141–150 of 172 posts
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What's going on directly above with what looks to be 3-4 galaxies interacting?
"like NGC 4410, above them in this image. The four interacting galaxies of that system are connected by tidal bridges, created by the gravity of each galaxy pulling on the others in the system."
Why do the brighter objects have the four way cross artifact? My (apparently incorrect) understanding was that those types of artifacts were a result of support structures holding reflecting mirrors on a telescope. But this camera just has a "standard" glass lense with nothing obstructing the light path to the sensor.
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What range of wavelengths are in the original images? Do you produce multiple RGB images for looking at different things? c'mon, what does that entail? ;-)
The filters used for this range from near infrared to near uv. We used 4 different filters in all (for this image, the telescope has more). In general yes to fully appreciate all the color information as a human we need to generate different color combos so our eyes can pick up different contrasts. However, what we strive for is being accurate to "if your eyes COULD see like this, it would look like this". To the bes…
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The economists calculated the value of 1 life. The calculation might be different if it extinguishes the whole of humanity (and thousands of other species). In a way, it also presents all future human lives. Should we include those?
I don't believe that this would change the outcome much: It seems hard to argue that preservation of a nonhuman species would be worth more than a million lives (=> negligible) and assuming global loss of all human life is already unreasonably pessimistic in my view-- (e.g. the Chicxulub impactor would not have achieved this). I also think that fully accounting for multi-generational consequences is murky/questionabl…
All the math assumes that the probabilities will follow historic trends and is relatively static. With single digit events, we really have no way in knowing what the actual likelihood of impact is. It could be 1 in 100 million, it could actually be 1 in 1 million and we've been rolling a bunch of nat 20s.
Before we build out the asteroid blaster 9000, the first step is detection. With that in place then we get actual good risk and probability calculations. If the detector tells us "There's no object that will strike earth in the next 1000 years" we can safely not put any budget into asteroid defense. If, on the other hand, the detector shows "Chicxulub 2.0 will hit in the next 100 years" then your probability of an impact is 1 and the actual budget worth it is going to be much closer to that $8e+16 number calculated earlier.
something green: https://skyviewer.app/embed?target=186.82033+8.25479&fov=0.0...
Image creator here. This is such a massive dataset, most of the image processing needed to be custom written software pipelines. It not really practical for every pixel to be hand inspected. A few defects (and bright asteroids) imprinted through. It really hard to decide what is a real weird thing in the universe, and what is some sort of instrumental effect. We try to not pre-decide on what we think we should be see…
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It will continue with a new instrument after 10 years (spectroscopic) funding permitting. Tololo has been running since the 60s. In California, Lick has been running since the 1880s.
I get that it will run for a long time as long as someone is maintaining it. I am wondering what will happen if the doors are locked and the power is cut for an extended period of time (5+ years), as seems like a very real possibility unless an alternate source of funding can be found.
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If it has the potential to wipe out our entire species, but there's something we could do to prevent it (which I'm not sure about w/r/to asteroids), then it's worth looking out for the black swan event. Doing some extremely rough math along these lines to double check myself: * Gemini says that a dinosaur-extincting asteroid hits Earth about once every 100 million years. So in any given year that's 0.000001%. * Econo…
These numbers are not what I expected at all. So you could actually make an argument that to a country like the US, full 100% reliable asteroid protection is only worth like $50M/year (even if an impact means full extinction)? So if upkeep for a detection/deflection system costs more than that we'd be "better off" just risking it?! Thats insane. I would have expected this number to be much higher than $50M/year.
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>The prompt products are alerts, issued within 60 seconds of observation, about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position. Transferring, processing, and differencing such large images within 60 seconds (previous methods took hours, on smaller images) is a significant software engineering problem by itself.[64] >This stage of processing will be performed at a cla…
"Let's look for spy satellites / orbiters" was an "application" I wondered about. My second thought about this was: maybe the US (and possibly other countries) already have something like this, but classified?
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The counterpoint is that not doing so (implying some sort of infinite monetary loss if the entire human species is wiped out) would mean you want to spend every single unit of monetary value of the entire global economy to preventing this (which is also obviously nonsense - people have to eat after all). So you have to put the monetary value somewhere (although you're completely within your right to question this spe…
That's the most interesting application of capitalism-as-as-resource-allocation mechanism I've ever seen, that's something I look forward to thinking about more. My immediate reaction though is to doubt the mapping of dollar to value - e.g., the 10 million dollar valuation of the human life, but also the valuation then of all the things that year-dollar-cost could be spent on. Many of those things probably don't map…
And indeed, accounting for externalities (unmeasured or unmeasurable) is a tough economic proposition. If it weren't hard to account for every single variable, creating a planned economy would be easier (ish).
FWIW, there's a whole sub-field just dedicated to determining the value of life for various purposes (a starting link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). You may disagree with any specific assessment, but then you have to argue how that value should be calculated differently.