61–70 of 84 posts
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You'd expect better from Sky At Night. (Wikipedia says -143 °C, -225 °F)
The attack on spacex at the start - the one company that’s actually likely to put sky at night readers on Mars - took me out of it before the 900C hilarity.
Trust but verify, as the saying goes.
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> aligned such that we occasionally get to see a perfect solar eclipse and the sun's corona with our naked eyes. Uh...don't do that. It'll end up being the last thing you see.
A total eclipse is perfectly safe to view with the naked eye. You just have to be carful you don't start too early or end too late... Many references, but e.g., https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/safety "Looking directly at the sun is unsafe except during the brief total phase of a solar eclipse (“totality”)..."
It was a glorious sight, an experience of a lifetime.
I was on a hillside near The Dalles with other eclipse chasers. Many of us wore sunglasses and looked away from the sun before totality to get our eyes a bit dark-adapted. And then when someone called out "totality!" we turned around, took off the sunglasses and used our binoculars or telescopes if we had them, and viewed the corona directly.
And no, no eye damage.
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This makes me appreciate our moon. How lucky we are to have a moon that is roughly the same size in the sky as the sun is -- aligned such that we occasionally get to see a perfect solar eclipse and the sun's corona with our naked eyes.
> aligned such that we occasionally get to see a perfect solar eclipse and the sun's corona with our naked eyes. Uh...don't do that. It'll end up being the last thing you see.
I wonder if generations of humans born and raised on Mars might start adapting their eyes to blue wave lengths!
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The star link complaint seems kind of like how people must have been when telegram/power lines went up.
Astronomers, amateur or otherwise, have been complaining about "light pollution" forever. Traditionally, it's about night-time lighting on Earth that isn't shielded from transmitting light upwards. It startled me to find (in a long ago HN thread) that people, presumably nerdy types, are not generally sympathetic to the complaints. I somehow assumed that universal lukewarm quasi-environmental feelings would mean peopl…
Reducing it should therefore be a priority. Instead, it's increased worldwide, mainly thanks to cheap power LEDs.
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The kinds of people who like building things will be less sympathetic to environmental concerns when those concerns are 'don't build that, leave the world untainted by human hand'- there's a difference between polluting by building/placing something of value somewhere and polluting as a pure stupid ugly externality. Engineer-y people might be inclined to hate the latter but not the former.
The aspect of amateur astronomy culture that discouraged me was the awful code published in Sky & Telescope back in the late 80s or early 90s. They used to have a policy that in order to be compatible with the least common denominator of their readers, they required published programs to be in BASIC. And not just BASIC, but basic BASIC, with line numbers. As far as I was concerned, it was unreadable and obsolete sinc…
Man, I'd love to see what Earth would look like from Mars thru an amateur telescope. I'm sure it'd be beautiful.
>Depending on the time of year, you might also see an ‘Evening Star’ shining in the lavender-hued twilight – Earth, a strikingly-bright spark of silvery blue, which at its best would blaze brighter than mag. –2.5. Man, I'd love to see what Earth would look like from Mars thru an amateur telescope. I'm sure it'd be beautiful.
> Night-time temperatures can drop to -900C wait, what?