is a stall where the challenge is to guess how many smarties there are in a large glass jar. You buy a ticket and enter your guess, the person who guesses the closest to the actual number wins the prize. After all the tickets are in it is possible to calculate the number that has the highest probability of winning. Simply take the mathematical average of all the guesses entered and that will most probably, almost certainly, be the closest number to the actual number. But why? This does rest on the condition that there is a large enough number of guesses made. Okay, some people will be wildly wrong and guess a number way too high, others way too low and others a little more accurate and yet others even more accurate until a wide spread has been established. It is because of this wide spread that the average will move ever closer to the true number as more and more guesses are made. However, the question then becomes why is it that a random collection of people all making guesses will result in the average being so close to the true number? I can think of no reason why that should happen. Why does it not by pure chance happen that many more people guess a number that is way too high that results in a “wrong” average number? Probability? Statistics? Standard Deviation? A love of smarties? I recall watching this on a tv documentary about maths many years ago and it was said that the theory of the mathematical average being very close to the actual number, if not spot on occasionally, has been checked and verified enough times to give it a high degree of confidence. Unfortunately I do not remember if an explanation why this should be so was given. If any mathematicians out there can explain it to me before I loose a few million more brain cells I would be very grateful. I would also appreciate it if you could find a way to explain it in a way that doesn’t make me look stupid, I understand that is something of a challenge in itself. 🤪

What an interesting character she is. I could listen to her for hours, an expert who really knows her stuff and is able to communicate it in a manner that is both educational and entertaining. Zees vas nit a vayst of time.😂 Thinking about buying her book, anyone read it? EDIT: looked it up on Amazon and I think asking £14.99 for a paperback first published in June 2018 is a bit much. I understand physics books are always expensive but not buying it. Pun intended!

You may scoff but if you so much as think about taking her toy bone away you will find yourself staring into the cold, dark, eyes of a lethal killing machine. You may possibly survive if you quickly offer a tummy rub.

That is funny I have to admit 😂 but I’m the sort of idiot that would protect my dog first and foremost, 🤓 but then a Bichon Maltese standing 10” high isn’t much of a deterrent anyway.

That is one of those sites that is interesting and has many other interesting sites that it gives links to. I find that sometimes this can be akin to crossing the event horizon of a black hole and spinning down into oblivion. 😃 I’m glad you have decided to give my Quantum Theory explanation a read, I hope you find it interesting. I am going to blow my own trumpet now (after all no one else will 😂) and tell you about when I first put it on my website. After around 6 months or so I received an email from an American university, forget which, asking if it was okay to direct their undergraduates to my site, and print if off, as they considered it was one of the two best introductions to QM they had found on the Internet. (I checked out the other one, it was rubbish 😉). This was followed a month later by another American university asking the same thing. It’s a funny old world.

Back in 2003 (when my brain was still more or less working) I decided to create my own website that would cover a number of topics about cosmology and physics that I found interesting but complicated, and I wanted to do my best to explain them in a simple way that the majority of people would hopefully be able to understand. The one I found hardest to explain was, unsurprisingly, Quantum Theory, so I spent a lot of time and many drafts on this topic before I was happy with it. Anyway, that was a long time ago and I haven’t updated the site since 2004. Move on 20 years to today. I just happened to be mulling over in my mind this afternoon some of the weirdness of Quantum Theory and decided to look up the Double Slit experiment. I used a search engine and ended up here https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/double-slit-experiment It was only a short article but gave links to two other sites for further information. One was Wikipidea and the other was the “Theories with Problems” website………which is mine! What are the chances?

No chance of remembering? You must be joking!!!

And that’s why I enjoy Ted Talks so much, brilliant speakers, even though I view it on a social media platform, YouTube.

I only installed the app a week ago but have to say it’s a bit hit and miss, mostly miss. I prefer to use the infrared satellite images because at least it current and factual.

My wife and I spent a week on holiday in Manhattan, New York, and then spent a week in a log cabin up in the Catskill Mountains. We were literally miles from any towns or villages and the night sky must have been Bortle 1. I had no ‘scope with me but was able to bring my binoculars. I woke up particularly early one morning, around 5 am, and decided to sneak out with my bins and spend a while star gazing. I set off up the narrow animal track to an area of high ground that I knew afforded an excellent view of the sky. It was pitch black and I didn’t have a torch, forgot to pack one, so it was difficult to find my way. I had only gone a 100 yards and suddenly the ground erupted under my feet, knocking me to the floor, and a huge stag burst up from his sleeping place and careered away at a rate of knots. My heart was pounding like a steam piston and it took me a good while to figure out what the hell had happened. I was scared half to death! That is the first, and without a doubt, the last, time I stepped onto a deer! I don’t recall anything about the intended star gazing!

This thread has got me thinking and lead me down this weird thought process. Okay, it’s just for fun, but there could be some truth in it, somewhere: I think, therefore I think I exist. I think I exist because I think. Does thinking that I exist, or not, alter or not the reality of whether or not I exist? I think not, surely I exist or not, whether or not I think it or not. There are people that I think exist, but I do not know if they think they exist or not. Therefore it matters not to me whether or not they think they exist, I think they exist. So it must matter not to others whether or not I think I exist or not, they will think I exist or not. If it is you who is to judge if I exist or not, how can that be? You may exist or not. We may both think that we each exist, and also that the other exists, but we still only think that we each exist because the other thinks, as we do, that we each exist and that the other exists. But we both exist or not. So who then is to judge if we both exist or not? Others may think that we exist or not, but who are they to judge? They may exist or not. If enough people that I think exist, think that I exist, then that encourages me to think that I exist, and I am therefore encouraged to think that they exist. We all then believe that we each exist because we think that we exist, and others that we think exist, think that we exist, which encourages us to think that they exist, who in turn are encouraged to think that they exist. Makes you think. 🤔

I am happy to bet against you, not that it matters, because as you say the position is indeterminable. That being the case then neither one of us claim to win the bet so instead why don’t we both donate a few shekels to a worthy cause. I’m going to give a fiver to the first rough sleeper I see tomorrow.

I’m not so sure. My brain receives input from the world around me via my senses. Your brain receives input from the world around you via your senses. My brain is not physically the same as your brain anymore than my fingerprints are not the same as your fingerprints. Why then should we assume our brains perceive the world in the same way? Why should we assume our senses detect stimuli to the same degree as each other and send the same information to our brains that processes it the exact same way and results in us having the exact same perception? For example, I love the flavour of a single malt whiskey yet my brother hates it. I hate the sound of trad jazz but my daughter loves it. I can’t play any musical instruments, my uncle was great on the piano. Why are we different? I don’t know, I only know that we are. We all accept we are different physically, academically and in our taste of the arts, food and fashion, so why is there a problem accepting that our perceptions are different? Each individual has their own perception of the world, there is no right or wrong perception any more than there is a right or wrong appreciation of music. Sent from my iPad

I have seen so many photos and videos of gigantic spiders that live inside Australian houses I would never go there unless I could borrow a NASA spacesuit.

I do not believe there is any possible way for us to communicate to one another how we each perceive the world. My world, the one that my brain has processed from the input from my five senses, is in all probability very different to your world. We can both look at a red rose and agree that it is a red rose, but that's just putting a handy label on an object, it does not convey anything at all about our perception of it. I will never know how my wife perceives the red roses I give her on our wedding anniversary, to her they may be what I would describe as yellow. I wonder what they smell like to her? Does she hear the Atlantic rollers crashing onto the beach the same way that I do? How does Beethoven's Fifth sound to her? When I hold her hand, how does it feel to her? I will never know. We can never know what anyone else in the world is feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling or tasting.

Currently yes, but who knows what the future may bring? Maybe we will one day make contact with ET and they, possibly being in existence 3 million years longer than us, have made incredible discoveries, they even know how the universe came into existence and what existed prior to that. We do not know what the future holds. We don’t even know if the future is already written, already out there waiting for us to reach it. Or maybe the future exists but only as a blank page waiting for us to make our mark on it. I think time is the biggest mystery we have, once we fully understand it I’m sure that a full understanding of the creation of the universe will naturally follow. We can’t help but view time as moving along a one way street from the past to the present to the future. For any geeks interested I have written about time here. http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/What is Time.htm

Oil change, new spark plugs, engine de-coke and drive thru wash, that should fix it. A mate of a mate of mine can do it cheap if you mention my name. If you don’t mention my name it will be even cheaper.

vlaiv I love the way you explain complex subjects in simple terms with great analogies such that I am able to understand them. This post of yours is a classic example. Thanks for taking the trouble.

Very true, but does this mean the universe was fine tuned for life to develop? Or are we here by pure chance alone? I’m going to ask my wife because she knows everything and is never wrong, apparently.