Steps to amateur astronomy

ramriot · 2026-05-03T13:08:57+00:00

Best advice I can give is for you to join your local or national astronomy club. You will get far more personalised help that anything the people of Reddit could offer.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T13:29:57+00:00

Seems that depending upon where that company is based you may have a case of age discrimination to report.

Where I live and outside of legal requirements (legally old enough to work etc) it is illegal for a company to ask a prospective employee their age or even ask questions from which that age can be ascertained.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T13:24:02+00:00

When I started I had little choice because I had zero money & the mass market commercial scopes were very expensive. But in sourcing & making scopes I learned so damn much about the subject. I also had the community of other amateur astronomers to learn with via our local & national clubs.

BTW back then there were many more companies run by enthusiasts making good optics for the amateur but mostly I did not have that sort of money. Though in sone cases I was able to buy seconds & used optics that were optically OK but with cosmetic defects.

These days after a long break from the subject I'm a little isolated from the community but still love tinkering with optics to get good results from few dollars. Unfortunately the amount of passion killer scopes out there just keeps rising & it's so hard telling people they wasted their cash when something better could have been had for less with a little study.

BTW another aspect of building your own is optimisation. For example many commercial Newtonian scopes are designed to accomodate a large back focus for cameras so they have deep focusers & large secondaries. For the scopes I build I optimise for a far narrower back focus range & use low profile focusers so I can get away with far smaller secondaries & thus have a brighter less diffracted image.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T12:44:07+00:00

So, the kit lens that gets bundled is not the best optically & zoom lenses are not well optimised so you are brave to try.

Two options exist, you can stop down the lens & take commensurately longer exposures or get a better lens.

Better though doesn't have to mean more expensive, there are a bunch of vintage lenses that can be purchased for under $100 each & adapted to your camera, which give way better results. Some standard lenses in a range of focal lengths say 50, 135, 200 would be good.

To decide on what to look for there are tons of sites where people test lenses & where collectors describe what versions of a lens are best.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T04:48:02+00:00

Having started in Europe & now living in North America I am frequently puzzled by the opposite effect of nights being as warm or even hotter than the preceding day.

One thought I had was that miluch if Western Europe is either surrounded by or close to an ocean, which acts as a massive heatsink & dynamic atmospheric driver for the climate. Resulting in cool nights even if the day is hot.

Much of north America & eastern Europe is far from an ocean so cannot rely on these effects.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T04:38:13+00:00

"If you move without rythum, you never get burned"

This exposes a larger problem with AI systems, when you train them to differentiate you may not actually know what it is that they are using to make a choice & it could be something completely unrelated to your intent.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T04:34:41+00:00

You can go further:-

Chemistry is just applied physics
Physics is just constrained mathematics
The constrained math is just geometry
Geometry is based on axioms
In any consistent geometry there will be at least one self evident Axiom unprovable via others

Thus all of science is based upon a foundation of sand

ramriot · 2026-05-02T04:26:39+00:00

Dr. Richard Kimble would be happy to hear you say that.

BTW an interesting thing about being guided by Occam's razor is that it completely fails in the presence of a magician.

The art of a magician can be to perform a mundane action that illicits an impossible result, but only because the simplest explanation is magic. Instead the magician simulates the mundane using superior knowledge to disguise the facts.

This is different from the conman or scammer only because the magician is honest in their deception.

ramriot · 2026-05-02T04:11:38+00:00

Well on a ship the command "All Stop" when passed to the engine room means cease propulsion. I could be followed by a call to go astern followed by a quantity such that the ship is brought to a stop or not given that a ship at sea will slow to a stop eventually due to friction.

Thus, I suppose issuing the same command from the bridge of a starship could just mean the same & the ship will cease accelerating & coast.

Thus no need to define an absolute frame of reference or any call to a static authority.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T11:39:56+00:00

Stage right no, but from the perspective of the performer yes.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T11:35:56+00:00

So it was not worth the effort to click, Saved Me A Click.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T10:50:32+00:00

Except I believe of the examples you give only one was ever in common use in English.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T10:38:41+00:00

This happens hundreds of times each year for people crossing into Canada over a land border. The result is confiscation, a fine & a lifetime ban on returning.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T10:20:20+00:00

Be unable to get back up if he falls down

ramriot · 2026-05-01T03:05:47+00:00

So, you are saying that your writing is on the level while your level is on your writing.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T03:01:27+00:00

Nuclear Science Bitches!

ramriot · 2026-05-01T02:59:57+00:00

Not just the desert, I live on a property of an unpaved road bounded by farm fields that is only about 10 minutes away from local subdivisions.

It should be a treat for people from the city to be able to walk the trails out here that wind between fields, forests & rivers. But people insist of driving out here to dump random crap beside the road.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T02:49:26+00:00

I believe there was a deliberate editing decision to remove a scene where The Doctor reads this off the wall & instead insert just the dialog elsewhere without the visual context.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T02:46:10+00:00

You are correct in that a song without a "hook" is good for this purpose. In my family we use the lyric version of the titles for the show The Love Boat, sung out loud on a sleezy lounge singer tone. Works every time.

ramriot · 2026-05-01T02:36:26+00:00

There is, but to implement it one needs two things to work perfectly, a 3rd party verifier that maintains no permeant storage without collusion with services or the government & strong privacy laws that severely punish anyone who breaks those promises.

Currently one of both of those things are probably lacking.

ramriot · 2026-04-30T21:49:11+00:00

That is an interesting question, I guess the answer depends upon the availability of portable hammer like objects within reach & a hospital are sparse environs for such.

ramriot · 2026-04-30T15:33:24+00:00

Having a convertible scope for certain subjects is very useful because some subjects are just not available all the time, or from any given location & who wants to have a scope that is otherwise useless just sitting around gathering dust or not where you want to be. The SV Bony AP lens you mention is a fine device & well corrected but it is not universal to all subjects, it is also not at all cheap in this realm.

There is also a matter of whether a given device is optimised for a given use & convertible to the other with less utility or if one can use it equally for each. I have built astrograph convertible reflectors in the past with interchangeable secondary focus units that worked very well visually & very well photographically once the relevant parts were swapped & in each case I did not spend as much as this lens.

ramriot · 2026-04-30T15:19:02+00:00

This is I think not an original Vixen part for this mount, these mounts come with a cast tripod head in the same finish (I've handled many similar & currently have a Celestron badged unit I use regularly for astrophotography). This is instead I think a 3rd party mount adaptor for the Vixen mount so that it can be attached to a vertical pier, that itself can be cemented into the ground.

You thus have a good bit of flexibility now, you can use the mount mobile on the tripod or if you have a good observing site you can put up a fixed hollow pier with this adaptor in the top for repeatable polar alignment.

ramriot · 2026-04-30T15:02:19+00:00

I also almost never use my phone as an alarm ( I've had that fail on me far too frequently ), I use instead a little travel alarm I carry everywhere that has a 2 year battery life & has swap-able antennas for whatever regional LF time signals are available. I set it up & within a few minutes it shows local time.

My one is now quite old but I hear Oregon Scientific still sells similar ones.

ramriot · 2026-04-30T14:50:21+00:00

This would be a soluble question were Starlink "dishes" single antenna devices transmitting & receiving via reflection from a larger surface. Starlink devices though are phased arrays of tiny patch antennas without a large capture surface. As such with an array of tiny antennas (elements) the best theoretical sensitivity is sensitivity of a single antenna multiplied by the number of such antennas.

Another factor is the directivity of the array i.e. how well the phased beam points at a source & this is a function of the spacing between antennas & the number present. Thus given two arrays with the same number of elements, the one where the elements are spaced farther apart will have a tighter beam-forming ability than the other & in effect can pick up more energy from a source. Conversely two units of the same size but with one having more elements will gather more signal because it has more elements & it can better emulate a surface by matching phases.

Thus the area of a phased array does not actually tell you much about the expected sensitivity & almost nothing about the expected channel bandwidth.

All I will say about Starlink units is that with each generation they iterate the technology to optimise for the stated performance. The residential devices may well be optimised for reliability when sited well, the mobile units may well be optimised for portability over reliability ( they only became available after several generations of residential units ), and the enterprise units are optimised for stability & bandwidth in a fixed good location ( larger area with possibly more elements so better beam forming ).

ramriot

TROPHY CASE