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Showing posts with the label telescope

Camera Obscura

Perhaps it's a little weird for me to begin an article with a glimpse of a romantic movie, but I can't think of a cooler way to start today's topic. When I came up with the idea to write about "Camera Obscura", the first thought that came to my mind was a movie from 1997 called "Addicted to Love". Of all the movies in this genre, only a few are at the top of my mind, and this one, directed by Griffin Dunne with Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan in lead roles, is definitely the best one I remember. In short, Sam, an astronomer who, in an attempt to win back his girlfriend, turns his astronomical tools into specific spy equipment and, by using his dark-chambered pinhole camera, manages to observe what is happening in the building across the street in real time. What he used to achieve this is a principle behind Camera Obscura—a method to project the light through a small hole and create an image on the opposite wall inside a dark room, tent, or box. Something first observed and described by Mozi, a Chinese philosopher, around 400 years before Christ.


AstroMedia 'The Sun projector' cardboard kit

To better understand what camera obscura really is, think of an eye—a small, almost spherical chamber where light enters via the cornea and through a small pupil, with the iris controlling how much light enters the eye. Light then passes through a lens, which can change its shape to focus the image. The image is projected through a transparent, gel-like substance to the back of the eye (retina and macula), which contains light-sensitive cells. The light travels in straight lines from its source, and because of this, the image is formed flipped and upside down. However, the brain receives the image via the optic nerve and interprets the scene correctly.

Just like in the movie and inside the eye, we could also create our own camera obscura, which in Latin means "dark chamber." Imagine a large room completely darkened by, for example, placing cardboard sheets over the windows with a small, shaped pinhole in the middle of the cardboard. The light from the outside will enter and paint a great image on the opposite wall of the objects from the exterior. Upside down and flipped, but that could be fixed by utilizing a couple of mirrors. Check below in references for the tutorial made by PetaPixel*, an online publication covering the wonderful world of photography, or many other DIY videos from YouTube. There was also a camera obscura exhibit made by Robyn Stacey**, an Australian photographer and visual artist, that turned the Australian city of Brisbane on its head in stunning photographs.


Convert your room into a giant Camera Obscura by PetaPixel*

Today, as a continuation of the small astronomy thread on MPJ, I had my hands on a second AstroMedia kit (of three), and this one was made with the camera obscura principle for observing the Sun, its sunspots, planetary transits, and eclipses. Despite its size, it was surprisingly quick and easy to put together, or more likely, I am becoming much more experienced with paper gluing. :-) Surely, compared to the previously assembled Galilean telescope replica, it was easier to paste more non-round parts than before with the telescope's multiple tubes. Nevertheless, the Sun projector surprised me with its rather large size.

However, the kit is not an ordinary pinhole camera. Instead of a simple aperture of the camera obscura, the solar projector has a lens and two convex mirrors to choose from that work together like a Galilean telescope from the previous post. It is designed to provide higher magnification, and a plane mirror redirects the image to a comfortable viewing position. Best of all, it has a cardboard-made Dobsonian base and can be adjusted to any height between 0° and 90°. Furthermore, on both sides, there are quarter circles with degree scales, which determine the angle between the position of the sun and the horizon, which helps in calculating the height of the sun. With additional apertures, it is possible to reduce the opening and amount of light that enters the box. Smaller apertures can make sharper images. It's a surprisingly comprehensive astronomical tool.


Phases in assembling the Sun projector

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical that all the parts were glued perfectly and aligned for the light to be beaming exactly from the objective lens through the convex mirror to the plane mirror and toward the white screen, but the "First Light", as the astronomers like to call the time of the first observation with brand-new equipment, showed the Sun disc amazingly clear and focused. Now I have to wait for the next eclipse to test it with, which will be in March 2025. Or for the next Mercury transit nine years from now. Unfortunately, the transit of Venus will not happen again in this century. In the meantime, I will definitely play a little more with it and test all its features, including observation of landscapes, as in the summer there is plenty of light, so stay tuned for more information about all it can do.

Unrelated to this project, it reminded me that observing the sun could be very interesting and enjoyable. Once, when I was watching the Sun through the reflecting telescope with a solar filter, a plane transited the Sun disk at the same moment as my observation of one of the previous Mercury transits, and it was so intense, to say the least. Imagine watching Mercury slowly pass through the sun's disk when suddenly the black shadow of an airplane passes the disk in less than a second. I was stunned for a moment, trying to comprehend what exactly happened. I would probably still be puzzled by the event if the airplane hadn't left a contrail behind it, which stayed for a while in the field of view along with small Mercury and a couple of sunspots.


Details from the Sun Projector's "First Light"

Amazingly, Camera Obscura could be dating even back to the past, all the way to the prehistoric settlements. There are theories that prehistoric tribe people witnessed the effect through tiny holes in their tents or in screens of animal hide, which might have inspired them to start with cave paintings. It was not away from logic that they would intentionally make the pinholes in order to monitor the exterior for potential dangers from within their shelters.

Anyhow, it was fun building the kit as well as writing about it. Nature is definitely full of wonders, even with something so simple to test, build, and understand, like it is with monitoring light behavior within a camera obscura. By using the same principle, it is possible to make a small projector that uses a light from a smartphone to project it on the wall, and even the additional mirror is not required if the smartphone is positioned upside down in the first place. We played once with that as well, and the result is in the refs below.

Galilean Telescope (AstroMedia cardboard kit #1)
https://www.mpj.one/2023/07/galilean-telescope.html

What Do Jupiter and Mercury Have in Common?
https://www.mpj.one/2019/11/what-jupiter-and-mercury-have-in-common.html

Transit of Mercury
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2yuXbUdj6o

Shoebox Projector
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsvUbysEk8

Ref:
 

Galilean Telescope

The knowledge and manufacture of lenses were known since the time of the old Greeks (the word "optics" came from the Greek word ὀπτικά, which means "appearance") and later in the old ages with Egyptian scholar Alhazen, who made important contributions to the study of optics in general. In Europe, the lenses arrived around the 13th century and immediately triggered the invention of the first eyeglasses. However, one important discovery had to wait three centuries later in order to set off a wave of new discoveries in the field of astronomy. The invention was made by Hans Lippershey, the spectacle maker from the Dutch city of Middelburg in the Netherlands, who in October 1608 tried to apply for a patent for a tool he described as an aid capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby". It consisted of convex and concave lenses in a tube capable of magnifying objects three or four times. For strange reasons, the patent was rejected, but the new instrument immediately attracted attention. Now known as a spyglass, the invention ushered in a new era in astronomy and was the foundation of today's refracting telescopes.


Cardboard replica of the original telescope made by Galileo

Only half a year later, in the early summer, Galileo Galilei at the University of Padua near Venice started to build his first telescope based on the one Hans' made. He managed to design and build telescopes with increasingly higher magnifying power for his own use as well as for presents to his patrons. Galileo was a skilled instrument maker, and his telescopes were known for their high quality. Just like the initial spyglass from the Netherlands, his first telescope was basically a tube containing two lenses, but he managed to enhance the power that magnified objects approximately nine times with his first designs.

Even though Galileo perfected the manufacturing of lenses and telescopes—in later years he managed to produce over a hundred telescopes, some of them with magnifications as high as 33—only two have survived and can be seen in the Museum Galileo (Museo di Storia della Scienza) in Florence. One of the two, especially designed for Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, with gold-embossed leather, probably had (with initial lenses from the end of 1609) magnification power of around 20. The limiting factor of these early refractors, especially those with higher magnification, was their small field of view, but still, it allowed Galileo to see that the Milky Way is just a multitude of millions of stars and that the Moon's surface was not smooth and perfect but rough, with mountains and craters whose shadows changed with the position of the Sun. He saw the phases of Venus throughout the year and the most interesting fact that planet Jupiter was accompanied by four tiny satellites that moved around it with distinctive proof that not everything in the heavens revolves around the Earth.


Phases in assembling Galileo's historical telescope

This particular gold-embossed leather telescope from the Florence museum was the model for the AstroMedia cardboard replica kit I got my hands on last weekend. It was advertised as "With this historically accurate cardboard replica, you can experience firsthand the great research achievements of Galileo, which he achieved despite the optical performance of this telescope, which is modest by today's standards". All I could say after two days of carefully pasting pieces of paper one after the other was that I couldn't agree more, especially at the last moment when I pointed it to the one-kilometer-away sign of the neighboring shopping center and clearly read what it said. I can only imagine where Galileo pointed his first telescope and what his initial reaction was.

While Galileo did not invent the telescope in the first place, his contribution toward their use in astronomy and science earned him two phrase coins: Galilean telescopes, which now represent a popular name for a refraction telescope type, and Galilean moons, now referring to the first four of Jupiter's natural satellites.


Jupiter's moons as seen through modest reflecting telescope compared to the view
from a small refracting spyglass similar in size to Galileo's original telescope

Unfortunately, I cannot make any astronomy photos with this replica; after all, it is made of cardboard, and fixing it on the moving sky is a mission impossible, not to mention its extremely small field of view, which is perhaps less than a centimeter in apparent terms, which would provide only troubles for focusing the camera through it. For these reasons, I decided to embed a photo of Jupiter's moons as seen with a modest reflecting telescope (the one you can see in the background of the first image above). Below you can find a link to the YouTube video of the entire event we created a couple of years ago when Jupiter was close to Earth. In the upper right corner of the photo, I also included a small view of how Galileo might have seen Jupiter and its four large moons. It is what can be seen with a decent refracting spyglass or powerful binoculars, which, in terms of magnification power, stand at the level of Galileo's scopes.

Camera Obscura (AstroMedia cardboard kit #2)
https://www.mpj.one/2023/07/camera-obscura.html

Jupiter Moons (zviktor22):
https://youtu.be/VTEsXEx-tnE

Ref:
https://astromedia.de/Das-Historische-Galileo-Teleskop
https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/index.html
 

What Jupiter and Mercury Have in Common?

Before we jump to premature conclusions with easy answers such as 'nothing at all' or 'at least they are both orbiting the Sun', perhaps we could do some quick research, just in case... With Jupiter's equatorial radius almost thirty times bigger than the same property on Mercury, the obvious composition difference between one gas giant and a small rocky planet and all the other major differences in mass, density, temperature, orbital inclination, and orbit period, and with almost everything we could compare the two, it is very hard to find the slightest similarity. Not to say that Jupiter in its arsenal is in possession of moons equal to or even bigger in size than the smallest planet of our solar system.


However, within the past couple of seasons, what they had in common was the fact that they were under the spotlight of all of us who, from time to time, enjoy gazing at the sky with our naked eyes or through modest telescopes with a strong feeling of being the witnesses of our own solar system at work. It all started at the end of last year with a rare Jupiter-Mercury conjunction when two planets came close to each other to the size of two moon-diameters. It was easily observed without any optical aids just after the sunset on December 21, 2018.



Even better, the show was on June 12, 2019. On that day, the giant planet was closest to Earth during the celestial event known as Jupiter’s opposition. At its closest point, it came to within 641 million km from Earth. We took the chance to point the telescope and observe the mighty planet and its four largest Galilean moons: IO, EUROPA, GANYMEDE, and CALLISTO. If you watch the video, you'll find the entire story of the event and more facts about the history of the most famous moons, along with short footage from the Sky-Watcher and references in the video's description.



Culmination in our amateur astronomy happened a couple of days ago on November 11, 2019, with the celestial transit of Mercury over the face of the Sun. It was the last transit of the small planet for a while, and the next time it is going to 'eclipse' the mother star again will be in 2032! It was hard to take the photo of the event since it was fuzzy and cloudy with the sunset approaching rapidly, but we made it at last, and it was worth all the efforts.

Stay tuned for more celestial events in the future and maybe some more stories and photos from the active heavens, along with our first long-exposure astrophotographs from outside the solar system.
 

Solar Eclipse

The moon travels around the Earth in an elliptical orbit, and logically there are two points in its path where it is closest and farthest from us. Today it was in "perigee-syzygy" of the Earth-Moon-Sun system, or simply called "supermoon". Coincidentally, it happens that today it has the power to fully block the sunlight in northern Europe and make the biggest shadow one can make on Earth. In Serbia it only made a partial eclipse covering somewhat less than 50% of the solar disk. These are 12 photos I took in intervals of approximately 10 minutes from the eclipse start at 9:40 until it went away around 11:58. The biggest shade was at 10:48. We were pretty lucky today since nature gave us a clear sky with just one stubborn cloud that covered the sun-moon kiss around 11AM.


The above image is the composition of those 12 photos, which I took through our Sky-Watcher telescope with a solar filter. I still don't have a proper camera or adapter for taking astronomical photos, so I used our DSLR and manually took images. Therefore, photos are not ideal and perfect, so I used a little photoshopping to make them as clear as possible.


More about today's event in our neighborhood I found at timeanddate.com and tons of websites, as the media literally went viral this morning. No wonder, as the next partial eclipse in Europe will be in 5 years, and the next total one is not expected before 2026. Unfortunately, a total eclipse in Serbia will not be visible any time soon.


It sure is spectacular when our moon eclipses the sun, but in the celestial sky above, there are more events in the same fashion. I mean, situations when three solar system bodies become aligned, so to speak. In this update of the blog story about the classic eclipse, one of those I took with our scope on May 9, 2016. It was the transit of Mercury across the Sun, and the photo ended very well. I managed to catch one of those giant sunspots as well.
 

Scientific Copenhagen

Do you have that strange feeling when you are about to visit a new city abroad and are a little afraid of what you will stumble upon when it comes to simple things? Like how to use the metro line or how to buy a bus ticket or how to identify your next destination? Or how to book your flight back to your home? Or how to handle a simple dilemma: should you exchange the money to the local currency, or is it wise to put your card in every ATM or any other 'slot' machine on your way?

Hello™ at Microsoft Campus Days, 2014

Ericsson, a Swedish multinational provider of communications technology and services, has the answer for you. And me too. Last week, I took my entire family on the trip to Copenhagen for both business and pleasure hours in the Danish capital. During my previous visits I didn't have much time for tourism or any off-work activity for that matter. So I did a little research this time, and Ericsson's "Networked Society City Index" helped a lot. With the well-developed ICT infrastructure, economy, and social development, as well as environmental progress, Copenhagen is located in the top five within the NSC index, among 31 well-developed worldwide cities. After our visit we left Denmark with a feeling that everything, or most of it, went perfectly smoothly and the applied IT was extremely helpful, simple, and useful. Unified communications (UC), integrated into people's business life from within smart gadgets and laptop computers, were also a big part of it, and I can proudly say that, in a way, I took part in the active development of Rackpeople's* Hello™ for Microsoft® Lync®—UC software that integrates with Microsoft's Lync and Exchange and presents video conferencing within a single click on a wide variety of screens and devices. The business part of last week's Copenhagen trip was to visit Microsoft Campus Days, where Hello™ had a big feature presentation and successfully presented what it can do in the current edition. From the developer's point of view, I have a good feeling that this project will have a long life with plenty of room for more versions in the future, especially if Skype and Lync integrate and create space for non-business users as well.

However, Copenhagen, besides the business side of the medal, has plenty more to offer. History, arts, sport and music events, amusement parks, museums, royal and naval sites, shopping streets and malls, restaurants, walks along the canals, sightseeing from the sea, and many more, but this time we chose to glimpse the city's unique scientific side. With a seven-year-old boy in our small family, along with me being a big fan of science and skeptical of society, our stay was really special. If you add last week's Black Friday hysteria, which brought an enormous smile on my wife's face all day long, I can safely say that we spent one of those memorable times you never forget.

The Rundetårn, a 17th-century astronomical observatory**

The very first day we went to see Rundetårn, an almost 400-year-old observatory built by King Christian IV after the first major success of naked-eye astronomical observation of planetary motion, performed by famous astronomer Tycho Brahe. His incredibly accurate measurement of 6 planets motion at the time was used by Johannes Kepler after Tycho's death in 1601, and for the first time in astronomy, three laws of planetary motion were established, including the one that all planets in the solar system move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at a focus. Even though there are still suspicious thoughts about honest relations between Brahe and Kepler and even uncleared circumstances related to Tycho's death (traces of mercury in hairs from his beard were found in the 1901 autopsy), these two colorful characters of the early 17th century made crucial contributions to our understanding of the universe, including the discovery of Newton's law of gravity, which was a direct outcome of Kepler's laws.

Anyway, the Round Tower in the heart of Copenhagen is still active and one of the oldest functioning astronomy observatories. The dome is 6.75 meters high and 6 meters in diameter and contains a refracting telescope with 80–450x magnification with an equatorial mount. Without an elevator or stairs, walking up and down its unique 209-meter-long spiral ramp that spins 7.5 times is something special I never saw before. Not to mention we had the opportunity to look through the 'scope with two very friendly astronomers who warmly welcomed us and patiently answered all the questions we had.

Apollo 17's moon rock

The next stop in our astronomy tour was the Tycho Brahe Planetarium. It is located not too far away from the observatory and hosts 'The Space Theater' with a 1000-square-meter dome-shaped screen, and seeing a giant 3D Earth rotating in front of you or 30+ meter high mammoths in "Titans of the Ice Age" is the experience you don't want to miss. They also hosted an "A Journey through Space" program and permanent exhibition with meteor specimens and one of the largest moon rocks from the Apollo 17 mission (in the above image).

Science is not science if you don't experiment in the lab, and to have at least a feeling of what scientists do on a daily basis, you have to visit Experimentarium City. The main exhibition last week was "The Brain", with tons of posts waiting to be explored and played with. Needless to say, my favorite was the game with the cool name "Mindball"—in which you have to push the ball only by using brain wave sensors. The more you are relaxed and focused, the more it will get into your control and move in the desired direction.

Mindball—moving the ball with brain activity

If you like to have your brain scanned and to see which part is activated when you move fingers, or if you want to see really cool optical illusions, or to learn more about scientific facts and how stuff works, or to play memory games, or... simply to experience a great family time, visiting Experimentarium City is mandatory.

Finally, no trip to Copenhagen would be allowed to have the adjective 'scientific' in the title without visiting the national aquarium and the zoo. Opened last year, Den Blå Planet, National Aquarium Denmark, located near Copenhagen's airport in Kastrup, is something you would need to see to believe. Especially if you came from a continental country like Serbia. Equally interesting was the zoo, which went viral earlier this year when they decided to euthanize Marius, the young giraffe, because of a duty to avoid inbreeding, approved by the European Breeding Programme for Giraffes. Right or wrong, it is not mine to say, but we humans are responsible for the health of the animal life, and at least it is a good thing that there are scientific organizations that are taking the breeding of animal species seriously. Anyway, perhaps the best impression in both the wild animal and fish exhibitions, to me, was their climate-controlled environments—in the zoo their "Tropical section" with jungle climate conditions, and in the case of the aquarium, it's the "Amazonian region" with tropical plant life, strange-looking fish, and lots of piranhas.

The Little Mermaid

Finally, I want to thank all my coworkers at Rackpeople for having a good time on and off the office, especially Lasse, who invited us for a visit and gave me the opportunity to spend my yearly bonus in Copenhagen. Trips like this are also a great opportunity to learn more about the country and region you are visiting, and I mean not just about the sites, history, monuments, and other attractions, but also about people, hospitality, and friendship. Sometimes, the result is more than you hope for... sometimes less. Perhaps the best advice when you are visiting abroad, no matter if you are doing it as a pure tourist or within a business agenda, or both, is to leave high expectations at home. Nevertheless, Copenhagen is one great corner of the world, more than worthwhile to visit, and this scientific side I wanted to show in this post is something not many cities in the world can offer.

Image references:
Scientific Copenhagen, 2014

References:
* http://www.rackpeople.com/
http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2013/ns-city-index-report-2013.pdf
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundetårn
http://www.rundetaarn.dk/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/17/was-tycho-brahe-poisoned
 

Celestia, Campfire and Astronomy

I remember every little detail from that weekend trip. From the very first moment when we stepped into the bus that took us to the mountain base, throughout the rest of the first day when we climbed down into a small cave with narrow hallways toward the small chamber at its end. I vividly remember the glorious, endless, and hard-to-find second cave we stepped in the very next day, followed by an overwhelming feeling and little fear when we passed through cave chambers, cutting the darkness with handy tools and small flashlights. I will always hate myself for not having a camera to capture the surrounding scenery when we traveled by train later that afternoon, which looked like it came right out of the 19th century with wooden benches rolling the railways slower than Usain Bolt. All those rock formations and abandoned train stations were slowly losing their battles with nature and were looking exactly like a background from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies.

Viktor at Rundetårn observatory, Copenhagen

But what I will remember the most is the first camping night between the caves. It was an extraordinary experience only a campfire can provide.

It was the hot middle of the summer, and the forest was mysterious and kind at the same time. I don't remember the exact year, though, but it surely was during my late teenage years, most likely in July or August of 1987. Along with a couple of my peer friends, I was lying down in the middle of a forest clearing on top of my brand-new sleeping bag, hypnotically staring toward the nightly sky. I glimpsed the watch and saw that midnight passed just an hour ago. The campfire was vividly glowing around the small glade surrounded by dark trees. It was the perfect time, and soon it was about to begin. As planned, the first one came on schedule, leaving a straight line in the sky for a millisecond or two. Shortly after, another one fractured the nightly sky, then another one and another and another...and then it was a shower. The Perseids. The icy fragments entering the Earth's atmosphere every summer are body parts of the comet Swift–Tuttle, which travels in this neighborhood every 130 years, providing lots of meteors for our camping TV. That particular year we planned our adventure by the moon's motion, or, to be precise, we wanted to go on the trip when there was no moon in the sky most of the night during its crescent phase. Without light pollution from the Earth and the Moon, the sight was amazing—perseids, thousands of stars, nebulas, galaxies and planets, the Milky Way in the center of our view, planes, and artificial satellites passing by throughout constellations with their leader of the time—the Russian space station "Mir", which was probably one of those brightest moving dots we saw that night. If you didn't see such a sight, you would be surprised how the night sky is actually dynamic. If you add to the scene strange sounds coming from the surrounding forest made by sleepless birds and wild animals, you get perfect entertainment for the big portion of the night. It was our first camping trip, and the fear of the unknown a little spoiled the event, but in our defense, without any experienced guides or team members, I can assure you that every suspicious sound that came from the forest sounded like the ultimate wild predator hungry for young humans. Anyway, little because of the fear and much because of active heavens, we finally fell asleep a little before dawn and successfully slept for an hour and a half, ready for the next day.

Space station Mir (1986-2001)

That really was one great summer, and this trip would stay on top of my adventurous history, from many perspectives. But it wasn't the one that triggered my interest in science and astronomy. I couldn't say what it was for sure, and probably, among many things, at the very beginning, it was one scientific toy my parents bought for me when I was really young. It was one toolkit box**—an optical set of plastic parts and various lenses allowing you to build different gadgets such as a microscope, binoculars, a spyglass, a kaleidoscope, a diapositive magnifier, prism tools, etc. It was my favorite toy for many years. The other equally important trigger is my failure to comprehend the word "infinite" and my everlasting desire to understand its meaning. It was bugging my mind ever since I started to look up at night. Even today, after dozens of courses of various mathematics I had to pass during my high school and university education, infinity is staying the biggest unknown, lying right there, far beyond my scope. There were years in my youth when I was convinced that infinity actually doesn't exist at all. I loved the idea that the cosmos is curved to 360° in all directions. I desperately wanted to believe that if you go with your spaceship straight up, eventually you will reach the same spot only from the opposite direction, just like the surface of Earth and its two-dimensional fully closed curve. Of course, today within the mainstream scientific thought there is much evidence that the expansion of our universe is real, but still it doesn't solve the infinity of it. At least in my mind. Even though the probable fact that our universe is just a part of a multiverse neighborhood where our cosmos is expanding into something bigger, to me it is only stretching the infinity out, only this time far beyond our borders. Maybe one day we will find the definite answer.

From the other perspective, if we are looking at the 'infinite' trouble only from our rational mind, we have to admit that the human race is extremely young, evolutionarily speaking. The real handicap is that we are living in a 'finite' world. Everything that surrounds us has its beginning and the end. At least it seems so, and even though we today learned a great deal about our position within the celestial realm, we only scratched the surface of it. We only managed to set a foot or two (or 12 to be exact) on the Moon, and we only started to explore our own solar system. Due to our own limitations in the form of our unwillingness and hesitations to deal with the unknown and/or our own animosities for each other in the form of militant behavior throughout our history, this is still a very slow process, but inevitably, one day, in the not-so-far future, the time will come when, lackingenough energy to sustain humanity as we know it, we all will have to start looking up, not for searching for the divine but for our own pure survival. Then our own evolution will speed up and skip some gears toward answers to many inconceivable questions.

Night Sky and Perseids by Brad Goldpaint (Goldpaint Photography)*

Anyway, astronomy is one of few scientific playgrounds simply because it contains many unanswered questions. There are plenty of proposed theories that will surely stay in their theoretical phases for many years until we finally get ultimate proof. It is entirely based on studying electromagnetic radiation we are picking up on the surface of Earth and several instruments in orbit. All possible frequencies within electromagnetic radiation are telling us many stories from its origin point and the path it is traveling through. Of course, studying full spectrum requires big and even large instruments in both size and money needed for their manufacturing. Especially if they require being lifted into orbit in order to avoid atmospheric disturbances. Secondly, it is amazing what must be done in order to look up one particular spot in the heavens simply because everything in the cosmos is in motion. We need to solve the rotation and revolution of the planet and, if posted in orbit, compensate for the extremely fast speed of the spacecraft carrying the instruments. As the monitoring object is farther away, the less amount of radiation is picked up by the sensors, so astronomy is one of those indirect or asynchronous sciences where we need to collect the data for some time, which could be years or even more time, and then for an equally considerable time analyze the data, compare the resulting images, and conclude science out. For example, take the Kepler orbital space laboratory. It orbits the Sun following the Earth in order to get a clear view toward the monitoring stars, and it is simply continuously taking images of 'nearby' stars (about 145,000 stars) and sending the data to the Kepler team for analysis. Over time, the team and their sophisticated software measure slight brightness changes during possible orbits of potential planets, and only by these small changes in brightness of the main star is it possible to roughly determine the size and orbit of the planet causing the dimming of the light from the star. However, in order to get all those facts out of the data, Kepler must take lots of images and cover the planet's full orbit. That means in order to confirm the planet, Kepler must take at least two images separated by time in order to confirm the revolution time of the planet. It's a slow process, and considering lots, and I mean LOTS, of received data, I am sure we will hear about more and more planets found by this technique.

Among all possible wavelengths within the full electromagnetic spectrum, the coolest one is the one situated between infrared and ultraviolet waves. The greatest visible light. The one we can see. Even though it is just a tiny portion of the full spectrum, this is the one we can enjoy with our own eyes. This is the one we see every night we look up toward the amazing heavens. Thanks to relatively cheap optical instruments, we are able to enhance the view and zoom it in and see further. Some time after I enjoyed my optical set toy I mentioned earlier, I got my own first refracting telescope. It was small without any tripods and fully mobile, but looking at the moon for the first time was something I will always remember. Discovering the fact with my own eyes that Venus, like the Moon, also has phases and seeing it in its crescent shape was the next best thing I experienced. I still have it, and every time I grab this small piece of optics, I can't help myself and instantly remember the times when I was fixing it on the ladder positioned on the top of our garage and spending hours looking toward the stars.

Transit of Mercury over Sun by Sky-Watcher 150/750

Today I have in my possession an educational reflecting telescope with a respectable mirror size and focal distance mounted on an equatorial tripod along with a motion tracking system capable of fixing the spot on the sky for hours. Unfortunately, amateur astronomy requires lots of free time, which I regretfully don't have enough of. In addition to a lack of free time, watching the heavens requires an unpolluted environment, and life in big cities is beneficial for everything but astronomical observation. Sometimes I feel like that character from the Michael Keaton movie—I don't remember the title now, but in the movie he found a way to clone himself in order to get finished various tasks in his life... Similarly, I would like to have one me for work, one for astronomy and science, one for family and writing... Simply, the day is too short, and to support the family and life, the work is always number one. But it is a good thing to have spare moments and spend them in the most enjoyable way. Even today, from time to time, I point the scope up and peek a little. Sometimes I take photos out, like this one of Mercury transiting the Sun disc.

To conclude with some short 'observations', if you want to do some amateur astronomy, you will need star maps. Before they were black and white and printed in the form of atlas books. Today all that changed with the speed of the internet and graphic tools on the average personal computer. They are all online, and you can access them with many apps. I recommend 'Celestia' and 'Stellarium'. Even without a real telescope, they provide endless fun.

Image refs:
https://amsmeteors.org/2017/08/viewing-the-perseids-in-2017/
* https://goldpaintphotography.com/

Kepler project:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fnbJ1hZik

** Toolkit box (~1978):


Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.stellarium.org/