♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

if i leave astronomy then the first thing i will do is write a crazy DFW-style feature about the politics of international observational astronomy, and particularly how the U.S. and Europe chose where to put their forthcoming giant telescopes.

p.s. you picked a really really interesting topic by the way

haha that's true, i didn't know if it was just me. it is a bit wordy in places but a lot less wordy than a normal lj post so i saw it as already a giant improvement ; )
xposts

i love the way LJ has to adjust his style in pretty much the opposite direction of everyone else when he writes for print rather than ilx

tried to read that article, fell asleep three times. and i'm at work. rubbish.

tips for again- include more zings, references to the work of ocean colour scene 1995-7, and ws pics.

yeah I also noticed the wordiness but it was a booming article overall

guys this dude will never learn with all of this unrequited positivity. our man is definitely a 'tough love' responder, see how SB worked for him?

if i leave astronomy then the first thing i will do is write a crazy DFW-style feature about the politics of international observational astronomy, and particularly how the U.S. and Europe chose where to put their forthcoming giant telescopes.

― caek, Wednesday, 3 March 2010 11:24 (3 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah this is really interesting! i read something about europe's latest launch to stash a telescope at the second Langoustine* Point on the far side of the Earth to the Sun - geostationary and thus glareless

*the precise name may have slipped my mind

lagrange, methinks. (i always have trouble with the idea of the lagrange points anywhere other than between the two objects.)

lagrangian, yeah

the telescopes i'm talking about (the european extremely large telescope and the u.s.-led thirty metre telescope) are ground telescopes. the choice of site (morocco vs. china vs. chile vs. spain vs. hawaii vs. etc.) is worth billions (and is a billion-dimensional optimization problem) which no one will go on the record about until it's finished.

they are massive btw, e.g. ELT

http://www.roe.ac.uk/elt/graphics/elt-telescope.jpg

why are not all telescopes space telescopes? they plainly kick so much more ass. but perhaps they are too expensive, and/or the astronomers get a kick out of actually looking down the telescopes. or are they all telescopes which deal in non-visible wavelengths these days :(

there are two reasons to work in space:

1) the atmosphere is strongly absorpant at a number of important wavelengths (gamma, X, UV, etc.)

2) the atmosphere blurs images

point 1) is a showstopper. if you want to detect x-rays you need to work in space. there are a bunch of instruments like these. they don't make v. photogenic images, so they don't get a lot of press, but they do great science.

if you're working at optical wavelengths (i.e. you could in principle observe from the ground) point 2) can these days be worked around from the ground with adaptive optics, which involves laser beams and shit. you can't quite get the high resolutions you get in space, but you can get pretty close. and you can do it for a _tiny_ fraction of the price. and you can build telescopes with _preposterously_ big mirrors, which is of course not an option in space. e.g. the elt has a 42m mirror. hubble has a 2m mirror. that means the elt will collect light at ~400 times faster than hubble, so it can observe fainter objects in less time. so in many circumstances, the ground is preferable.

the hubble has obviously been great, and it's put dinner on a lot of people's tables, but if you had $10bn or whatever it cost, and your goal was to make as many great discoveries as possible, you would not build a space telescope. of course that was not nasa's goal, which is fine.

ahh ok, I knew the atmosphere was a hindrance to many wavelengths but yeah they can adjust image resolution on their fancy computers and whatnot. don't you need space telescopes to pick up the most distant non-pulsar objects? generally the most jawdropping photos of space (as on that other thread) come from space telescopes too. what things tend to emanate x-rays?

will they be capable of firing an ELT into space, do you think, within our lifetimes? i appreciate that hubble was a PR thing to some extent, and also a political statement

also I would like to know more about dark matter :) because if 75% of the universe is made of it then it's pretty important right

dark matter is basically just a best guess because iconic minds of astrophysics got their sums wrong but can't admit it.

boom

(that was the sound of a truth bomb going off)

jesus can't a guy have a little fun? thought that was challops for the ages and i can't even get that right.

idk ianaa but i thought this thing was pretty clear and convincing:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/09/dark_matter_part_iii_dark_matt.php

also
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/10/dear_mond_time_for_a_new_song.php

I've got dark matter in spades, ladies

don't you need space telescopes to pick up the most distant non-pulsar objects?

no. you need a big collecting mirror/dish, which are always going to be ~10 times bigger (and therefore 100 times more efficient) on the ground than in space (even as space telescopes get bigger)

(i think you're confused about what pulsars are btw. they are not particularly bright. you can't really see them outside of our galaxy, either from space or the ground. when you can see them, you detect them in radio, which you can do much more easily from the ground (a radio telescope has be be hundreds of meters big these days, and does not look like a "telescope").)

you get x-rays from very very large structures (e.g. clusters of galaxies). it comes from the gas that surrounds them, which is very hot. x-ray observations are a good way to probe the large scale structure of the universe and figure out how wrong your sums are.

http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ is going up in a few years. that's a 6m mirror. going to be a pretty big deal iirc.

cool :) so space telescopes are for the two extremes: really pretty pictures and really uncharismatic but vital details about the mass of extremely distant objects

yeah i knew pulsars were only found by radio telescopes, and only then when they happened to be beaming in the correct orientation - i had been asking earlier whether these new telescopes were radio telescopes but it appears they are conventional, just enormous

also nice links guys, will peruse

forthcoming radio/mm telescopes:

massive array of dishes in the atacama, EUR-US-Japan consortium, http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/alma/

SKA, probably end up in western australia:
http://www.skatelescope.org/photo/design_full.jpg
http://www.skatelescope.org/pages/page_genpub.htm

what is this radial spiral nonsense

goonhilly and herstmonceux all the way, bitches

I don't understand gravity. if I spin a ball, objects resting on its surface fly off of it. how do we stick to the earth?

dark matter has been a major component of shoe soles since 1906

iirc centripetal force keeps us in a sort of fixed harmonious orbit around the earth's centre, as for gravity, well, help us caek

no one understand's gravity. it just is. things with mass are attracted to each other. that is the way of things. people are working on understanding it, but given it's the most familiar force on the day-to-day, it's odd that it's by far the most poorly understood.

lj's centripetal force comment is not even wrong.

i am getting better at science iirc - either that or i am now making sure i only say the stuff i know to be truthful

gravity is caused by god fyi

yeah I get centripetal force conceptually but gravity seems like mysterious magic and I was hoping someone had figured it out since the last time I took a science class

I don't believe in god but it's hard to deny gravity

p sure gravity is due to god

im a scientist btw

i love caek

like a fat kid loves caek

lj: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

lol

sombrero galaxy would be a good band name

;_;

plan to use that as awesome stealth zing though so all good

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong

Something that is wronger than wrong is therefore more wrong than something that is not even wrong.

wrong

not as stealthy as it used to be thanks to peter woit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0099488647/

(a+ book)

RONG

∞RONG∞

the rong ranger rides again

~wtw~

sombrero galaxy would be a good band name

― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Wednesday, March 3, 2010 10:54 AM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark

STEALING THIS

also caek u rule and also again i solved the universe btw the other night on w33d and it has to do with magnets, do u want my theory y/n

magnets sound more plausible than god tbh and you can have sombrero galaxy btw

dude

god is magnets

why do you think one magnet moves when you put another one near it

I thought I was moving it with my mind