Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

I read the article. It is an interpretation within the letter of the Constitution but clearly in violation of its intent.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, the Constitution was written over 200 years ago before modern legalese evolved to the point that all documents are designed to have no loopholes but have been rendered incomprehensible in the process.

The Constitution, being very old, is a document that can be read and understood by ordinary humans. That means it's riddled with loopholes because the Founding Fathers didn't think to add an extra 8,415 pages of incomprehensible WHEREAS's, HOWEVER's and other legal mumbo-jumbo.

As a result, divining Constitutionality is very much an exercise in adhering to the spirit of the document, the intent that the clauses were written in.

It should be abundantly clear that the Founding Fathers forbade Congress from passing laws regarding the establishment of religion for the purpose of keeping the government out of religion. PERIOD. The Founding Fathers, of course, never forsaw the hijinks of religious-activist judges trying to stir things up with a religious statue in a government building.

No one is preventing the judge from religious expression, of course. He can display a statue like this on his own property, or any other private lot on which he has permission, he can even tote it along on a demonstration of some sort. Key here is that he is doing this as a private citizen as is his Constitutional right to express.

However, if he installs it on public property by the power of his judicial authority, he is NOT acting as a private citizen, he is acting as a part of the GOVERNMENT and is then guilty of government meddling in religious matters, something the Founding Fathers never intended.

Hey cool you can actually make out the caldera on Olympus Mons!

Two points in favor of the Housey scope:

1) portability -- you can't throw a 12-ton scope in the truck and take it camping!
2) performance per dollar -- the Hubble costs a million times as much, but only gets 10-20x better resolution! What kind of a deal is that?

:-)

ANYTHING you can do to keep stray light out of that tube will make a BIG difference IF you often view from a place that has lots of scattered light around. I view from my back yard in St. Paul and there's light everywhere. So I built my 10" dob with this city-use optimization in mind. An overly-long solid tube that extends more than a foot past the eyepiece and dark cloth spray-painted ultra-flat black glued to the whole inside.

I can't help you with the mount but you do need better eyepieces. I understand these things come with .965" huygenians which is a very junky eyepiece. If you don't want to throw in a lot of money right now you can get some very inexpensive (like $15-26 each) 3-element kellners and 4-element plossls from dealers like SurplusShed and HandsOnOptics that would even be a major improvement over the eyepieces you have now and would give you some better idea of whether the scope's primary optics are any good.

Another possibility is that the two lens elements in the achromat could be *slightly* out of alignment with each other, making perfect collimation impossible. This can happen easily in refractors with plastic cells if the lens housing is loose or cross-threaded.

I think they say that because f/5 dobs usually have not much extension of the tube past the eyepiece so lots of stray light gets in.

I'd say go for the 10" but baffle the heck out of it -- get or make some sort of tube extension to extend the tube well past the eyepiece / diagonal zone, this will do much to cut down the ambient light getting in your eyepiece that ruins contrast in observing from a metro area. Maybe get some flocking paper too and light the inside of the tube.

In my experience, higher mags do NOT overcome atmospheric conditions, if anything they seem to make it worse.

IMO higher mags are useful to increase image scale to see tinier details with better certainty as to their size and position, but it comes with a penalty of lowered contrast since the light/dark concentrations on a planet's disk are spread out over a wider area.

For example, when observing Mars, 170x provides a very 'pleasing' very contrasty view and allows me to see some very subtle shading variations, -- but to sketch it I really have to crank it to 300-500x in order to get a more precise 'fix' on where all the features are on the planetary disk and to gain perception of truly 'tiny' features. Few of us have 'teenage' eyes anymore and have to contend with floaters and generally declining 'eyeball' resolution anyway.

"I mean, wouldn't it be great if we had:
3 or 4 moons around the Earth "

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You'd have to enjoy those moons, because you could forget about deep-sky viewing under those circumstances. It'd be a looooooong wait between times of 4 simultaneous 'new moons'! :-D

IMHO, satisfying participation in forums of this sort is predicated upon one very critical skill. Knowing when to quit, when to let things drop and maybe come back later. This can be especially hard for relative newcomers to this forum.

Because things here are seldom argued to any sort of resolution, no the truth is that things are rather argued to simple exhaustion.

So someone at some point has to quit. It is not an admission of the other party's being right, and it is certainly not a reason for a lot of hand-wringing over what impression one has made on the group.