Page 2 of 2
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:51 pm
by vonkaar
From
"Cold Turkey" by Kurt Vonnegut
Link
Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.
If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.
If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.
What could be simpler?
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:52 pm
by Narrock
Dude. Are there any in the 200-300 USD range?
This one made me go...
Zeiss Meniscas 150-2250 Maksutov - Cassegrain
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:52 pm
by Gargamellow
i know u were...
and if i google this, that means u guys have to read the links i post..cuz it would mean u are making me do my own research
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:55 pm
by vonkaar
Narrock wrote:Dude. Are there any in the 200-300 USD range?
I called them godlike... for the backyard astronomer anyway...
You can get a very nice beginner scope for that much. Start another thread sometime and I'll look around. Don't buy anything at Walmart though. Meade 'does' make 'some' decent scopes but the ones they sell at walmart are in NO way associated with Meade, same for Celestron... they are 100% manufactured by a Taiwanese company and Meade/Celestron/Tasco/Nikon just license their name to the company.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:56 pm
by Narrock
vonkaar wrote:From
"Cold Turkey" by Kurt Vonnegut
LinkWhich one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.
If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.
If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.
What could be simpler?
I like Kurt Vonnegut's work. I loved "Slaughterhouse Five." But he is being very vague here. You don't have to be in support of all things typical of either liberal or conservative stances. You can support some or most of them and still choose a side.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:57 pm
by vonkaar
Read the article and tell me what you think. There was a thread on it a long while ago... I think it was back when you were taking an NT vacation.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:58 pm
by Narrock
vonkaar wrote:Narrock wrote:Dude. Are there any in the 200-300 USD range?
I called them godlike... for the backyard astronomer anyway...
You can get a very nice beginner scope for that much. Start another thread sometime and I'll look around. Don't buy anything at Walmart though. Meade 'does' make 'some' decent scopes but the ones they sell at walmart are in NO way associated with Meade, same for Celestron... they are 100% manufactured by a Taiwanese company and Meade/Celestron/Tasco/Nikon just license their name to the company.
Damn, Meade makes some high end gear. Check this one out:
http://www.meade.com/rcx400/index.html
If I bought this one I would have a Lojack theft tracking chip installed on it.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:00 pm
by Gargamellow
omg..i would so die to have just one long look into space with a high powered telescope...
i love microscopes, too , man...i wish i had a high powered one of those!
i wish i had the brains to go into science
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:04 pm
by vonkaar
Narrock wrote:vonkaar wrote:Narrock wrote:Dude. Are there any in the 200-300 USD range?
I called them godlike... for the backyard astronomer anyway...
You can get a very nice beginner scope for that much. Start another thread sometime and I'll look around. Don't buy anything at Walmart though. Meade 'does' make 'some' decent scopes but the ones they sell at walmart are in NO way associated with Meade, same for Celestron... they are 100% manufactured by a Taiwanese company and Meade/Celestron/Tasco/Nikon just license their name to the company.
Damn, Meade makes some high end gear. Check this one out:
http://www.meade.com/rcx400/index.html
Meh, meade is a Toyota at best... like, they make the Lexus, which... their very very best model is a GREAT automobile, but if you compared it to a Rolls Royce, it's not in the same ballpark... er, dealership... parking lot, whatever. Meade is great but a multi-millionaire backyard astronomer would never use it. It's 'consumer grade' stuff. Which... is what we are, so... I guess I shouldn't knock it, no?
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:06 pm
by Arlos
You are NOT going to find a high quality telescope for 2-300, basically. If you're mechanically inclined, and are good at following plans, you might be able to MAKE one for yourself, but it's going to be relatively primitive.
The better telescopes out ther eyou can get have a number of REALLY nice features: mechanical stabilization and drive. Basically, it will let you point at what you want to see, and the mechanical drive will compensate for the motion of the earth, and keep the telescope pointed at exactly that spot, despite the rotation of the earth, until it falls below the horizon.
That kind of capability is going to be mated with the ability to hook in a camera of some kind (the best will be digital CCD cameras, but just about any old camera will do). Keeping the telescope pointed fixed at the object you want to observe for hours without moving allows you to take VERY long exposure pictures, thus getting much better details on objects that would otherwise be very faint. So, you can get amazing pictures through the telescope of stuff that looks faint/fuzzy to the naked eye through the same telescope.
Anyway, as I said, if you want something cheap to just stare up at the sky with, look up some do-it-yourself plans, you can make some relatively simple reflector designs for relatively cheaply, even ones with fairly sizeable mirrors. But as I said, they'll be rather primitive, and just for looking through.
It's all in what you want to do with it, and how much you're willing to spend, really. Telescopes are a lot like speakers in that regard. If you want cheap and crappy that doesn't do much, but fills the basic need, you can find it. If you want to spend as much as BMW on one, you can do that too.
-Arlos
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:06 pm
by Gargamellow
dude i would be happy with the wal mart version of a telescope
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:13 pm
by vonkaar
Gargamellow wrote:dude i would be happy with the wal mart version of a telescope
For about 3 nights and then you'd get sick of staring at shaky white dots... and a blurry moon... because that's all you'd see.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:22 pm
by Narrock
Would this one be shaky and blurry? Although the price is $5600:
http://www.meade.com/rcx400/index.html
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:24 pm
by Arlos
Heh, back when I was an Astrophysics major at Whitman, I had keys to the science building, and onto the roof where they had an observatory tower with a old old refactor that was a good 20' long +. The problem was, the college was in the middle of town, so the light pollution, especially from the campus tennis courts, was just awful. Still, was fun to get a couple friends and head up there late at night, open up the dome and use the scope to stare at stuff that you could never see with a typical backyard scope.
They also had a fairly sizeable reflector out in the wheat fields somewhere. It had some pretty nice resolution; I remember staring at the Pleiades through that thing and being amazingly impressed at the entire region they existed in. Unfortunately, while I had unlimited access to the thing, it was like 45 minute drive away from campus, so unless I was doing real work as part of a class, we never went out there.
One other nice piece of gear they had was a small telescope with the appropriate filters for doing solar observations. Being able to stare through it and see the roiling sun, sunspots, ets. was pretty damn impressive.
I'm not an astrophysics major any more, because it is completely non-applied, but I do miss it. Still, at the level I was at, it's really just all pure mathematics anyway. Calculus is the language you speak when you get to higher level astronomy, physics, etc.
-Arlos
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:26 pm
by Narrock
arlos wrote:Heh, back when I was an Astrophysics major at Whitman, I had keys to the science building, and onto the roof where they had an observatory tower with a old old refactor that was a good 20' long +. The problem was, the college was in the middle of town, so the light pollution, especially from the campus tennis courts, was just awful. Still, was fun to get a couple friends and head up there late at night, open up the dome and use the scope to stare at stuff that you could never see with a typical backyard scope.
They also had a fairly sizeable reflector out in the wheat fields somewhere. It had some pretty nice resolution; I remember staring at the Pleiades through that thing and being amazingly impressed at the entire region they existed in. Unfortunately, while I had unlimited access to the thing, it was like 45 minute drive away from campus, so unless I was doing real work as part of a class, we never went out there.
One other nice piece of gear they had was a small telescope with the appropriate filters for doing solar observations. Being able to stare through it and see the roiling sun, sunspots, ets. was pretty damn impressive.
I'm not an astrophysics major any more, because it is completely non-applied, but I do miss it. Still, at the level I was at, it's really just all pure mathematics anyway. Calculus is the language you speak when you get to higher level astronomy, physics, etc.
-Arlos
You're pretty close to the Lick Observatory.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:32 pm
by Gargamellow
arlos u are way cooler than i thought you were
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:20 pm
by Harrison
My job is causing me to take up an interest in sailing
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:37 pm
by Arlos
I would love to combine the two, you know? Get a nice boat, and take it out way into the ocean and wait for a really calm night/spot with no overcast, and THEN pull out the telescope. Turn all the lights in the boat out, and as long as you're far enough from any major settlement, you're going to have about zero light pollution, and could see objects in the sky that you couldn't DREAM of seeing just about anywhere inside the continental US. Get a good enough scope with the mechanical drive & GPS system so that it can maintain positioning despite the combined motion of earth, water and boat....
It would be so indescribably awesome, I don't even have words for it. I could see me spending my retirement years doing that, actually. Not even own a house or anything, just a big boat, and do the oceanic version of retirement RVing.
-Arlos
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:47 pm
by vonkaar
A large multihull boat like a cat or trimaran is a really popular choice for solar eclipse hunters since most of the best eclipses are seen from an ocean vew (2/3rds water and all that). Various deepwater oil rigs are popular spots for various grad work or amateur stellar astronomy because of the steady surfaces and absolute void of light pollution. That's also the best way to see the
green flash due to the low height and incredibly long horizons. Basic stellar navigation is STILL required for ASA certification, which boggles the minds of landlocked GPS sailors. Astronomy and boating are two hobbies that are VERY compatible.
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 7:21 pm
by Mop
I fall more in libertarian, I vote solely based on who i feel will do the best job, sometimes I vote based on who wont do a shittier job ( IE last presidential election) I have some very liberal and some very republican view points /shrug
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:31 pm
by Maeya
South East Minnesota had pretty low light pollution at night, and out in the country where we lived, the stars were amazing. That's one of the things I really, really miss being stuck in Atlanta. I miss the nights my family would sit out to catch the August shooting stars.
If any of you have the capabilities to get really neat space photos, I'd be interested in buying prints plz~ I took one Astronomy class in college, which was neat, and we got to go up to our school's little ghetto telescope and they got some awesome pictures of a couple of the planets and a pretty clear one of the moon's surface. I'm not sure what happened to those photos though =/
But on the subject of the thread, the Kurt Vonnegut quote made me think of that other saying; "If you're a conservative when you're young, you have no heart. If you're a liberal when you're old, you have no brain." Or maybe it was republican/democrat. Either way, it doesn't matter. Both sides are awfully corrupt and will spout out nearly anything if they think it will get them a better chance of being elected by whichever popluation they are catering to at the moment. If I were to choose for myself, I'd say moderately conservative. I'm all for personal responsibility and not relying on society to hand-feed us, but on the same token, I believe in a person's right to choose for themselves who to marry (within reason - I'm talking gender, not age), and I am pro-choice.
Also I think this political joke sums up how I feel (father's point of view):
A newly political college freshman considered herself a liberal Democrat and was a passionate advocate for the distribution of wealth. One evening at dinner, she was challenging her staunchly Republican father's opposition to higher taxes for the rich and better welfare programs for the poor.
Finally, Dad changed the subject and asked her about her grades.
"Oh, Dad, it was tough, but I think I'm going to make a 4.0 GPA this semester. I've spent every minute studying; I haven't gone to parties, haven't dated much; I haven't even made many friends because all I've done is study!"
Her father asked, "And how about your friend, Mary?"
"Mary's a party girl; she may not even make a 2.0 this semester, even though she took nothing but easy classes. She never studies. But, she's popular, she's having a blast, she goes to every party, and sometimes she doesn't even make it to class because she's so hung over. We're still friends, but we're so different!"
Her father said, "Well, why don't you help her? Go to the Dean's Office and have them deduct one point off your GPA and give it to Mary. That way, you'll both have a 3.0!"
"What, are you crazy? I worked my ass off and sacrificed everything to get that grade! All Mary's done is party! Why should she get the same grade? That would be totally unfair!"
Her father smiled and said softly, "Welcome to the Republican Party."
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:28 pm
by 10sun
Who wants to go sailing this coming summer?
I've got a Hobie 18 that has been limited to a fucking shitty lake when I used to be able to cruise the Long Island Sound without having to tack for an hour somedays =(
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:11 pm
by Tossica
Narrock wrote:I've been wanting to get a *good* telescope. Mead makes some nice ones.
A friend of mine owns
http://www.binoculars.com and
http://www.telecopes.com In fact, about 10 of my friends also work there. They can get pretty much any telescope you want for a decent price. Go Go local business!
