iantaylor2uk

The whole reason Fourier worked on his series was to help him solve practical problems of the time on heat transfer!

I agree with you, but the point I was trying to make was that scientific theories don't really need to be understood by non-scientists to be correct, although the big bang theory is easier to understand compared to quantum mechanics, for example.

Are you a scientist? The big bang theory is a scientific theory so it does mean you need a fair bit of scientific knowledge to understand why it describes many of the features of the observable universe.

Thanks for the comment Mark - by the way I'm not called Chester, that is where I live.

I had another go at processing this, and think the version below is slightly better. Let me know what you think.

Thanks for the comments Michael , I'll have a further play around with the image - I must admit a personal preference of having a more "natural" image. I find if you darken the background too much the final image can look over-processed - although I appreciate there is a bit of a fine line and some personal judgement involved, and also different people may have different views. I am reasonably happy with the final image although it could maybe do with the red dialled down slightly. I also much prefer to leave the stars in rather than do starless images.

Good clear night yesterday in the Northwest of England. Managed just over 3 hours of imaging on the Veil Nebula with the ASKAR FRA 300. Camera used was a ZWO 071 MC Pro (gain=200, sensor cooled to 0 C) and I used two minute exposures, and took 100 subs, and stacked the best 90 of them with DSS. I also used an L-Enhance filter for this target. Full image is below with some close ups of the Eastern Veil, Western Veil and Pickering's Triangle. I do like the wide field view from the ASKAR FRA 300.

The attached article is from 2003 - well after QED was formulated - there are clearly many physicists out there that still don't consider we understand what a photon is. what is a photon.pdf

QED can calculate things to amazing accuracy. It doesn't mean we know what a photon actually is. If you think we do, then you are wrong.

I'm not sure they do think in a different way. If you apply Newton's laws to atoms, you end up with nonsense. If you assume a classical picture of an electron moving in a circle around a nucleus, then electromagnetic theory would say that the electron would lose energy and so spiral in towards the nucleus. It doesn't do this, as atoms are observed to be stable, so you need different physics to describe what goes on in an atom. There is also the fact that objects, such as the electron and photon, sometimes behave as waves and sometimes behave as particles, although they are neither of these, and what they are is not at present understood all that well. These ideas led on to the concept that atoms are stable when the number of wavelengths of an electron around a nucleus was a whole number (this is Bohr's simple model of an atom). These fairly simple ideas then led on to the more complex mathematics of quantum mechanics. For example, if objects behave as waves, then there must be a corresponding "wave equation" which was written down by Schrodinger, although the novel aspect was that his wave equation involved complex numbers, whereas conventional wave equations (for modelling sound waves or waves in the ocean) did not contain complex numbers.

If you do experiments to try to "prove" Newton's laws of motion you will find it quite difficult. For example, bodies do not experimentally appear to travel at constant speed but instead appear to slow down - this is due to friction. At some point you have to make the jump from complex experimental data to simplify things in a model. Newton realized that in the absence of friction (or other forces) bodies would travel in straight lines at constant speed indefinitely.

I would suggest a carbon fibre tripod + strain wave guide mount, like the AM5 and look at something like the Orion Optics OMC140 (or similar Mak). That combination would be quite light and portable.

This looks interesting https://www.thephoblographer.com/2023/07/29/did-om-digital-figure-out-a-solution-for-astrophotographers/

Complex numbers and complex analysis are rigorous mathematically and also incredibly useful for engineering and mathematics. It is surprising to me that quaternion and octonion analysis is not more developed. In terms of common tools used in physics, perturbation theory and Feynmann path integrals have not yet been shown to be mathematically rigorous. I think also in fluid mechanics, it is not known if the Navier Stokes equations have unique solutions and even the Euler equation for fluids has been shown to "blow up" for certain boundary conditions.

It is somewhat suspicious that if anyone has any photos they are generally blurry and low resolution. More or less everyone nowadays have good quality high resolution cameras on their phones, which work irrespective of whether there's any Internet or phone connection, so if aliens are out there (and for some reason they are virtually always in the US rather than anywhere else in the world!) we should expect to start seeing some better quality photographic evidence.

So by your logic if a photon is emitted by a galaxy which travels towards us, the galaxy no longer exists. I don't think so!

I use mine with a ZWO 071 MC Pro camera, which has an APS-C sized sensor and it gives a field of view of 4.5 degrees by 3 degrees, which is pretty wide!

Try the FRA 300

I think this has already been tried, with some success - see paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1528

Just because a paper has been published and been through peer review doesn't mean it's correct. Plenty of papers were written about the "ether" before Einstein pointed out it didn't exist, which in hindsight were all complete rubbish. The scientific community will read the paper and decide for themselves whether it has any merit. Let's be clear, the consensus for the age of the universe has not changed just because of this paper. Watch this space as I would imagine serious scientists will react to this work in due course.

The Hotech SCA 1x flattener works for telescopes from f/5 to f/8 and I have found it to be very good. It doesn't have an M63 thread but just pushes in and self centres with rubber bands but you could probably use it with a suitable adapter.

The top photo looks like very similar to one I took last year using a ZWO L-Enhance filter - although in this case my subs were 180 seconds, and I took 60 of them, with a fairly slow Tak TSA 102 f/8 refractor.

Just to be clear - the form that physical laws take are constrained by symmetry. To be specific, the Lagrangian proposed for a physical law (such as electromagnetism, or the strong force, or even gravity) has to be invariant under local symmetries - the ones covered by Noether's theorem are examples of these. Most physical laws have coupling constants, and I guess these could potentially change without changing the underlying symmetries of the forces, but you would have to have observational data for this, and research aimed at seeing if the fine structure has changed with time have not, to my knowledge, found much, if any change. I am not an expert on general relativity, but claims that energy is not conserved assume that space-time does not have energy associated with it. For example, if photons from the early universe are red-shifted, then their energy is less, and so you could ask where the energy has gone to. If you don't think it has gone anywhere you would claim that energy is not conserved. However, I would have thought it to be a reasonable assumption is that the energy goes into the work done for space-time to expand. We don't yet have a viable theory of space-time at the microscopic level, although we do know that space-time has entropy (see very recent paper at: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.221501 and also available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10607), so it would be reasonable to assume it would have other thermodynamic properties such as energy

I don't think it matters that the universe is not symmetric. What is being claimed is that physical laws should be the same an hour from now, or a thousand years in the future (or past) or a billion years in the future or past. Of course this is an assumption. If there is evidence that physical laws were different 10 billion years ago we would have to rethink things.

There are also other symmetries that occur in complex systems. For example, at a phase transition, there is often scale invariance, and this is why many different systems at a phase transition have the same critical exponents.