Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Here in Minnesota I find the following combination to be satisfactory:

- Long underwear
- Pants & sweater & thick wool socks & hiking boots
- Big heavy tundra-style coat with matching gloves
- Nearby house or car handy for warm-ups
- Some hot tea

Order, and not chaos?

Just from looking around I'd say there is plenty of both order AND chaos. In fact, the Universe seems to be quite a mix of both sides of this existential coin. You have intersteller and intergalactic space, with free particles, atoms, random EM radiation being dispersed from all directions as well as a few random gravitons flying around, along with the fabric of space-time fluctuating quite chaotically at a quantum scale. This is chaos, and there's plenty of it, everywhere in fact.

Order is not actually forbidden by physics. It's just that as time progresses the ratio of chaos to order steadily increases, until stars burn out, and eventually even matter itself dissolves. And there may be universes where it's all chaos from the get-go.

Of course, such a universe wouldn't give rise to us and so we wouldn't find ourselves asking 'why is there chaos and not order'? We naturally find ourselves in one of the ordered universes asking the opposite question. The question itself is rooted in two biases, one of observation and one of logic, the first being the assumption that what we see is all there is, i.e. that there are no 'chaotic' zones or semi-chaotic other 'universes' beyond our grasp, the second being that 'order' is unnatural, even impossible, and that 'chaos' is the original fixed, and presumably immutable state of everything.

Of course some would argue that an eternal Supreme Being would imply a very high level of order at least within that being, so that atheistic or protheistic, one must always admit to some possibility of order as being able to come into existence or simply 'existing' primordially. To deny the possibility of some order to either occur or to exist outright would deny the existence of both Universe and God.

Maybe if you prefer to see + instead of x in your diffraction spike pattern? :-)

In my experience ghost images are more apparent with uncoated eyepieces than uncoated objectives. I have an uncoated 60mm for a 'quick look' and I've never noted any ghosting. While at 3" you are definitely on a "light budget" and want as much transmission as possible, if it's a Jaegers and a good enough deal maybe it doesn't matter to you.

You can get a D&G 6" f/12 or f/15 OTA for $1695. Being a planetary guy that'd be my first choice for a refractor.

Officially, I believe that according to international law the Moon belongs to everyone and no one -- that is, no one can 'claim' it to be part of their country, etc.

Of course as a practical matter it would probably really fall upon the United Nations (through the NASA, ESA and/or whatever other space agencies exist in cooperation with the military) to enforce this when the time came should some rogue state or band of prospectors try to set up their own little lunar regime.

Depends on your definition of 'reading' I guess -- 25,000 words per minute is over 400 words per second. Since the human mind has difficulty even perceiving separations of time shorter than 1/30 of a second, to read and comprehend a word in 1/400 of a second, or a full sentence in 1/40 of a second, seems a bit implausible.

I used PVC for my 10" dob alt bearings and it works great. You can get pre-cut plywood discs at Menard's or Home Depot if you don't like to cut circles.

As for 'why isn't everybody making them' is probably mainly because for most people the hassle involved is out of proportion with the gain achieved. When you talk about bending mirrors at odd angles like 3 degrees and such, not to mention the fun you'd have collimating this thing, well... you're getting into areas of fiddling that most people would rather not fiddle with. Most people like nice, straight 90-degree angles and a simple on-axis lens or mirror to collimate centrally.

There is something to be gained with minimizing the secondary obstruction size -- but there is questionable gain, IMHO, of breaking your back to get it to zero. There is a point of diminishing returns.

Others will have strong feelings on this matter I'm sure, but my opinion is the Ultimate Planetary Instrument, barring a $150,000 monster APO, is an f/8 or so newtonian with a 15% or so secondary obstruction and of course a high quality mirror. Or alternatively, a large-aperture long-focus refractor if you have the facilities for such a thing (notice the cost of the 8" off-axis model is about the same as an 8" D&G OTA, so maybe there's a reason everybody's not making them just from that standpoint too).

As I understand it there is no general agreement as to what happens inside the black hole. Relativity would say everything just gets crushed into singularity and stays there, but lots of physicists say that the singularity isn't a real result and just a sign that our physics models break down at that point. I think quantum physics makes the creation of actual point-singularities impossible. We need a unified theory of gravity and everything.