Posts Made By: William Paolini

Hi Floyd All the clouds rolled in today to obscure the Venus transit...so not happy about that. But ok...I saw the last one luckily.

Converted my main-line eyepieces once more...this time to Pentax XWs and liking them much much better than anything I've had previous. Just working with the 40, 20, 14, and 10, then Barlowing for higher mags...keeps what I have to bring out to a minimum. Also "refining" my planetary collection a little...looked for a 7mm TMB Supermono but hard to find these days, so gave up and picked up a Pentax SMC Ortho instead for that slot. Glad I did...had forgotten how spectacular these eyepieces were. So now have the 8 AP-SPL, 7 SMC Or, 6 ZAO-II, and 5 XO. Have a 10 AP-SPL also but considering ditching that and replacing with a 4 ZAO-II instead, then maybe the 2.5x XO and will be done.

Also looking forward to getting the new Baader Classic Ortho set with turret and Barlow. Should be a fun little set.

btw - also pick up the Nikon 12x50 AE binoculars. OMG are they fantastic astro performers...and solar also with front filters.

Keith,

What an excellent observation and challenge! I figured I would give it a go with my 4" APO. Was a very interesting experience. At about 200x the CD was clearly visible until about 20 degrees of arc from the planet's orb on the back side of the rings, and maybe around 25-30 degrees from the planet's orb on the front side. Bumping the magnification up to 340x the CD was clearly visible completely on the back side of the rings. So was able to see it right up to where they vanished around the back of the planet. On the front side of the rings could clearly make it out right up to the point where it crossed the front of the planet, but not on the portion that was in front of the planet. My last bump in magnification was up to 400x. At this point the exit pupil was getting dim at only 0.25mm and this was working against me so less of the CD visible at that low exit pupil.

Was an interesting exercise since as I varied the magnification between 200x to 340x in different amounts, gradually more of the CD would become visible arcing around the rings. Interesting to see this happen and also another good validation that there is no such thing as "empty" magnification if you know where and what to look at on each target. One day soon will try this exercise with my 10" Newt since I will be able to sustain higher mags with better brightness to see if I can catch it entirely around front.

-Bill

Joe,

For this magnification, lots of things need to be well controlled...such as your scope collimated well, the mirror thermally acclimated well, the target high in the sky, and most important the seeing stable and transparency good. These tend not to all come together easily.

I've had 400x and 500x and more perform very successfully with a 10" Dob. I would say that for now you use the 3mm for more forgiving targets (i.e., Glob Cores) and enjoy what it can do, then when all other conditions seem in place let it strut its stuff on lunar/planetary.

-Bill

George,

This is interesting to say the least. However, thier view of what consciousness is, seems rather limited based on what you posted, i.e., the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consciousness is an exceedingly complex topic, and has many meanings (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).

I have no doubt that many animals, if not all, exhibit some level of consiousness. The real question becomes exactly what level and then what should that mean in our behavior towards them? And then, what would it mean if one day it is discovered that the plant kingdom possesses some rudimentary form of consciousness as well? What would be left to eat?

Sounds far fetched that a plant could meet the definition of consiuosness that your post references, directed behavior. But we do seem to see this in some species of plants. As this article states (http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-17/ideas/32231146_1_plants-carrot-human-behavior):

"In 2006, Penn State researchers demonstrated that the parasitic dodder vine can smell the difference between wheat and tomato plants. In 2007 a pair of Canadian researchers determined that plants can tell the difference between their own kin and strangers of the same species. “Plants have this kind of hidden but complicated social life,” one of the researchers told National Geographic News."

And here's another interesting discussion on the topic of what is consciousness and how low does it acually go in life forms: http://arcade.stanford.edu/sentient-plants-sentient-bacteria.

If we allow consciousness be the test to decide what we eat or not, we may just go extinct!