A wonderful astronomical weekend near Spruce Knob WV, at the Almost Heaven Star Party.

The fields at The Mountain Institute where it’s held remind me of the farm I grew up on, near Clarksburg MD, and the farm I lived in with Susan Greenthal Hurd in East Ryegate VT about 44 years ago.

The altitude here in WV does mimic the climate in VT. I have never gotten bitten here at TMI or AHSP or anywhere else I’ve hiked or canoed in West Virginia by any ticks or chiggers – which bedeviled me and my siblings 50-60 years ago in Clarksburg MD and continue to bite me at the Hopewell Observatory in Northern VA near Haymarket.

I brought my 12.5″ truss-tube dob, which you can see in one picture. I had just re-made the secondary cage and spider and secondary adjustment mechanism. I had to perform emergency surgery to cut off the truss tubes by exactly one inch so that all of the eypieces would actually come to a focus.

Part of the road up to TMI and AHSP

Baling hay in fields right next to TMI / AHSP

Learning how to use a sextant; if you know the exact time, you can use this to calculate your location to within 100 meters or so.

Beautiful but slightly threatening clouds the first night ended up dissipating. We had three beautiful nights of observing!

Me and my 12.5″ truss-tube dob that I built,

This is the Durbin Rocket railroad – a small and slow coal-burning locomotive designed to carry heavy loads of lumber. If you sit behind the engine, you WILL be coated with coal dust and cinders.

A friend’s minimalist, ultra-light dobsonian telescope, either 18 or 20 inch diameter. Note the lack of mirror box! It also tracks and has both Argo Navis and a go-to capability.

One of the many excellent talks. In this one, Jan Wisniewski (Vish – NYEV-ski) is showing how to make an IR on-axis autoguider.

Here I demonstrate how light and insubstantial are the famous Seneca Rocks that I passed on the way back from the star party.

Yesterday, we felled a large red oak tree that was blocking our view of Polaris from the outside pier. (If you can’t see the North Star then it becomes very, very difficult to align your telescope for imaging.) Since the observatory was built in the 1970s and 1980s a lot of trees have grown a lot taller, and we’ve had to cut or trim several of them. This one apparently sprouted in 1940, by my count. Fortunately, one of our members heats his house with wood, and burned about 7 cords last winter. This tree is not even one cord.

The very first picture was taken just as the tree began toppling. I have a video of the tree falling and crashing, but WordPress doesn’t allow movies.

Timber!!!

Collins is a scientific big shot (head of the Human Genome Project) and is famous for also being very religious.

I’m not. I am in awe of the incredible wonders of this planet, not to mention the wonders of the universe. I am awed even watching my 20-month-old granddaughter learn new skills and new words, but I have no idea what CAUSED all those wonders to come into being.

In the copy of Mationsl Geographic that I just opened, Collins is quoted thusly:

“At the most fundament level, it’s a miracle that there’s a universe at all.”

I agree! 

He continues:

“It’s a miracle that it [the universe] has order, fine-tuning that allows the possibility of complexity, and laws that follow precise mathematical formulas.”

Perhaps miracle isn’t the word I would use, but it is indeed amazing that the universe has those properties. Why is it that neutrons and electrons have the properties that the do, and hydrogen and oxygen and all the rest behave the way they do? I have no idea. Physicists and chemists and biologists can describe those properties, and explain why more complex phenomena occur as a result of the fundamental properties, but we have no frigging idea what caused the Big Bang or why atoms and subatomic particles behave the way they do. Its a mystery that I think we will never discover. But Collins continues:

“Contemplating this, an open-minded observer is almost forced to conclude that there must be a ‘mind’ behind all this.”

Here I disagree. I haveno idea what caused the universe to occur starting 14.7 billion years ago, but for a “mind” of some sort to be In charge of setting the values of all those physical constants raises even more questions. And provides even fewer explanations. For example, one might ask: ok, where did this “mind” come from? Why did it set the mass of a neutrino at such and such? Can this “mind” change its mind if it gets bored? If yes, what happens? If not, why not?

He concludes that “to me that qualifies as amiracle, a profound truth that lies outside of scientific explanation.”

Here I might agree. I doubt we will ever discover a cause for the Big Bang or why the various physical properties of the universe are what they are and are uniform in all places and for all time. (Or why dark energy may be an exception)

It does not force me to conclude there is a “mind@ controlling all that. No particular evidence would leave me to conclude that the human sky deities and inventions called Zeus, Legba, Thor, Cronis, Allah, Atman, or YHVH are responsible for any of those mysteries.

Two major accomplishments tonight:

1. David C finally Aluminized his mirror in our vacuum chamber. Long story with mishaps that included pyrolized Sharpie marks on a previous quick and dirty aluminizationsfor attempt, and a Varian high-vacuum gauge that got stuck for a while. But he was persistent and diligent and forgiving as well.

2. Rich K appears to have finished parabolizing his 10″ f/7 mirror, which he had started about 20 years ago under the guidance of my predecessor, Jerry Schnall. If my Foucault knife-edge measurements are correct then it’s 1/15 lambda which is great.

Oh, jeez, what an idiot I am. I overlooked the amazingly obvious fact that the focal lengths in my table were in INCHES. I somehow thought they were in FEET, but they weren’t.

As they say about scientific investigation in general, the easiest person to fool is yourself. I see that I did a pretty good job of doing just that. Thanks to those who pointed out my error, for example Mel Bartels. I guess that’s the great thing about these interwefts: you can get immediate feedback and have other, wiser souls point out your stupid mistakes in a matter of hours or minutes.

Here’s how the table should go:

As you can see, the distances are still pretty long,  but not nearly as long as I claimed. For our fairly-standard 8-inch (20-cm) f/5 mirrors, the distance we would need for a good star test would be 73 feet (22 meters). We still can’t fit that inside the CCCC building in one straight line. However, I guess that if we get some good first-surface flat mirrors, we could arrange for 73 feet/22 meters if we reflect the pinhole light a few times. I also bet we won’t need that lens to reduce the size of the pinhole, which you can see here.

A 12.5″ f/6 mirror will need 119 feet, or about 3 times the width of the CCCC game room. My 16″ f/5 will need a distance of 287 feet or 87 meters. That’s a long way; 7 times the distance across our largest room! I guess we’ll need a bunch of decent small flats from Surplus Shed, as well as precision tip-tilt devices to line all those mirrors up properly.

David Collins has a nice blog where he’s been documenting his telescope making projects. His first scope, a 6″, is named the Riccioli, and his second, a 12″, is named the Schall von Bell. Beautiful workmanship and good optical practices as well. If you are interested in finding out why they have those names, you will need to read his blog.

The link for his blog is here.