Xilman

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.

3 hours ago, Mal22 said:

Thanks @Xilman

Where is AE And in the image? I tried to Google it but nothing helpful came up 😊 

Many thousands of variable star charts are available from AAVSO.  https://app.aavso.org/vsp is an extremely valuable resource.

Below is a snip from your image, doubled in scale and with AE And marked in red. You should be able to find it as the elongated pattern of bright stars above M32 is  easily recognizable. AE And is also easy to find, once you know where it is located, because of the Mercedes-badge asterism of four stars.

I encourage imagers to observe variable stars in M31 and M33, record their measurements and submit them to the BAA or AAVSO.

As a bonus I have marked the globular cluster Bol 352 in yellow.

Before you apply Hammerite, which I recommend, please remove any surface rust with emery cloth and then treat with a rust remover, almost all varieties of which contain phosphoric acid. A hard insoluble layer of iron phosphate is created which greatly inhibits further rust formation.

Hammerite itself will not stop rust from recurring. I speak from experience.

Looks nice.  You are picking up stars down to at least 17th magnitude because AE And (a supergiant in the galaxy) is readily visible. Several globular clusters show up nicely too.

A number of confusions about the Big Bang arise from the fact there are at least two interpretations of that term.

The observational evidence is very strong that the universe was once extremely hot, extremely dense and expanding. By "extremely" I mean compared with what we see around us in the present universe.

In one interpretation, the conservative one, "Big Bang" labels the universe when it was in that state. If you believe in inflationary theory, and many do because it is a persuasive explanation for a number of observable things in the universe, the Big Bang started the moment inflation stopped in our region of the universe.

Another definition of the Big Bang describes the condition of the universe immediately before inflation starts in our portion of the universe. There are many models of this. Some extrapolate back to a primordial singularity and posit a quantum fluctuation created both space and time. Others posit an infinite universe, one portion of which started inflating. Others posit a collapsing universe which then bounced once the conditions became possible for inflation to happe3n.

My personal favourite is the first definition. The nature of quantum gravity is not yet well understood enough to make pre-inflation predictions with any degree of confidence.

Hmm, just noticed something. Has anyone else? Look at the line of fairly bright stars at the 7 o'clock direction from Quaoar. There are four in my image but only three in the DSS2.

Checking the Gaia DR3 shows more information.  The "missing" star is Gaia DR3 4103983023994688768 which appears to be extremely red.  Its BP, G and RP magnitudes are 21.1, 16.16 and 14.43.  It is so faint in the blue that Gaia gives error bounds of 0.25 magnitudes whereas the others are good to 0.01 and 0.03 respectively.

For various reasons, (50000) Quaoar has always been a difficult object for me. It is fairly but not particularly bright these days (it is at V=18.8) but the real problem is that it lies in a very dense part of the Milky Way and 19th magnitude or brighter stars are only a few seconds of arc apart in that region. The TNO does move, but slowly, and you have to pick the right time to find it when it lies in a relatively clear spot. The image above is my first clear detection. It is around 13 arcs from the bright 16.1 magnitude star and about 3 arcsec from the nearer of the pair of ~19 magnitude stars.

Unfortunately I screwed up. Although 50 minutes of subs were taken it turned out that  for most of them the Peltier cooler was switched off and so all those subs were useless. The 29 usable subs, totalling 820 seconds, were stacked on Quaoar so the stars are slightly trailed. All subs taken by an unfiltered SX814 camera cooled to -10C and attached to a 0.4m Dilworth telescope. Imaging began at 2023-08-17T20:55.

The right hand pane shows the DSS field with the ephemeris position of Quaoar marked with a purple cross. The limiting magnitude in that image is about g=20.5.

13 hours ago, DirkSteele said:

BTW, Astronomy in your t-shirt (I.e 25C nights) is rather nice in my opinion. Certainly better than dressing like an arctic expedition.

I agree, when you are outdoors in your t-shirt.  Indoors, sharing a control room with a bunch of electronics and relatively poor ventilation is another matter.

Quite often I ensure the equipment is working then retire to the house and control everything from there.

The weather here in La Palma has been most unusually hot for the last week. It is much cooler now, but is still 31C at present. A few days ago it reached 42.6C. We suffer from a calima --- hot dusty air blowing in from the Sahara. the calima comes with high winds which produce terrible seeing, sometimes 15 arc seconds or more.

The electronics on and around the telescope suffered. The FS2 mount controller became very unreliable and died after 30-60 minutes until an old 4" cooling fan was strapped to its side with cable ties.

Some nights were so dusty that naked eye limiting magnitude was +1 and I didn't even try to do any observing, but have managed two nights, most recently last night. Only the latter yielded any usable results. The camera temperature at start of play was 31.5C and the two-stage Peltier with internal and auxiliary fan on the SX 814 camera had a real struggle to get the CCD down to -10C. I forgot to turn on the cooler at first and couldn't work out why the starting shots were so lousy and showed too few stars for plate-solving.

People in the UK can justifiably complain about clouds and rain but at least they don't have to deal with thick dust and nighttime temperatures well over 25C.  The dust, BTW, gets everywhere including on optical surfaces, and that dust is in addition to the fine volcanic ash still blowing around.

21 minutes ago, Mark Elijah said:

An old sod, in other words. I've been interested in astronomy for many years, but to my shame it's been in an 'armchair' capacity.

I'm thinking of dipping my virtual toe in the actual astronomical waters by buying a binocular. Maybe an 8x42. Baby steps...

Welcome aboard!

The 8x42 will work well but perhaps you may wish to consider a 7x50, the workhorse of astronomers for many decades.  The lower magnification makes it them easier to hold still enough so the stars don't move around as much and the larger aperture makes it easier to see the fainter stars.

BTW, please don't undervalue armchair astronomers.  These days they can do valuable scientific work through various Zooniverse projects.

22 hours ago, andrew s said:

Me too earth, fire, air and water. 😊 Regards Andrew 

Or, in modern terminology: solid, plasma, gas and liquid.

Still makes perfect sense and the classification still has its uses in science.

39ºC now and completely cloudless sky.  Shame that the dust haze is so thick that the sky is white, very slightly tinged with blue. A skimmed-milk colour.

Three are obvious (MW, LMC, SMC) and M31 is not that difficult.  I guessed at M33 and, sure enough, there it it - just.