Someday!

Some 10 years ago I began to browse and surf for information on how to get my own telescope.

Well by 1999 I was lugging out my 10″ Meade LX200 to my backyard and happily looking at the clusters and nebulae in Sagittarius and Scorpio, the Orion Nebulae, and other sky treasures that, before getting a scope, I could only see at Joshua Tree National Park star parties.

Now I own a home on a 1 and 1/4 acre tract just 1 mile from the northern border of the Joshua Tree park and can look through that same LX200 (though now easily wheeled in an out of the garage on JMI Wheeley Bars) under some of the darkest skies anywhere. Just hunting for objects to look at using star charts and monthly astronomy magazines is satisfying enough. But I also want to image. For now I’m going to limit myself to webcams for the planets, piggy-backing my Canon 10D and, when I get the drift-align, polar alignment technique down, I’ll try some prime focus. But, I think I will wait to build my permanent observatory before trying anything more ambitious. Why? Because to do good astro-imaging you need very precise polar alignment and having to polar align everytime I wheel out my scope is just too much of a hassle. We’ll see. I’m a few years away from building the observatory.

Rolloff roof in action

In a few days I’ll upload a gallery of images I took the other night learning to use my SBIG STV. I plan to use the STV primarily for autoguiding when I use my Canon 10D at prime focus. But it can also do some low resolution imaging of its own (black and white). Using it in “Track & Accumulate” mode Monday evening (’til 3 in the a.m.) I got some interesting images of M13, M8, M27, and M51. As soon as I process them in ImagesPlus and Photoshop, I’ll share the results.

I have just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. With thinkers like Hofstadter making clear what it is to be alive and human, I believe we need less and less to resist the apparent truth that consciousness is constituted of forces, things, and processes wholly physical in nature. (I say physical instead of material because the physical includes energy fields and virtual particles of the quantum realm, entities not usual referred to as material.) I can do no better right now to convey some of Hofstadter’s thoughts on the subject than to share a couple of quotes from the final few pages of the book’s “Epilogue.”

Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful

(Hofstadter, 363-364)

I’m following Strange Loop with David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness. From the intro it seems that, in addition to his original thoughts and insights on the case for consciousness being wholly physical, I will also be treated to an overview of the major positions, terminology, and arguments comprising philosophy of mind.

I have just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. With thinkers like Hofstadter making clear what it is to be alive and human, I believe we need less and less to resist the apparent truth that consciousness is constituted of forces, things, and processes wholly physical in nature. (I say physical instead of material because the physical includes energy fields and virtual particles of the quantum realm, entities not usual referred to as material.) I can do no better right now to convey some of Hofstadter’s thoughts on the subject than to share a couple of quotes from the final few pages of the book’s “Epilogue.”

Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (Hofstadter, 363-364)

I’m following Strange Loop with David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness. From the intro it seems that, in addition to his original thoughts and insights on the case for consciousness being wholly physical, I will also be treated to an overview of the major positions, terminology, and arguments comprising philosophy of mind.