Astrophotography is a Lot Like Love

It took five hours over four nights to figure out how to get an image with my new iPhone 11.  I gave up trying the smaller telescopes, a 2-3/4 inch refractor and a 5-1/4 inch reflector. Just attaching the phone knocked them far out of alignment and I had to retighten the bolts against the extra weight. So, I turned to a large 8-inch Maksutov catadioptric that I borrowed from the Austin Astronomy Club. That, at least, had good inertia. 

The next problem was focusing. The iPhone 11 makes a lot decisions for you. And it has a lot of options. It all just gets in the way.

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong

The Austin Astronomical Society featured a guest speaker a couple of months ago who talked about astrophotography. He kept waving his iPhone around saying, "All you need is one of these. All you need is one of these." Well, behind him was an electric guitar. So, this was a dextrous dude. No wonder he finds it easy. 

My current project is working my way through Astronomy Activity and Laboratory Manual by Alan W. Hirshfeld. The arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry are easy, but real the fun is in following the logic and discoveries of the Paleolithic people, Aristarchus, Copernicus, and Kepler, up through Hubble, to measure the day, the distances to the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and beyond. 

Just remember in the winter,
far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love
in the spring becomes the rose

It is true that the telescope is a wonderful instrument. Last week, I again observed the star group catalogued as Messier 7, called "Ptolemy's Nebula." Ptolemy knew it as a permanent cloud, just as other ancients catalogued the Andromeda Galaxy as a fixed patch of something. The first telescopes allowed many of those sparkly patches to be resolved into collections of individual stars. 

Andromeda was not resolved into a flat disk until our century and it was not so much the 100-inch telescope as it was the photographic plates that made that possible. So, photography is important and useful. That being as it may, only in 1924 did Edwin Hubble rely on Henrietta Leavitt's work with Cepheid variables (1912) to demonstrate that Andromeda is another "island universe" 860,000 light years away.  

I distance myself from the hobbyists who stack images and photoshop the colors to produce artwork that is not science. Perhaps even more to the point, Astronomy magazine for August 2020 has a glowing review of the Stellina imaging telescope. This robotic camera "captures and stacks exposures to create ever-more-detailed celestial images." You do not even need to know a single star or constellation. The database does all the work. 

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Astrophotography and Me 

The Andromeda Galaxy 

M-44 Beehive Cluster First Sighting 

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe 

The Perfect Machine 

Newton versus the Counterfeiter

The Public Good be Damned

On the "Galt's Gulch" website of the Atlas Shrugged movie producers, one of the regular writers asked about "Page 1069: What's Next?" (See here.) Everyone there knows that the paperback edition of the novel runs 1068 pages.  In other words, what indication (if any) suggests that the political agenda - or the wider philosophical program - of the strikers would be long-lasting?

The message of Atlas Shrugged is that the evils of taxation and regulation are the result of producers accepting an unearned guilt. If any previous generation had spoken the words of Rearden at his trial, d'Anconia at the reception, or Galt on the radio, the game of the looters and moochers would have been over. Only William Henry Vanderbilt is on record - and even so he was also proud of his philanthropy.

"In 1883, reporter John Dickinson Sherman questioned him about why he ran the limited express train: "Do your limited express trains pay or do you run them for the accommodation of the public?" Vanderbilt responded with: "Accommodation of the public? The public be damned! We run them because we have to. They do not pay. We have tried again and again to get the different roads to give them up; but they will run them and, of course, as long as they run them we must do the same." The interview was then published in the Chicago Daily News, but Vanderbilt's words were modified. Several accounts of the incident were then disseminated; The accounts vary in terms of who conducted the interview, under what circumstance and what was actually said. William received bad publicity and clarified his response with a subsequent interview by the Chicago Times. In that interview he was quoted saying: "Railroads are not run for the public benefit, but to pay. Incidentally, we may benefit humanity, but the aim is to earn a dividend." (Wikipedia here).  But an isolated instance is not enough to reverse a cultural trend. 

 Following Rand, many Objectivists claim to admire Ancient Greece, especially the Athenian Golden Age 480-400. But in fact, Athens itself was no friend of philosophy until after the death of Socrates, though it nurtured philosophy and art by attracting "metics", Greeks from other towns.Unable to speak in the Assembly, they wrote books and lectured in gardens. However, that launched a 500-year culture of open inquiry, learning, and exploration, both physical and intellectual. It was at Alexandria in Egypt that the word "cosmopolitan" was coined. No one was persecuted for questioning the existence of the gods, or asserting their own self-interest. Read about Aristippos of Cyrene. 

But it was not perfectly explicit or consistent. Merchants were still looked down upon. Slavery was accepted as an institution. Not the Cyreniacs, Hedonists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, Platonists, Stoics, or anyone else developed a consistent and complete philosophy of reason. But it lasted 500 years anyway. 

Rand's thesis was that once clearly articulated and demonstrated, the truths of Objectivism will endure like any other science.

Moreover, politics derives from ethics which rests on morality. In the story, Hank Rearden's oppression by the government is only the external expression of his exploitation by his family: his mother, brother, and wife all hate him - and he accepts their premises. That is most starkly evidenced in his own view (initially) of his romantic relationship with Dagny Taggart: he accepts the looters' view that sex is a base instinct - and that a woman must be protected from the shame of it.  Dagny, of course, has a more rational understanding.  

So, William Henry Vanderbilt's reply was salient, but not inclusive. It could not be: volition being as it may, we are born into our contexts; and he knew nothing of bobbed hair, bloomers, flappers, or women elected to the U.S. Senate.  So, even Vanderbilt could not articulate a post-Nietzschean egoism derived from Aristotle.  That mission is ours.

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Capitalist Culture 
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Venture Capital
Freedom in an Unfree World