Posts Made By: James Brown

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

Nice work on the planets, Jim. I find those images to be more representative of a natural image, similar to those in my 16" on nights of excellent seeing, rather than the heavily enhanced images I typically see on amateur forums... 

Thanks.  I definitely appreciate the comment, because a fairly natural image is my target.  It is way too easy to get carried away with sharpening and color saturation, and I don't like those results either.

I have never seen the planets through a 16" or similar under steady skies.  It must be grand.  I doubt we ever get steady skies like you would have in California or the South.  Most of the time when I look at the planets in my 7" they are just dancing around.  July 30 was pretty good for here though.

Originally Posted by Brian McFarland

Thanks (I think). Now you have me tempted to throw even more money at this hobby! I have a few excellent planetary telescopes that would work really well for this.

Hey it's just money!  Planetary is cheap imaging too.  You can get a kit with the camera I bought plus a manual filter wheel and filters for $550.00.  The software is free.

Of course you might have to upgrade your laptop!  I was getting about 15 frames per second with my old usb2 "astro-laptop" but with my newer usb3 "work-laptop" I can get 80 frames per second full frame, or even a couple hundred fps if I use a smaller frame size.

J 

Originally Posted by Russ Carroll

Nice pics, Jim. A conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter will put them only 0.1 degrees apart December 21st. You can get a two-fer!

Thanks!  That conjunction will be really cool, I understand this is a once every 20 year event.  Setting sun will be a pain, but it looks like it will be manageable. 

Speaking of incredible free software, the screen capture below is from https://stellarium-web.org/  Super user friendly, free interface.  This is the view at 5:22 pm from my location on 12/21/20.

  

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/08/politics/michelle-obama-bernie-sanders-john-kasich-dnc/index.html
AND:
https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/25/us/john-kasich-fast-facts/index.html

Two old white guys?  Never going to happen.

Jim

Originally Posted by Greg Shaffer

Nice images btw James.....I did notice what cam you said, didnt notice what scope though?

Thanks!  TEC 180 FL.  Also used a 2.5x TV Powermate.  I love this telescope!  We had guests over on Saturday night and the seeing was about as good as it ever gets in Colorado.  No images taken, but a good time was had by all!  We looked at the summer show-stoppers plus Jupiter and Saturn.  

Jim

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

That was the plan Greg.  I told a couple of other posters here via PM that I was going use the leftist tactics that CNN and they use against Trump, back at them and see how they liked it.

I still don't think they get it.  

Yeah, you sure owned me.  

Rich mentioned in another thread:  "The Swedes did it right, and they didn't lock down their country..."  He then compared Sweden to New York.  New York is of course not much like Sweden.  I would submit that the other Scandanavian Countries, Finland and Norway are a lot more like Sweden than NYC.  

Sweden's approach is quite interesting though.  It is well know that Sweden avoided mandatory business closures while Finland and Norway followed a more typical European response to the pandemic.  Sweden paid a price as illustrated below.  They have about ten times the deaths per million of their neighbors.

I'm posting this graph without commenting on whether Sweden was right or wrong.  It is quite possible that the benefits to their economy of their pandemic strategy are deemed by the Swedes to outweigh the human cost.  

I am posting this for another reason.  Some people seem to believe that death and hospitalization toll in the US would be about the same whether or not we wore masks, closed business and enforced social distancing.  These people just don't see the benefit of simple social distancing measures.  The data from Scanadanavia demonstrates that social distancing, masks, business closures and the like work quite well.  If an analogy can be drawn between Scandanavia the US (and I think we can make that analogy although not precisely) the situation in the US might have been a lot worse, if we had followed the Sweden model.  800k dead?  1.6 million dead?  So far?  Who knows.  

Maybe the analogy is invalid of course.  There are a lot of factors at play in Scandanavia.  The US is not socially structured much like Scandanavia.  In any case, this is pretty interesting data (from Worldometer of course).  Jim

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opinion/israel-uae.html

I never thought I would read favorable, near glowing coverage of Jared Kushner in the New York Times, but here it is.  Shines a pretty favorable light on Trump too.  I wonder how many died-in-the-wool NYT subscribers are calling for Thomas Friedman to be fired and his opinion retracted?

The underlying Israel/UAE deal seems to be a pretty big and very favorable development for the Mid East, Israel, and the US.  Iran is very upset.  
Foreign affairs are not my strong suit, and I am still working through the details.  Curious what some of you think.

Jim

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

Better yet, lets have Trump's buddy, Bill Barr, PROVE IT TO THE JUDGE, and not simply offer his biased opinion about it. Where was he all these years when voting by mail has taken place,(since the civil war) and why hasn't he condemned Trump and his wife for doing the same. Finally, Rich, why don't you email the judge with your "proof"... 

Rich will be mailing in his ballot of course, or maybe dropping it off.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Colorado has been a "mail-in" state for many years.  It works great here.  I have described our system in detail, there are many security checks.   Is fraud possible?  Of course, fraud is possible with any system.  There is no evidence that the state of Colorado experiences any more ballot fraud than traditional voting states.  

I have asked Rich about this many times, but not surprisingly, he refuses to answer questions about any difference between the fraud rates in Colorado and other states.  He prefers to speculate about how much fraud is possible, rather than rationally discussing how much fraud actually occurs in the existing mail-in states. 

Jim

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

Your asinine, moronic assertion as if it has been regular protocol since the Civil War  (emphasis in original)

Rod didn't say that of course.  Here is where you back down and say, "OK, my bad."