Astronomy in the morning, questions in the afternoon

Here's a picture of the Hector J Robinson Observatory the other night (2-23-2010) as I was approaching it. I wanted to take a picture of the snow around the observatory without any tracks in the snow and obviously no sidewalk or path was cleared. I was happy to have my winter boots on which easily tracked through the snow making a one man path. It gave me a feeling of being up north breaking new trails through the snow. The fresh snow without tracks reminded me of "virgin snowmobile trails up north" which is a trail that nobody has been on yet after a fresh snowfall. No tracks in the snow, just a path to walk or in the case of snowmobiling, drive through. We of course don't have snowmobile trails in Lincoln Park, so if I want to combine sledding and star watching, I'll need to take a pair of small binoculars or something small in a backpack up north. Some years back when snowmobiling up and standing out at Black lake under the dark sky, I wondered how cool it would be to have brought along a small telescope. (Maybe I should try a snowmobile and dark sky view trip and post about it in the future. . . :)

2-26-2010

I heard some phrases from an old movie playing Friday morning that had some comments about astronomy.

This is some old obscure movie, perhaps even an "out of print" movie difficult to find. (Perhaps bought from a relatively unknown B actor, Gloria Jean herself over the net. But that's another story.)

One of the "kids" in the movie was talking to a college teacher.

STUDENT

Astronomy is the study of heavenly bodies isn’t it?

TEACHER

Yeah. . .

STUDENT

You study you’re heavenly bodies, I’ll study mine.

And then quickly later in the movie. . . I heard . . . one of the "students" say . . .

And “Professor. Astronomy is a pretty dull subject, even from you.”

This was some movie shot in the 50s on black and white film. Perhaps a film that Gloria Jean was in, it might have been a movie called "Mr. Big" with Gloria Jean and Donald O'Conner. Or some movie of that type. I didn't stop to find out what the movie was exactly, I headed off to work.

These movies were about kids at that time and light musicals. Made at a time when the idea of kids music was changing toward rock and roll and still giving perception of "big bands" swing dancing or tap as being things the younger generation did. This of course was at times a Hollywood generated light and musical way of life and these Black and White B movies were more like a made for TV movie than a huge high budget MGM feature.

The movie dialog reminded me of that in general most people view astronomy as something that's a rather dull subject.

THE LUNCH ASTRONOMER

Later in the same day, I was at lunch reviewing some photos taken at the Hector J Robinson Observatory and dark frames on my laptop. Dark frames are photos of nothing but the dark. More about them in a different post.

I saw a guy walk into this diner and noticed he had a new Ford van and asked him how he liked it. He said he liked it a lot. It's that small van Ford imports from Turkey, I forgot it's name, but it's a small cute van. When I asked about the fuel economy, he replied he gets 25 mpg.

He sat down nearby and I went back to the task of looking up exposures and recording what I had in detail. He was waiting around for his order and heard me talking to myself a little as I was working on the computer.

(Computer guys often talk to themselves a little when on the computer, which is a sign of being crazy I suppose.)

I read out loud the name of the file and said something like, "what exposure is this dark frame?" or something like that to myself. When he overheard me say "dark frame" his interest picked up. "Astronomy club? You're from an astronomy club?" I guess the word "dark frame" tipped him off and he noticed my FAAC jacket.

He then asked me a telescope question. He had had a "13 inch Coulter" in the past and was thinking about getting a 12 inch dob. He wanted to know if there would be much of a difference in what he would see going down to a 12 inch discovery(?) I think he said Discovery which if I recall correctly is a dob built by Orion.

I replied that I'm not an expert at that but have read that there is a lot of extra light gathering power added on the edge of a mirror by going up sizes and he might notice a difference, but perhaps not that much between a 13 inch and a 12 inch. It's only an inch. He stated someone mentioned that there was a 44% difference in brightness between the two. I didn't have time to check this figure out, but I have read that you may need 80% or more brightness difference between a couple of telescopes to notice much difference. I said, I don't know if you'll notice much difference, but when was the last time you looked up with that Coulter?

"Twenty years ago."

Well I've been out of astronomy for a long time about 32 years before getting involved again only about 6 months ago. I can say there's a lot more light pollution now in the cities and you may notice it's a lot harder to see much due to light pollution now than 20 years ago. He seemed to agree with that. I said you might notice the difference an inch would make, but more likely would notice two inch differences in light gathering power. There's a lot more difference between a 12 inch and a 14 in theory, because you're talking more like 80% difference in light gathering power. (As you can see I've been reading the Obsession telescope site lately.)

(The other thing I wondered about was the quality of the mirror in his older Coulter, compared to a newer discovery or whatever he was thinking of getting. I didn't mention this at the time, but sometimes the old optics in some of those old telescopes is quite good and it's hard to say if the newer scopes have mirrors that are figured as well and provide as nice an image.) There are a ton of other things of course to take into consideration. But that's for another post and there are a lot of good links out there and forums with telescope reviews and buying advice.

I asked him if he ever went to an astronomy club and he said he had been a member of the Warren club in the past. He said it like he attended, but I don't know why he stopped going. I asked him if there was a reason he stopped going? I was more curious than anything, kind of like a guy taking a survey. He didn't really have a reason and of course I couldn't tell if there was some reason he quit going. He mentioned he might see me at a future meeting, so who knows he might know enough guys and local club information to just show up at one of the FAAC meetings.

So there's two astronomy coincidences that happened to me on Friday and I wasn't even looking for them.