Xilman

I am very slowly building up a collection of images of globular clusters, both in  the Milky Way and around external galaxies. Here is M14 in Ophiuchus.

I had a similar issue until I bought an observatory in La Palma with the scope under a dome and almost entirely computer controlled. I can do imaging in relative comfort and from inside the house if I want to.

These days I live in LP for half the year, in three month sessions. When in the UK (like now) I have a 25cm Dobsonian which gets no use because I am just as apathetic about observing as before but maintain my interest in astronomy by processing images taken in LP.

Although I am not suggesting that you go out and buy a physical observatory, but have you considered using remote robotic telescopes? You could choose one in the southern hemisphere which would let you observe things to which the likes of me are impossible.

Images of star trails are very commonly seen. They are generally taken with a stationary camera and use the Earth's rotation to let the sky and stars drift past the camera.

This one is different. It uses a moving camera to follow the sky and it lets the star drift past the sky.

Barnard's star has an enormous proper motion of 10.3 arcseconds per annum. The stack of subs in the image shown above started on 2019-08-30 and ended on 2023-08-07 for a duration of just a tad under four years. The star had moved 41.2 arcsec in that time. To put it in context, that is roughly the apparent size of Jupiter.

On 23/02/2022 at 15:51, spacegalaxy said:

Barrel security recess - No (What does the even mean?

It generally means a groove around the barrel into which the end of the screw which holds the eyepiece to the drawtube fits. If the screw comes slightly loose the end of it is still inside the groove and the eyepiece won't drop out. If the barrel is completely smooth the eyepiece also becomes slightly loose and can fall out, a possibly expensive circumstance.

It's astounding! Time is fleeting!

The clouds have broken, at lest partially, and the sky is more transparent than I've seen it for months. I can walk around purely by starlight and that from the Milk Way - no torch required.

Making the best of it while I can.

You may have problems but here on a sub-tropical island the cloudy season has set in. Clouded out for several nights now with no end in sight.

The rainy season starts in a week or few and runs to November or later.

At least folk in the UK don't have to clean abrasive volcanic grit off their optics and out of their mounts.

13 hours ago, andrew s said:

INuclear fission powers the stars and we are literally star dust.

ITYM nuclear fusion,

Just bought a copy.

Yeah, the Universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. His Noodly Appendages have ensured that all observations are subtly manipulated to confirm with the current scientific dogma.

How can you tell that I am a Pastafarian?

9 hours ago, peter shah said:

Thank you Mark... you are not wrong there are definitely more clearer nights in Spain than I get in Mid Wales, not to mention Spain gets astro darkness in the summer, but in reality my skies at home  are just as good if less frequent.

That is my experience too in La Palma - which is technically Spain but geographically North Africa.

I get more clear nights (not the last three though and likely not tonight judging by the clouds building up) but much more Saharan dust which really fouls up contrast and reduces minimum magnitude. England, being so much wetter, generally has nights which are much more transparent because all the rain washes the crud out of the atmosphere. It just has fewer clear nights (as distinct from transparent nights) than La Palma.

This last couple of months we've also had a lot of smoke from wildfires, first in La Palma and now from Tenerife which is over 100km away from here but the air still smells of smoke.

My take: everyone always complains about something. It is human nature. Offer them free beer and they complain because neither wine nor cider is on offer.

15 hours ago, saac said:

Yes they do but you don't build and operate a particle collider without Newtonian mechanics  - stress, strain, acceleration, momentum, compression, expansion, cooling, fabrication of steel , concrete, generation of electricity etc.  That is the point I was making - we live and function in a Newtonian realm and we have discovered the quantum through that. 

Jim 

 

You don't operate one without special relativity. Things get heavier as they move faster, so they are harder to bend round corners with magnets, the strength of which have to be altered accordingly as the particles are accelerated. The particles travel at essentially the speed of light when they are at high enough energy so to know where they are, the timing of the accelerating pulses of energy requires SR once again.

These are only two examples. Designing and operating the detectors provide more.

23 minutes ago, Richard N said:

I also like to measure things but I’m realistic enough to know that it’s only of interest to me. With a few minor exceptions I’m inclined to think that the days of amateur astronomers doing much in the way of useful science, have gone. 

In that case we very strongly disagree. The professionals do not have anywhere near enough telescope time to measure everything of interest.  Just one example: timing exoplanetary transits is almoe entirely performed by amateurs and yet their results are vital for planning future satellite missions.

There are many other fields in which amateurs play a vital role because professionals just do not have the resources.

Please report your measurements to the relevant organization(s).

1 hour ago, RobertI said:

The answer for me is no. BUT, I was doing some EAA a few years back, and captured a few galaxies in one night. A supernova was discovered in one of those galaxies soon after, and it turns out I had captured it before the official discovery date, but obviously never reported it as I didn’t know it was there at the time! So now I check all my EAA galaxy images for supernovae - science of a sort! 

What a shame! You could have made your name in the wider scheme of things.

Better luck next time.

7 minutes ago, billhinge said:

Thats the issue with uni physics, they teach the maths but not "Foundations of QM' - I used to believe in Copenhagen but now switched to Many Worlds, you know it makes sense 😉 

I rather like the pilot wave interpretation.

4 minutes ago, saac said:

I love the "Boy And And His Atom" video . I remember my physics teacher saying "we will never see the atom". Ok so we are technically still not seeing it rather visualizing it but that video is mesmerising - it raises so many questions when you realise what you are watching. It's about 10 years old now I think;  I wonder how further they have progressed.  Are we manipulating individual atoms yet ?

Jim  

We have been manipulating individual atoms for rather a long time.  A famous example is IBM spelling their company's name dates from 1989.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms) for more detail.

6 minutes ago, saac said:

 

Are there any examples of where we have used the rules and theories of quantum mechanics, GR to build or operate in the macro world?  I know GR calculations influence corrections I think to the GPS signal to counter time dilation arising from gravitational effects. But are there any situations where we start the design process off with QM or GR as the tools. Design, specification of particle colliders I guess?

Lasers, superconductors are good examples. Bose-Einstein statistics are profoundly non-Newtonian.

Drug design is another one. QM calculations of molecules. their structure, their energy levels and their binding to biologically important molecules started about 1985. These days all serious pharmaceutical companies employ quantum chemistry specialists. Relativistic QM is becoming ever more important in that field.

Disclaimer: I almost joined a quantum chemistry research group back in the mid-80's.

6 minutes ago, saac said:

Hang on don't go dissing Newtonian dynamics here     Can you tell I am a fan boi - stands up and mutters to the group  "I'm Jim and I'm an engineer.  It's been 32 days since picked up a slide rule " 

We came a long way on the back of Newtonian mechanics - heavier than air flight, split the atom, left the planet, built CERN and found more quantum stuff, put JWST in space to see the beginning.   Not so bad for "special cases" - we inhabit that realm.  Let's hear it for Newton.   

Jim 

Err...

CERN, and absolutely every particle accelerator working at more than 100keV or so, absolutely requires non-Newtonian mechanics. The rest mass of an electron is only 511 keV.

I guess you have heard of GPS. It absolutely requires GR to be useful.

Sending anything to another planet also require GR to get there with any degree of precision.

Relativisitic QM is essential to understand almost anything at a small scale, including electron spin and antimatter. At large scales, why don't we fall to the centre of the Earth under gravity? Answer: Fermi-Dirac statistics.

QM itself is profoundly non-Newtonia. Try explaining lasers and superconductivity  in a Netwonian universe.

I know you are trying to be funny, but still ...

6 minutes ago, andrew s said:

We can't all be perfect 😊 Regards Andrew 

Indeed. My tyaping[sic] could be much better.

How many people here make observations in order to do what may loosely be called "science"'? That is, to discover something new or to measure something already known in order to characterize its behaviour better?

I have absolutely nothing against people doing astronomy for the fun of it or to produce aesthetically pleasing images. Indeed, I do that myself.

Nonetheless, that is not enough for me. I measure the brightness of things and, if they are moving, their positions. I look for changes from what is expected to be seen in the images I take. I often wonder if I am a fish out of water, or just differently weird.

So I repeat: how many people here do scientific astronomy?

Agreed. Newtonian dynamics and Euclidean geometry is so brain-washed into us from childhood that truly grokking that they are only special cases can be extremely difficult.

Even after you achieve that level of enlightenment, the concept of a (-,+,+,+) metric can cause difficulty. The idea that a vector can be non-zero and yet have zero length is profoundly non-intuitive until you recalibrate your intuition.

I am an immense fan of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's Gravitation, very widely referred to as MTW. Fully understanding it takes a mathematics level somewhat above A-leverl standard but does not require a physics degree. I have a degree in chemiastry, for instance.

33 minutes ago, Mal22 said:

Thank you for such a detailed and helpful response! I’m very curious about what’s in my images, and finding out what i’m looking at but didn’t realise I was looking at. It’s all so fascinating! I’d actually reduced stars a fair bit in the processing  so AE And was more visible in the original data. 

I hope you have kept the original data. (If you have, please post it here.) One never knows what can be found in subsequent re-analysis.  For instance, I can provide data on the positions and magnitudes of all known and candidate globular clusters in M31. There well be so far unrecognized variable stars in your image, for instance.

You, and others, may wish to examine your image in much greater detail than saying "Wow! That looks pretty!"

Now go look for AF And, another variable on my observing program. It is much brighter than AE these days.

On 18/08/2023 at 12:48, JeremyS said:

Visual observing does seem to be declining and digital increasing. But digital is also overly represented due to the fact that it produces….images, which are readily reproduced in mags and online. Thus there appear to be Fewer sketches.

An issue as I see it is that colourful pretty pictures sell magazines to the masses.

There is no market  for images of things which are technically far more difficult for amateurs to produce, such as bodies far out in solar system, globular clusters around external galaxies and gravitationally lensed galaxies.

4 minutes ago, wesdon1 said:

@saac Hi saac. I think the best way I can describe my thoughts regarding the problems with GR is like the following...

remember many many centuries ago, when the greatest minds of the day believed the earth was at the centre of the universe. And their observations fitted very well with their theories. I mean, they looked up, and it was "OBVIOUS" the earth was at the centre of the cosmos because all the stars and planets were orbiting around the earth in the night sky, even the Sun during the day! Their theories fitted very well, but not perfectly! But there were anomalies that they couldn't explain, notably the retrograde motions of the planets orbits. Well I feel a very similar phenomenon is happening with modern day scientists. I feel they're blindly loyal to GR because it explains a lot of what they see so so well. But just like in ancient times, there's anomalies with their theories, notably when you get down to the quantum level of mass and energy, and gravity etc. 

I hope this explains well enough where i'm coming from regarding GR my friend!

Essentially every scientist agrees with you fully.  The incompatibility between GR and QM has been recognized for decades and has been a topic of intense theoretical research ever since.  The front runners to replace GR appear to be String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity, though those are not the only ones being taken seriously.

23 minutes ago, wesdon1 said:

@michael8554 Hi again Mike. Yes the dark matter and dark energy theories are basically scientists admitting " we literally have no clue what it all is!?" Tbh Mike, I have have always wondered about whether the reason scientists can't explain what dark matter and energy is, is because the fundamental Einstein theory of general relativity, which beautifully explains a lot, very precisely, is actually totally wrong, and if scientists worked out a new "Einsteinian type theory of general relativity" that accounted for all the so called unknown mass and energy, then there would be no need for dark matter and energy theories? I feel scientists have stay blindly loyal to Einstein's theories, instead of ripping up the book and starting from scratch, so to speak. 

As you rightly say Mike, given time, all will be revealed.

Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND, is just such a theory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

It explains somethings really rather well; other things not so well. That is true of all theories.

So your "scientists have stay blindly loyal to Einstein's theories" is rather harsh in my opinion.

On 09/08/2023 at 10:51, Elp said:

I think the point was what does the final image look like? I use uncooled cameras more often than cooled, the difference in quality with the final image result isn't that different, granted temperatures here don't really get too warm. A lot of people use DSLRs which get quite warm perfectly fine.

An important question is: are you looking at the image or measuring it?

In the latter case noise is important but as long as the signal to noise ratio is high enough (and this depends on the desired accuracy of the measurement) it doesn't really matter that much as its contribution can also be estimated from the data.