original budget estimates for operations are now too low due to inflation
the entire budget is 1/4000 the military budget, but instead of shoring up this rounding error to make sure that one of our country’s most impressive engineering feats stays usable, we could always just throw it out to bomb more brown kids.
There oughtta be a sci-fi short story competition using this for a basis - what happens when aliens eventually come across this bizarre piece of junk in space?
She’s very popular and I would imagine gets lots of messages. I’m not sure if she would prefer to have you message her directly or post on the subreddit. Either way, Andromeda321 is the real deal. Good luck! Be sure to post your pics here, I bet they’ll be real cool!
Awesome, thanks! Don’t hold your breath, though. Right now, this thing is paying for itself, and it’s not much. My first goal is to get a used DSLR so I can take promotional pictures. I know it’s a manually slewed scope, but I’m not trying to take crazy multi-hour exposures, I’m trying to show what people might expect to see IRL, and take promotional shots of people on the class. Then, I’ll probably look at making the radio telescope rig more seriously, hopefully before summer.
This entire thread is filled with people that know absolutely nothing about Space but the basics modern “media” poorly conveys, but feel the need to comment and display their ignorance proudly just because they hate Musk. It’s quite sad actually for an actual Astronomy community, there’s worse discussion in here than reddit.
Better fine the US government or NASA for all the Saturn V upper stages that are floating around up there as well. Nearly every Saturn V third stage was sent into an orbit around the sun after the Lunar injection maneuver, they’re all still up there. In fact, they lose track of those and “rediscover” them all the time because. The three-body problem is not fully solvable with our current technology, and the further out you get from initial conditions the less accurate calculations become.
his stupid fucking internet satellites make planning getting things into orbit real hard. also it’s not even his tesla in space. he stole it from mark eberhart
And his 6,000+ starlink pieces of trash in orbit have made earth based telescopes worse. They get in the way of the shot, and the emissions are something like 10x worse than promised.
Him and that tetraethyl lead guy. Just absolute stains.
SpaceX rockets don’t add Methane to the atmosphere. When you burn something, you’re not adding that thing to the atmosphere, you’re adding byproducts from the combustion, and Methane isn’t one of the byproducts of any rocket fuel.
Starship uses methane as a fuel, but that’s not at all the same thing. Methalox engines are one of the cleanest burning rocket fuels after Hydrolox. When burnt, methane just becomes CO2 and water vapor along with a bit of NOx (Nitrous Oxide, aka laughing gas, aka that boost you see in Fast and the Furious) as well.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are Kerolox (Kerosene, RP-1) engines. RP-1 is basically just a highly refined kerosene. When burnt, it will produce CO2, water vapor, NOx, carbon soot, carbon monoxide (which again mostly becomes CO2) and a little bit of sulfur compounds. The exhaust is nasty but it is not that different from what a normal internal combustion car produces. And even with the large amounts, it is still lower than what cars/trucks/SUVs output to get everyone in your city back and forth to work, the grocery store, and home on a daily basis.
Rocket engines don’t just immediately start, propellant has to be flowing through the turbo pumps before the flames start. Same at shut down. On the video you can see vapour coming out. That’s either methane or oxygen. How much of either? We can’t say because spacex doesn’t talk much about it. Same with ‘venting’ which happens quite a lot as shown on the videos as well. Whether it’s a little or a lot, it’s definitely more than was there before launch.
And that’s on a successful launch. Scott Manly talks about the last launch and shows how the methane levels were draining on the ship way faster than the oxygen levels, pointing to at least incomplete combination and probably methane puking out the back. Methane may be ‘clean’ when it’s burnt under optimal conditions, when it’s conflagrated in a RUD it’s less so.
Yes, yes, “it’s a drop in the bucket, it’s a tiny percentage of blah blah blah” which works fine until they start launching 3 per day. Then the question of what methane (a highly potent greenhouse gas) does when it’s directly added into the upper atmosphere gets answered.
NOx is not Nitrous Oxide and is not short for Nitrous Oxide. Nitrous Oxide is specifically N2O. NOx refers to both Nitric Oxide (NO) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), both of which are far, far more damaging to health and atmosphere than N2O. NOx emissions are the reason diesel is generally nonexistent in US passenger vehicles - not even great mpg numbers have sufficiently-low NOx emissions.
Even if it included N2O, using nomenclature with a variable like “NOx” and grouping it all together as one inert byproduct vastly underrepresents harm. Imagine if you referred to another group as “COx” but saying it’s relatively inert and easily detected by way of a burning lung sensation but feeds plants so it’s not all bad because Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has that effect. Carbon Monoxide (CO) is completely left out of that description and will silently kill you.
The part you’re not talking about is that there’s no catalytic converters on rockets tough, so it’s more like running a carbureted car than a modern car.
that he keeps metering access to because he has a clear favorite in that war and it ain’t Ukraine. have you talked to any Ukrainians how they feel about the world’s richest nazi? because the Ukrainians i’m in community with fucking hate that guy and actively seek technological edges to treat starlink as actively hostile to their usage.
Not really here, this would have been a dummy weight either way since it was the test payload for Falcon Heavy. So *something *was going to be sent up. The Tesla specifically was a publicity stunt, but a similar weight was going into a similar orbit.
The bigger question is why they lost tracking on it in the first place to where they weren’t sure what it was. This wasn’t from any sort of failure, this was a planned and fully successful launch payload into a planned orbit.
Tracking doesn’t necessarily have to be lost for this kind of thing to happen. The Rosetta spacecraft was accidentally given a provisional asteroid designation in 2007.
I don’t have any recommendations, unfortunately. But this is very interesting! I have gotten into software-defined radio recently and radio astronomy seems like a good direction to continue learning. Hopefully someone has some good advice.
Do we know what we did with radio when it was first discovered to know what it would be like if it bounced back to us? Or would it not have been strong enough?
I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope.
About 20 years or so, yup. Star parties, observatories, planetaria, etc.
My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc.
Don’t do this. The people who are going to show up to look through a telescope at the park do not GAF about how to use a telescope. They want to look through it and be awed by what they see. The work it takes to get to that point is of zero interest to 99.999% of them. Very often, the actual visual image you see is not awe inspiring, though, so you want to spend the time while people are looking through the lens explaining to them what they are seeing, and doing so in very awe-inspiring tones and terms.
Lead them to the feelings that they want to feel. Weave the story that reflects those desires back to them. Do everything you can to make them feel the scope of what they’re seeing. Use the fact that it’s an unimpressive smudge to hammer home just how god damn far away it is they are seeing. Trot out the big numbers. Tell them how far away it is in in light years, and then switch to miles. Reference what was taking place on Earth at the time the light first left its source. Relate it all to the things they relate to or care about.
And treat the telescope like it’s the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.
Thanks, that all makes sense! I noticed in hindsight that people were a little less jazzed about Trapezium than I was expecting. I mean, they appreciated it, but compared to my own initial reaction in seeing it (I had to go and tell someone right away), it was pretty muted. Sounds like I’ll have to do some homework.
That last line really grabbed my attention.
And treat the telescope like it’s the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean here?
Also, I should probably make clear that this is going to be a weekly recurring class that happens at different city parks. I’m trying to get people interested in actually doing amateur astronomy.
Imagine going to a public class on… let’s say playing the electric guitar, and the instructor just keeps going on and on about tuning forks, gear maintenance, and music theory. You were just hoping to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven, despite never having touched a guitar in your life.
The telescope is actually a hurdle to most people who will ever look through one. Introducing people to amateur astronomy by talking about making the sausage doesn’t whet the appetite. It’s dry, it’s small, and it’s boring. And it’s not relevant to 90% of people who will ever show up – they’re not going to race out and spend hundreds of dollars on a worthwhile telescope. It’s the kind of thing you talk about once people are hooked, want to view things independently, and are actually ready to invest their time, energy, and money into the hobby.
Amateur astronomy happens first in the mind. The imagination is accessible; the nitty gritty of operating a manual telescope is actually quite exclusionary, and fails to meet people where they actually are.
This is great advice, I’m very grateful that you responded! I did start out pointing out the constellations and the different features we would look at, but after reading this, I realize now that I got people looking into the scope way too early, and there was basically nowhere left for me to go after that. This also makes me think about doing a separate thing just for helping people get astronomical league certs, then.
I live half a world away so I can’t attend but I think it’s a cool concept. I have no idea how long it takes to re-align the scope between takes.
There is definitely some magic in that, I don’t know if you have both scopes, then you can set an automatic up for people that just want to take a quick peek, and use the manual to explain your story.
It doesn’t take too long to adjust unless somebody really headbutts the scope, which happens. Typically it’s just slewing targets back into frame because of the Earth’s rotation, which at 110x and a good RACI, is pretty easy. I think it takes maybe 15-20s every third guest to make sure they’ve got a good view (takes a bit longer sometimes if they’ve pushed the focuser in). I’m definitely thinking that a GOTO/PUSH TO modification kit might be in my future, but I’m trying not to spend more money at the moment.
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