Stargazing anew

After much consideration, and with my upcoming studies in mind (or at least that’s how I justified it to the accountant part of my brain), I bought a telescope earlier this week and it was delivered yesterday. I spent a few evenings considering my main options – refractor, Newtonian, Maksutov, Schmidt-Cassegrain, or Dobsonian-mount Newtonian – and speaking with various people, I whittled the choices down to either Sky-Watcher’s Explorer 130P or Skymax 127 (both with SupaTrak motorised mount). While there are undoubtedly better telescopes on there in this aperture range (the number refers to aperture in mm), this shortlist came about due to reviews given, price, and availability. Both have received excellent reviews, and they’re readily available.

The Explorer is a Newtonian, so is considered fine for general astronomical observation due to its aperture and field of view, and the Skymax is a Maksutov, so is considered ideal for up-close examination of objects. As I understand it, the reasons for the distinction are based upon:

• Size of the primary mirror. The Newtonian is 130mm and the Maksutov is 127mm, so both roughly 5″.
• Amount of light reaching the primary mirror. The Maksutov has quite a large secondary mirror and corrector plate (meniscus lens) which together reduce the amount of incoming light more than the Newtonian’s relatively small secondary mirror.
• Focal length of the telescope. The Newtonian is 650mm and the Maksutov is 1,500mm, due to the way the mirrors fold the incoming light to the eyepiece.
• Focal ratio (focal length divided by mirror size) will be familiar to all photographers as f-stop (to control depth of field). The Newtonian is f/5 and the Maksutov is f/11.8. The higher the focal ratio, the narrow the field of view.

A Newtonian has a wide FOV that allows it to naturally see a wide area of the sky, meaning it can fit a large nebula or a planet quite easily, but will need additional magnification to look closer; whereas a Maksutov has naturally high power but a narrow FOV, meaning it might not be able to view all of the largest nebulae at once, but is superb at picking out detail on what it can see. However, after discussing the matter with a number of amateur astronomers, it seems that at this level (aperture and price), the distinction is really not an issue.So… I bought the Skymax 127 (pictured).

I think I’ve got all that right. If not, please let me know.

It’s probably worth saying at this point that I’ve made enquiries with my local astronomical society, and plan to go along to their next meeting with a view to joining. With a topic like astronomy, you really can’t beat being part of a skilled community, learning from them and participating in their activities (including dark sky site nights/weekends).

The telescope was delivered to my workplace yesterday, though I had to wait until I got home before I could unwrap it. And that was the first thing I did when I walked in the door – opened the Russian dolls (it was a number of boxes within a box within a box within a box – no kidding), made sure everything was there, read as little of the documentation that I could get away with, and set up shop on my front porch. I hadn’t aligned the finder-scope, didn’t level the tripod (it has an inbuilt bubble level), and only performed a cursory zeroing of the motor mechanism, so I wasn’t going to get a quality experience, but I just wanted to look through it already!

Venus was still ~10° above the horizon, so I lined up on that first and was pleased when the bright, crescent sliver appeared in the telescope. It works! And it was the first time I’d look in a telescope in about 20 years – I was both immensely excited and disappointed with myself for letting it happen. I’d always intended to replace the 5″ Newtonian I’d inherited when my great-uncle had died, and then subsequently sold as other life issues took priority (though I did enjoy watching Halley’s Comet through it during its last pass), but somehow that never happened. Still, all that’s under the bridge now…

Next was the Moon, almost directly overhead and half-full. When it came into view in the eyepiece I just gasped. I’d forgotten how beautiful and inspiring it was. It’d had that effect on me since I first looked into a telescope at age 6 or 7, and 30 years later it does exactly the same thing. I set the controller up to track it (which it did, but required frequent corrections because of my lack of setup) and gazed at it in open-mouthed awe for a good 30 minutes. I never get tired of it.

Feeling I had the solar system sorted, I thought I’d try out Orion as it has a number of stars and magnificent nebulae to choose from, all in one small chunk of the celestial sphere. However, as I’d not aligned the finder-scope or zeroed the tracking system, it made finding and keeping anything worthwhile quite hit-and-miss. So rather than spoil an otherwise great time, I swung it round onto Sirius (or Dog Star, due to its location in Canis Major) and enjoyed the light show of the brightest star in the night sky.

It was while out watching the sky that I saw the steady stream of visitors into my neighbour’s house, who holds a loud prayer evening every Thursday for the evangelical church of which he is a vocal, proselytising member, and was quite pleased that their comments and brief conversations with me all remained natural. Normally it goes very differently — though one did have to ask the other if he’d brought “his weapon” along, to which the other asked whether he should use the KJV or NRSV “weapon”…

So after 90 minutes of a marvellous stargazing experience, I packed up and brought everything back inside as it was quite cold, I don’t yet have a dew shield and the unit wasn’t setup correctly. Once I’ve aligned the finder-scope and learned how to correctly zero and adjust the controller, I’ll go back out and try again on Orion.

Orion and the Southern Cross were my favourite constellations as a child growing up in Australia, and Orion remains so today particularly because it’s visible in either hemisphere and remains a friend from a simpler time, reminding me of childhood wonder.

In which we realise our insignificance

I felt compelled to share this fantastic video footage, posted to a friend’s blog. I’m not sure where the footage originates, but the music is clearly John Barry’s The Overture from The Black Hole, a film I enjoyed when I was young:

Our small world

[Edit: Normally I wouldn't make this kind of edit, but Unreasonable Faith posted a similar video that just had to be shared]:

Star Size Comparison

I think it does they do a fantastic job of showing the relative sizes of planets within our solar system, our Sun, and the staggering sizes of nearby stars. The extra-solar stars pictured range in distance from almost 9 ly (Sirius or Alpha Canis Major, and is also the brightest star in the night sky) away to over 20,000 ly (the recently discovered V838 Monocerotis).

To put the video into context: if V354 Cephei were placed at the centre of our solar system, its radius would end somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn. It’s that big. And just look at the final comparison between our Sun and VY Canis Major, which is the largest star that we know about. If placed at the centre, its radius would reach to Saturn. This image puts the relative distances of the inner and Jovian planets into context (image from solcomhouse):

 

Orbit of the inner and Jovian planets

It’s just mind-boggling how insignificant our own yellow dwarf Sun is in comparison to others in our own galaxy never mind a thought for our home, this pale blue dot hurtling through space around it.

Another blog?? And here’s introducing…

Welcome to Hurtling Through Space.

Why this particular name? I wanted to call the site something like “Pale Blue Dot” — a reference to the legendary Carl Sagan‘s awesome use of NASA’s Voyager I spacecraft in 1990 to take a photograph of earth from almost 4 billion miles away, the pale blue dot…

…to illustrate how mind-blowingly insignificant the angry, self-destructive little bipedal species we call Homo sapiens are in the greater scheme of things, but as with all things in the realm of free (or cheap) Internet names… it was taken. So I thought to paraphase a stand-up line I heard many years ago into something that approximates the awe of the pale blue dot:

Earth is moving at 67,000mph around its star, and still people insist there’s no such thing as progress!

My main aim was to convey my awe at everything around us: the earth and everything on it, our solar system, our galaxy and what we can and understand of our universe, but I wanted to do it in such a way as to make it clear that we, as humans, are both special and insignificant. Special in that we are the only sentient, self-aware beings that we know of — at least in our neck of the galactic woods (or perhaps in our understanding of nature around us) — and insignificant in that this planet, this third rock from the Sun, is not the centre of anything meaningful or important. We have no special place in the universe, the universe does not revolve around us, neither physically nor metaphorically. It’s not a matter of belief; in fact, it’s the complete absence of any belief or dogma. It’s simply stating what we know as fact so far. This may sound paradoxical, or even insulting, especially if you are from a religious background, as indeed I am, and you may immediately recognise where I am going and wish to move along to a less challenging site. But I hope you don’t.

I am, among other labels, an atheist, but note the lowercase ‘a’ — I consider it important. It is a device that I use to simply illustrate that I am non-theistic but am understanding and compassionate of the billions of theistic people on the planet which, if statistics are anything to go by, you are probably one of them. I used to be, too, but that doesn’t really matter here — I’m not trying to convert you, and I’ll thank you to treat me with the same courtesy and respect.

Before I begin, let me make one thing clear: I might speak of various theistic and non-theistic positions, but they are my take on the particular topic. I do not speak for anyone other than myself, and nor do I pretend to — not even for atheists or other labels with which I identify. I am representative of me. This is a clarification that may come up in the future — as many debates and arguments often include the “You don’t speak for…” line, or variants of it — so don’t be surprised if I either point you to this post or ignore the attempt. I’ll also be mix-and-matching “God”, “god” and “gods” not in an attempt to inflame, but rather to neutralise any partisan positions, point out that one man’s God is another man’s Satan, and of course to illustrate that ALL theists are going to whatever hell you believe in as you are ALL heretics to someone else’s faith or interpretation of it — even sects within the same religion — and they ALL claim to be the final authority on such matters. Think of it as an exercise in humility or, preferably, a level playing field.

Some time ago I was trying to determine where my position was on religion and the hornet’s nest that surrounds it. For some time I called myself an agnostic (claiming that I didn’t know whether there was a God or not, so the only logically-correct position was neutrality), but gradually came to the realisation that an agnostic is someone who hasn’t really thought about it enough. By this I mean that I’d been avoiding the ‘a’ word: atheism. To many it is a subjective word that conjures up images or memories of iconclasts, god-deniers and intolerant, red-faced angry-shouty people who think that anyone who believes in fairy tales of any sort should be hanged, drawn and quartered. It’s true that those people do exist, I can’t and won’t deny it; however, I call those people hard atheists — or in moments of pedantry, just Atheists (note the capitalisation).

The ‘a-’ in atheist denotes absence, or not, or without. For example: sexual and asexual reproduction, moral and amoral behaviour (a favourite of ad hominem and pro-theistic arguments), tonal and atonal, social and asocial, chromatic and achromatic, and so on. So you can see that atheist means the absence of belief, not the denial of belief. It is a truly neutral position that contrasts considerably with theists (who insist that the unseen and unproven is real, calling it faith) and the subset of atheists who consider the supernatural (in the literal sense) to be impossible; both are examples of dogma, having chosen a belief or a “side” over the facts. A truly a-theistic position is one that can and will change its view as new facts come to light — not in a “God of the gaps” manner as many religions treat scientific discoveries (i.e. where everything not understood by science belongs to religion, shrinking in size as our knowledge grows) — but objectively, without holding onto anything that has been disproven according to the best yardstick we have at our disposal so far: scientific method.

As an aside — and as an indicator of where the bar is — proof requires more than testimonials from rich, famous, important (or even lots of) people — it requires critical thinking while avoiding logical fallacies and cognitive biases. There is no middle ground on these points.

The other side to the hard atheist coin is what I call soft atheists — they tend to have the same intellectual position as hard atheists about the validity of religion, each religion’s sects and fragments, the actions of its followers, and its place in the world, but they tend to differ in the reaction to those points. A soft atheist is more likely to accept a theist’s position — or, perhaps more to the point, the theist’s right to that position — rather than a hard atheist, who may consider such discussion fruitless as they’re “dealing with someone who believes in fairy tales.” The soft atheist may feel the same about the theist they’re speaking to, but compassion tends to stop that becoming a show-stopper. A hard atheist may wish to rid the world of the scorge of religion, but a soft atheist may understand that it’s human nature to believe in something so, rather than try to beat it out with words, s/he seeks to engage and educate. It’s not so much that “theists are ignorant”, but rather it’s about understanding how much of our lives is affected by the contents or — more often — the interpretation of stories purportedly written anywhere from the Stone Age to the Medieval period, depending upon the religion.

This brings me to humanism (which typically refers to secular humanism). For me, humanism goes hand-in-glove with soft atheism, though there are as many different points or view and opinions within humanism as there are within even soft atheism. It probably varies based upon background (ethnic, family and socio-economic), education, exposure to science and religions, authority figures through life, personality, and individual goals. Humanism provides, among other things, an ethical framework around which non-theists can structure their approach to life. It is not an alternative religion, as that presumes that religion is the source of ethics and morality which, if you have critically examined any religious text, if most certainly not true. Such texts may contain examples and guidelines of such patterns of behaviour, but they also contain many examples of appalling crimes against humanity.

People are people, and neither religion nor the absence of it makes any difference to how we treat people. History has unequivocally proven this time and again.

And this brings me, in a roundabout way, to the various labels I use to address myself, depending upon who I am speaking to. In early 2008 I found an acronym that summed my perspective up almost perfectly: HASSNERS. It is as follows:

Humanist: Try to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs.
Atheist: Affirm that, in all probability, god(s) do not exist, or at best it cannot be proven.
Scientific: Consider science and the scientific method is the best way to understand the world.
Secularist: Work towards the end religious privilege and discrimination.
Naturalist: The natural world is all we know for certain, and events have natural causes.
Ethical: Follow ethical standards worked out by man not by god(s).
Rationalist: Believe truth can be discovered by reason.
Skeptic: Suspend judgement as knowledge is rarely final and absolute.

Even if you are the most ardent theist — let’s say a right-wing neo-con Zionist Christian or a closet jihadi furiously hammering your keyboard every night in a chat room — you will undoubtedly see yourself in some of those points, even if the rest offends you. It’s because not everyone fits into a neat little pigeon-hole. Everyone is at least a little bit like just about everyone else. I’d say think of a Venn diagramme with a set for each individual trait known to mankind in it, but it makes my head ache too — you get my point, I’m sure.

Back to the point of this website. You now know how I view myself and, to some extent, the strength of my position. It’s my intention to post individual posts and links to other posts of interest. I’ll apologise up-front if a disproportionate number of them are posts of outrage or examples of theistic intolerance, and note that I’ll mix-and-match “God”, “god” and “gods”, but I promise I will endeavour to keep the balance. This balance is unlikely to take the form of examples of theistic puff-pieces, as you already know that is not a position I consider realistic or helpful, but I will try to make an environment that encourages your participation and thought.