Ags

I had a similar telescope when I was young, although mine was longer so presumably a bit slower. CA was phenomenal, but it showed me Alpha Centauri and Jupiter's moons, and yes, I was inspired.

I think you'll find that's actually Entish for "Hello".

A sawn-off telescope?

It's a very nice collection indeed!

It looks very Spiderman 😀

You misunderstand me. No engineer is going to purposely increase the energy required for a device (unless they are funded by an energy company). The logic of engineering is to use less energy, use less materials and so forth. It's not even a green point, just common sense. In the fifties they thought aliens would pick up our noisy TV broadcasts, but with the advance in technology, the transmissions are much less noisy now. Think of the large communication satellites launched decades ago versus the tiny (trigger warning) starlink satellites launched today. Smaller and lighter is almost always better.

I would correct this slightly - we should strive to increase our supply of clean energy and to reduce actual energy usage to a minimum. We don't need megawatt mobile phones, I think all tech works better if it uses as little energy as possible. Less waste heat, longer battery life, safer, etc.

Musk has spoken favorably of nuking the Martian poles to make them darker and sublimate. Slower but less radioactive is the idea to pump CFCs into the martian atmosphere to boost the greenhouse effect. Others have proposed orbital solar reflectors to melt the poles or bake the permafrost at lower latitudes. All of these will thicken the martian atmosphere, warm the planet dramatically and lead to a Martian "spring", potentially with liquid bodies of water on the surface. The air won't be breathable (in fact it will be deadly poisonous) but maybe you wouldn't need to wear a pressure suit when you venture out of your hab sphere. I will claim to have invented a terraforming method myself, though I am not competent to do the math. High level clouds in the martian atmosphere raise surface temperatures by up to 20 degrees C, and are seeded by the small amount of space dust falling onto Mars. So... put a mass driver on Phobos or Deimos and pump an order of magnitude more dust into the upper Martian atmosphere! Martian climate modellers will shoot me down, but don't do the maths, just do it I say! The problem is that any technique to raise Mars' temperature will just create a thicker (but still very thin) atmospere of CO2, with no Nitrogen. A thicker atmosphere is not necessarily more hospitable. It will be warmer by day and the nights will be less "chilly", but that means the weather will be more violent, and with thicker air the wind will have more impact. All of these techniques bet on Mars being self-sustainingly more warm once the atmosphere is thickened - so once you have thickened the atmosphere you don't need to do constant maintenance. By the way, people go on about Mars being too small and not having a magnetic field, so it can't hold on to the thickened atmosphere. That's true - on geological timescales, not human timescales. On those sort of timescales we have plenty of time to construct an artificial Mars magnetic field. Some Japanese engineers have even designed one for Earth (to compensate for a loss of magnetism during a polar reversal). Mars is smaller and more geologically stable so much easier to magnetise!

I couldn't resist...

He is a divisive figure, but he gets results!

I didn't expect the topic to be so divisive! However, my question was not "should we go?" but "when will we go?" Half the time I tend towards the idea of not contaminating Mars with Earth microbes astronauts would definitely introduce, but I also feel that it is inevitable we will go regardless. Musk's Starship program is going well, so I think we may see the event in the early 2030s.

My family has a running bet on when hoomans will land on Mars. I am an optimist and an a proponent of a 2030 date, but what do you think?

Got the print proof of the Caldwell log book. The labels no longer collide with the ring binding, but I may need to print on thicker coated paper to prevent shadowing of print from the opposite side of the page into the sketching area.

New addition to my eyepiece collection: Explore Scientific 20mm 68°. ...it fits my TS 50mm RACI like a glove!

Very shark-like!

But if you are anti-space exploration, this kind of reporting would turn you off more, as it makes it sound like the entire space industry is just big boy's toys and ego trips.

I don't understand why the media is talking up the personal "competition" between Musk, Bezos and Branson. You simply can't compare Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic to SpaceX. SpaceX has transformed the launch industry, racking up scores of technological firsts and putting multiple civilian and government crews into orbit, not merely suborbital hops. Reporting focussed on which billionaire got into their rocket first reduces it all to the worst kind of personality culture. Having said that, the only one I would fancy going on would be Blue Origin. It seems the safest option, and 10 minutes in space is long enough for a lifetime. Virgin Galactic doesn't appeal - it's not a rocket, and I think it is the least safe of the three. The only one I have any likelyhood of getting on is suborbital Starship to Australia!

I am of the school that thinks larger aperture is a mixed blessing in light polluted skies. My situation is Bortle 8-9 (sometimes it seems like Bortle 11 😀 ) and my goal is pretty views in the eyepiece. That goal means the background in the eyepiece needs to be relatively black, not milky white. That in turn means a viewing exit pupil of 2mm or preferrably less. Given a 300mm dob, that would mean a minimum magnification of 150x, which would mean (assuming an 82 degree eyepeice) a field of about half a degree, which is getting a bit tight.

That's why I observe with an eye patch, bicycle helmet and knee pads 😃

Or just switch the eyepatch to the observing eye when going indoors.

Yes, looking at lighter lines and thicker paper. I hadn't considered dotted lines...

Sadly I had a major cloud transit to deal with....

The second hand market is is the best way to limit astro losses. When people have been kind enough to offer me an item at a good price, I have always resold at the same price, doing otherwise wouldn't feel right. Sometimes I buy new for tge guarantee though.

Well... just to conclude the thread I got an ES 20/68 in the end. Should come next week!

I just received the test copy of my astro notebook (the generic version without Messier/Caldwell finder charts), mischievously dubbed by my partner as the "grown-up nerd's coloring book". Overall I am pleased with the general heft of the book, the layout and the cover, but there are a couple of bugs. Lines printed on the back side of a page ghost through in the sketching circle, and the left-hand form labels sail too close to the ring binding.