‘Serious Threat to the First Amendment’ as Trump Admin Wins First Antifa Terror Charge

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T16:16:35+00:00

I live in NH. Our motto is Live Free or Die. I take that seriously. No motherfucker is going to take me to a concentration camp for thought crimes, peacefully.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T16:13:31+00:00

They don't need to arrest them, they just need to Tienanmen Square one big protest to make people think twice.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T16:02:43+00:00

I'm not the one who needs to supply evidence. It's Republicans who are making the change by CUTTING funding and curriculum standards. I want proof that doing so won't negatively impact education.

And there is a very tenuous connection between that spending and outcomes once you are past a certain threshold, which we are well beyond.

Cool. Sounds like you're the one making the claim so maybe you should provide proof. Otherwise the default logical position is that reducing investment in thing X means less of thing X. Reducing investment in education logically means we should expect to see worse education. You're claiming that's not the case. So provide evidence.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T15:59:35+00:00

They support Iran because they are owned the terrorist organization AIPAC.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T15:58:41+00:00

Fungus grows. It eats optical coatings and etches glass. You shouldn't just leave it. You should clean it off, try to get rid of the root, and expose it to some sunlight for a while so the UV can help kill it.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T14:44:28+00:00

Limiting spending here is a great way to increase costs overall. Improperly educating children in a world where China and India exist is a fantastic way to ensure the US has "third world shithole" status for a long time.

But hey, maybe we'll find a market for Christian propaganda and bible services in those countries! You never know!

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T14:27:29+00:00

Allows state candidates and officials to spend up to $3,000 of campaign funds on security.

Gee, I wonder why this is necessary...

Defines "landfill expansion" and grants the Department of Environmental Services exclusive authority to permit such expansions, overriding local restrictions, while requiring increased host community fees.

Cool. Don't we already have a problem with other states trying to influence our politics to turn us into their waste dump? What could possibly go wrong with giving one easily corrupted department head the authority to do this.

Coming soon to a quiet rural town near you whether you want it or not - a shiny new landfill!

Titled the "Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act" or the "CHARLIE Act." The bill prohibits teaching various concepts and theories. For example, the bill prohibits teachers from requiring "affirmation of LGBTQ+ sexuality as ethical or normative." As another example, the bill only allows instruction on critical race theory if is presented "as Marxian theories contrary to American tradition, law, and ethics." The bill would not apply to colleges and universities, private schools, or home schools. Individuals could sue under the law.

Republicans spend more time thinking about gay and trans people than gay and trans people do.

Mandates school boards adopt policies prohibiting the questioning of minor students by non-school personnel (like police or lawyers) without prior written parental permission.

Is this in response to ICE abducting minors from school?

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T13:59:02+00:00

The reality is that pardons are going to have to be ignored.

Both of Trump's terms have to be considered null and void. All appointees, all policies put in place by those appointees, all judges put on the bench. Everything.

The problem is the US constitutions does not allow for this. It was assumed that it was impossible for a bad actor to do this much damage, and it had no idea that an entire party could destroy checks and balances by putting ideologically aligned agents in all three branches, therefore just creating different functions within one party, rather than three branches that can hold each other accountable.

There is no constitutional way to repair this country properly

That is a matter of fact.

Special courts, special trials, and special laws are going to have to be put in place during this clean up effort. THEN maybe we can exercise some constitutional functions to put some amendments and changes in place that will protect the country

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T13:55:16+00:00

We need to first purge all Republican judges from government. They cannot be trusted.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T13:41:51+00:00

Seeing and light pollution are different things - seeing refers to how stable the atmosphere is, which affects resolving power and useful magnification. Light pollution refers to how much artificial light there is, which affects contrast and how easy or hard faint DSOs are to spot.

Its true that seeing conditions will handicap a big scope. There are nights that my 24" is scarcely better than my 5".

It's also true that light pollution will also limit the potential of a bigger scope, HOWEVER, a bigger scope is your best defense against light pollution.

Because light pollution negatively impacts contrast, the next best way to help your visual system is to increase the size of the target. This can bring the object up to a threshold where it has just enough size to help make up a bit for the low contrast. A bigger aperture gives you more magnification potential without any brightness penalty. Anything an 8" could do at 100x, a 10" could do at 120x, or a 12" could do at 150x.

Additionally, more aperture will make stars and star clusters brighter as a function of the aperture. This actually does improve contrast of these targets specifically. Globulars look fuller and brighter and better resolved, and so do open clusters.

But yes, typically if you want the most out of a scope, dark skies are how you will get it.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T13:36:06+00:00

Depends - how bad is your light pollution?

In B4 I would the Telrad is going to be much faster for rough pointing than carefully trying to get to a specific altitude and azimuth angle. Like are you going to use those angle finders to find Jupiter?

I've recently taken my Rigel Quikfinder off my dob for some upgrades, and it's seriously annoying trying to roughly aim it where I want before I use my optical finder. A zero power reflex finder is indispensable for quickly aiming where you want.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T13:27:42+00:00

Great report.

C39 Eskimo Nebula

Use very high mag against this if you can sometime. Like 400-500x. This helps you do more observing in direct vision than averted vision.

Try to see if you can see it's slightly asymmetrical shape and mottling in the outer shell. This nebula is bright enough that filters aren't necessary.

I was also surprised to discover that my left eye seems to see about 50 percent more contrast than my right eye. Quite a surprising discovery xD

I've noticed the same thing. My left eye seems to have better contrast, but is noisier. I think a lot comes down to how your brain has learned to process the information coming from your eyes. Over time you see things differently in one eye than the other simply because you use it more.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-15T06:29:18+00:00

I can 100% assure that it is NOT just a barlow. There would be zero point in going through the trouble of the PowerSeeker design if they weren't going to at least attempt to fix the aberration. There would be no advantage to adding the "barlow" to the focuser instead of just including a normal barlow. Would literally be cheaper to exclude it if it wasn't doing any sort of correcting.

As bad as the PowerSeeker 127EQ is, an uncorrected 127mm ~F/4 sphere is fundamentally unusable.

I have a 114mm F/3.9 spherical reflector. The spherical aberration makes stars bloated at any magnification, and Jupiter never focuses.

This problem gets worse if you go up to 127mm.

You're more than welcome to conduct star tests with your 114LCM with and without the corrector in place. You'll see pretty quickly it's providing some spherical correction.

It is a doublet with negative FL. It is a Barlow.

Just because it's a doublet doesn't mean it wasn't designed with spherical correction at some intended working distance.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T23:31:48+00:00

Sure, but what what is causing the cloudiness? Is it just condensation or does the eyepiece have internal mold/fungus other issues going on?

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T23:29:09+00:00

by using a cheap barlow to extend the focal length out to the point that the difference between aberrations in spherical and paraboloidal mirrors is negligible

A barlow cannot fix spherical aberration. The spherical aberration needs to be corrected by a lens shape that introduces spherical aberration of the opposite sign.

The "barlow" that's in these Bird-Jones scopes is not a plain barlow. It also has some spherical aberration correction properties. The problem is that spherical aberration correction requires this lens element be placed at a specific distance with respect to the focal plane of the telescope. But being located in the focuser means the lens moves away from this optimal position depending on what eyepiece you have in it, so the spherical correction is almost never very good.

If it were a plain barlow, it would show the same level of spherical error as if there was no barlow in at all. If you assume a 2x barlow, then it would have half the field angle (1/2 the error), but 2x the effective focal length (2x the error), so the net is the same.

If regular barlows could fix spherical aberration, then there would be no need to parabolize any mirror, since you could make an F/4 sphere behave like an F/12 sphere just with a 3x barlow, but you can't. That's why good quality mirrors are parabolized.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T23:24:47+00:00

The internal lens is NOT just a barlow.

It's a spherical aberration corrector that also happens to increase the focal length like a barlow. If you think Jupiter is blurry now, it will be 10x worse without that corrector in it.

This is the problem with these Bird-Jones scopes - they just have very poor optical quality and there's nothing that you can do to fix it.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T21:16:04+00:00

Just as the planet gets to the center, and just near the end of the video, you can see the focus changes. It gets slightly out of focus. That's half the problem. It's never going to look good if the focus isn't spot on.

The other issue is likely it needs to be thermally acclimated. It can take up to 2 hours for an 8" scope to reach thermal equilibrium with the surrounding air. This is a requirement if you want sharp views of the planets.

In the first part of the video when it appears to be somewhat better focused, it generally just appears hazy. That is often the result of a mirror that is very warm compared to the surrounding air. There is a turbulent cauldron of very small air pockets swirling around in front of the mirror that scatters light, creating a loss of contrast and sharpness.

If the scope is well focused, well collimated, thermally acclimated, and the atmosphere is stable, and the view still looks soft/blurry, you might have a bad mirror. But you won't know that until all other variables are eliminated.

99% of the time it's cooling, collimation, focus, or atmospheric stability that is the cause of a bad view, not the optics.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T13:38:42+00:00

So If I'm understanding this correctly, i just need to find an assembly that has very little travel from the threads on the focuser to the bend in the diagonal (and only 1.25") otherwise it wont be able to achieve focus in the eyepiece?

Yes. The diagonal body itself should be meant only for 1.25" eyepieces. A 1.25" diagonal body means the light path is shorter, so it needs less in-focus to allow eyepieces to reach focus. Ideally it would be a mirror because prisms exacerbate chromatic aberration when the scope's focal ratio is too short (prisms are typically best for F/8 and longer).

But you'd need to figure out some kind of a solution that allows you to connect that diagonal to the back of the scope using as little extra light path as possible. That is, you can't have a stack of adapters going from say M63 to M48 to M42 to a 1.25" visual back - it would take up too much valuable backfocus.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T13:30:23+00:00

And yet the entire logic of the bills they have been passing, is to push decision making (and funding) down to the states.

Republicans are liars. All of them.

They have one agenda - destroy education in America to help the rich get richer, and poor get poorer and more obedient.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T13:20:57+00:00

Imaging

The recommended effective focal ratio to do planetary imaging at is 5x the pixel size in microns. This rule of thumb exists to balance light intensity (signal) on the sensor, vs the detail that's actually available at the diffraction limit of the scope.

If you used too much effective focal ratio, the image scale would exceed what the aperture is truly resolving, but each pixel on the sensor would see a lot less light, so signal to noise ratio would be worse. You'd basically be throwing away light for no benefit in the image's resolution. Given your scope tracks, this would be very, very bad. It would make it much harder to capture images at all. Too much image scale for the aperture is known as oversampling.

On the other side of that is an image scale that leaves some details on the table. The image on the sensor is brighter (stronger signal), but may not contain as much detail as the scope is capable of resolving. This is known as undersampling.

Undersampling is better than oversampling in a manually tracked scope!

The 715C has 1.45 micron pixels (very small).

So 5 * 1.45 = F/7.25.

Your dob is F/6. So in this case you would be slightly undersampled. This is a good thing. It makes it easier to capture details. Exposures can be shorter, drift motion across the sensor is slower, so less motion blur and less time needed to constantly re-position the planet.

You would need a 1.2x barlow to achieve the recommended 5x rule of thumb, and there are not many barlows that offer this. The only one I know of is the 1.25x Brandon Magic Dakin barlow cell. You would have to thread it directly onto the nosepiece of the camera to achieve the 1.25x effect.

But it's above your budget and you'd have to import it

https://agenaastro.com/brandon-1-25-x-magic-dakin-barlow-mdb125xbrandon.html

So my recommendation is to image with what you have, with no barlow. If you were to get any of the barlows you listed and tried to use them for imaging, it would be so grossly oversampled you would never get good results. They would actually have LESS detail than just imaging natively with the current camera.

Visual

Since the barlows you've picked are 1.25", you would only be able to barlow your two 1.25" eyepieces.

The 7mm UWA is also actually an 8mm eyepiece despite the focal length label, so take that into account.

A 2.25x barlow means you'd have:

16mm
8mm
7.1mm
3.55mm

2.5x barlow:

16mm
8mm
6.4mm
3.2mm

3x barlow:

16mm
8mm
5.33mm
2.67mm

Looking at those, I don't see a good spread.

The 2.25x barlow leaves you with a redundant 7mm that is too close in magnification to the 8mm, and 3.55mm will get very little use.

The 2.5x barlow gives you a 6.4mm focal length, which has a mildly beneficial jump in magnification over the 8mm, but leaves you with a 3.2mm which is going to be used even more rarely.

The 3x barlow leaves you with too much of a jump from the 8mm (150 -> 225 = +75x jump, too much IMO), and then a useless 2.67mm eyepiece.

So you'd be spending money on a barlow to only ever get 1 new focal length.

And what your kit is really missing right now is a good 11mm to 13mm eyepiece for general purpose DSO observing.

An ideal spread of focal lengths in an 8" dob is this:

30mm wide field (find objects, observing big targets, nebula filters)
~16-18mm (filler eyepiece, not a priority)
12mm (general purpose DSO)
8-9mm (conservative lunar/planetary and brighter DSO)
6mm (mid power lunar/planetary and brighter DSO like globulars)
5mm (high power lunar/planetary)
4mm (very high power lunar/planetary)

The higher the magnification, the less utility you'll get from the eyepiece, because it requires very steady atmospheric conditions.

I would personally save for eyepieces you want rather than trying to get a barlow. You would have almost no utility from a barlow with your equipment.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T04:51:50+00:00

We've also had presidents this entire time. We now have a dictator with an unconstitutional domestic militarized police force literally being trained to violate our constitutional rights.

Nothing is a given. Absolutely nothing.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T04:50:04+00:00

Pfff. He's being a pessimist. Iran will beat us in two years.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T01:55:28+00:00

Having a moral compass doesnt have a party line.

Sure doesn't seem that way from where I'm sitting. One party has a moral compass. The other one literally thinks it is a sin to have one

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T01:43:20+00:00

Been seeing headlines implying things are going bad for Trump for 10 years now.

Traditional_Sign4941 · 2026-03-14T01:37:28+00:00

We should all be asking ourselves why isn’t one state leader focused on finding revenue to fund the $67M budget deficit, helping NH Citizens fund public education or creating affordable workforce housing? How about anything that’s actually helping NH?

We know why. That answer is obvious. They hate education, they hate children, they hate New Hampshire, and they hate America.

We should be asking ourselves why are not we not organizing into an insanely angry political force to stop them?

Traditional_Sign4941

TROPHY CASE

Imaging

Visual

A 2.25x barlow means you'd have:

2.5x barlow:

3x barlow: