The Astronomy Thread

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Oldbased

Oldbased

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I've owned 2 telescopes in my life but lived in a small city which made it hard to see what I wanted to see. Was further compounded by the issue of tech and price.
Pretty sure my first tele cost near $200 but that was 1980s as well. Got a desire and got one in shorter and fatter in 2008 in backwoods TN for about $80. Was before all the smart apps and crap though.
It was jittery, blurry and I could only see the moon larger.

Being you are already seeing 99.9% more than any city dweller ever will just by driving a few miles out of the city if you live in one, you are already many steps ahead.
The first one you listed with the tracking stuff and Celestron being a top name might give you better experience, but I'm going to say upgrade as much as you can because my experience was always in both cases I wish I had got something better.
$66 is not much of an investment unless you just want to see the moon bigger and mars look like an orange.
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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Tuco said:


This really is the coolest thing ever.
Click to expand...

I'm waiting for the triple view of 3 separate boosters landing. This summer.

(plus, the whatever they're launching. Will be disappointed if it's not a Tesla headed to the moon)
 
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spronk

spronk

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Newly discovered exoplanet is 'hotter than most stars' - CNN.com
The newest-discovered exoplanet doesn't act like any planet you've ever heard of. The bizarre find is 650 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus.

KELT-9b is a giant planet nearly twice the size of Jupiter, with a dayside temperature hotter than that of most stars and thousands of degrees warmer than any known exoplanet, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature.

It's so close to its host star, KELT-9, that it orbits every 1.5 days, unlike the year it takes Earth to orbit our sun. This proximity isn't exactly kind to it.

The star is twice as hot and 2.5 times more massive than our sun. It's also rotating 50 times faster than our sun -- so fast that its poles have flattened and the equator bulges out. This makes it the hottest host star of an exoplanet that we know of, said Scott Gaudi, study author and professor of astronomy at the Ohio State University.
The planet is tidally locked to its star, like the moon always shows the same face to Earth. Its dayside would look orangeish, so hot that complex molecules can't stay together and only 2,000 degrees cooler than our sun. If you poured water on the surface, it would immediately disassociate into oxygen and hydrogen, Gaudi said.
 
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Big Phoenix

Big Phoenix

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Olebass said:
I've owned 2 telescopes in my life but lived in a small city which made it hard to see what I wanted to see. Was further compounded by the issue of tech and price.
Pretty sure my first tele cost near $200 but that was 1980s as well. Got a desire and got one in shorter and fatter in 2008 in backwoods TN for about $80. Was before all the smart apps and crap though.
It was jittery, blurry and I could only see the moon larger.

Being you are already seeing 99.9% more than any city dweller ever will just by driving a few miles out of the city if you live in one, you are already many steps ahead.
The first one you listed with the tracking stuff and Celestron being a top name might give you better experience, but I'm going to say upgrade as much as you can because my experience was always in both cases I wish I had got something better.
$66 is not much of an investment unless you just want to see the moon bigger and mars look like an orange.
Click to expand...
I mean I could drop $400-500 a scope and associated hardware, just not smart thing to do atm. $100 or less is no big deal, especially as a novice who has no idea about them.
 
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Scoresby

Scoresby

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spronk said:
Newly discovered exoplanet is 'hotter than most stars' - CNN.com
The newest-discovered exoplanet doesn't act like any planet you've ever heard of. The bizarre find is 650 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus.

KELT-9b is a giant planet nearly twice the size of Jupiter, with a dayside temperature hotter than that of most stars and thousands of degrees warmer than any known exoplanet, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature.

It's so close to its host star, KELT-9, that it orbits every 1.5 days, unlike the year it takes Earth to orbit our sun. This proximity isn't exactly kind to it.

The star is twice as hot and 2.5 times more massive than our sun. It's also rotating 50 times faster than our sun -- so fast that its poles have flattened and the equator bulges out. This makes it the hottest host star of an exoplanet that we know of, said Scott Gaudi, study author and professor of astronomy at the Ohio State University.
The planet is tidally locked to its star, like the moon always shows the same face to Earth. Its dayside would look orangeish, so hot that complex molecules can't stay together and only 2,000 degrees cooler than our sun. If you poured water on the surface, it would immediately disassociate into oxygen and hydrogen, Gaudi said.
Click to expand...

Reminds me of a question I have had for some time but don't know how to answer. Why would life be limited to such a narrow spectrum of possible temperatures? This article hints at the reasoning that even basic (much less complex) chemistry breaks down under temp, but could there be the possibility for other life at ultra-high temp and what would it look like?
 
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iannis

iannis

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Sure there could. But what WOULD it look like? How could we even recognize it as life?

It's a philosophical question, and a good one. The scientific answer is that life, even as we know it, has no hard edges. It is a soft spectrum. Problems arise when you try to quantize things. But you absolutely must quantize them. And we still have a very hard time with the question of "what is it that self-animates matter". Well, emergent complexity is a good answer. It's a reasonable one. It's not a very scientific one.

You come alive in pieces and you die in parts. The threshold for both is not arbitrary but it does move. And that's for life as WE know it.

The answer to the drake equation may be simpler than we think. The biome of the universe is vast. It sprawls with life. So much life, in fact, that our variety of it is simply not given the potential of unlimited growth. Which, the drake equation does assume is true.
 
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Oldbased

Oldbased

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Scoresby said:
Reminds me of a question I have had for some time but don't know how to answer. Why would life be limited to such a narrow spectrum of possible temperatures? This article hints at the reasoning that even basic (much less complex) chemistry breaks down under temp, but could there be the possibility for other life at ultra-high temp and what would it look like?
Click to expand...
I think it is more perception of what life can be. Our experience is carbon based and we know the spectrum for that to functionally work. Silicon has been suggested as possible but has issues that many cannot get past. Easily could be more, we just don't have the data.
 
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Pops

Pops

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Olebass said:
I think it is more perception of what life can be. Our experience is carbon based and we know the spectrum for that to functionally work. Silicon has been suggested as possible but has issues that many cannot get past. Easily could be more, we just don't have the data.
Click to expand...
Considering where we find life exists here on Earth, hydrothermal vents, it's only a matter of getting a probe to the likely spots.
 
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Oldbased

Oldbased

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Pops said:
Considering where we find life exists here on Earth, hydrothermal vents, it's only a matter of getting a probe to the likely spots.
Click to expand...
Really even more than that. We'll have to probe every moon/planet around us in better detail.
Many people consider life as shitposters whining about Trump. In reality the planet would just be a bunch of wild animals/plants without humans. So "super" intelligent life capable of creating things and shooting each other is not the normal. That basically means life can be as simple as a speck of dust munching on some space rust.
 
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meStevo

meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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Easy to forget how big these rockets they're routinely landing are.

DBfOEMfVoAEqlz6.jpg


DBfGexBUAAA4WLP.jpg
 
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meStevo

meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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Craigslist is awesome for telescopes, I got this for $400 with a bunch of lenses and accessories a few years ago. Too bad I suck at collimating. When you are actually looking at a small cloud (Orion nebula) in space it's fucking amazing.

Orion SkyQuest XT10i IntelliScope Dobsonian Telescope | Orion Telescopes

To see if the hobby is worth investing further in any 70mm like the linked will do.

I kinda want to get an equatorial mount just to put my 7D on and try tinker with astrophotography.
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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iannis said:
Sure there could. But what WOULD it look like? How could we even recognize it as life?

It's a philosophical question, and a good one.
Click to expand...
The best definition of life so far is "any system that extracts energy from its environment to repair itself, duplicate itself and transform its environment into itself". (repair, reproduce and metabolize)

Note that, under this definition, a virus is definitively not alive. They lack the repair and metabolize functions.

There's also quite a few things that lack the immediate repair or metabolize functions, but they're intermediate forms between things that do (usually it's external gametes, like pollen). But virii don't generate non-virii, so they don't qualify.
 
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