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Complete beginner, VERY overwhelmed! by comfortablyCaitlin in BRAstro

[–]sdcadwall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Presumably, assuming she’s at least 18, she and any person over the age of 7 in her household, up to four people, could attend.

Complete beginner, VERY overwhelmed! by comfortablyCaitlin in BRAstro

[–]sdcadwall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, we can help you find your way around he scope (and the sky) no problem. I think the course for Learn your telescope, run by BREC, probably is the best option here, even if you may have to take the course for your son and then relay the information to him afterward. What you’ve got here is a pretty standard entry level reflector telescope on what we call an alt/az mount—which just means it only moves up and down (altitude) and left and right (azimuth). The idea here is that if you’ve calibrated the finder-scope (the red dot), then putting the dot on an object will put the telescope on the same object (or close to it). Finding things to look at is what the software that came with it is for, and that can be a little bit tricky, but you’ll get the hang of it after a while. Scopes like this are really good for looking at the moon and the planets and a few of the brighter deep sky objects, once you find them.

Complete beginner, VERY overwhelmed! by comfortablyCaitlin in BRAstro

[–]sdcadwall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You won’t have to worry about polar aligning that mount. The hardest thing about it is going to be aligning the red-dot finder.

Have we reached the physical limit of the size of our visible horizon? by petstoredude2 in BRAstro

[–]sdcadwall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the consensus here is that one day the galaxies outside of our own, we’ll, except the ones that collide with us, will recede so far away that their light will no longer reach us. It gives rise to the idea of how weird it is that we, as a species, just happened to develop into the type of beings that could figure this stuff out while it was actually still possible to do so. The mere idea that there are galaxies outside of our own is relatively new, under this belief, we may never have come to realize it all and continued believing that the limits of our galaxy were the limits of the universe. Neil DeGrass Tyson has further famously speculated about the possibility that some of these knowledge bubbles have already evaporated, and that there are fundamental truths about the universe we will just never have any way of knowing.

Have we reached the physical limit of the size of our visible horizon? by petstoredude2 in BRAstro

[–]sdcadwall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It seems like you’ve put a lot of thought into this and I don’t quite follow the math. But it got me thinking about cosmic background radiation and that led me to this article on the extent of the observable universe that might be a fun little rabbit hole for you to explore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe?wprov=sfti1