Stargazing -- Jupiter, M11 (Wild Duck Cluster), etc.

My 10" dobsonian reflector is really easy to take out onto the grass in front of my house. Did so this eve. Light pollution in Seattle is pretty bad, but you can still see some interesting things. Would've driven to a dark spot but moon was due to rise at 10 pm.

Jupiter is always amazing. Have looked at it several times in last month. Can see 4 satellites. Can easily see bands with my scope through either 32 mm lens (40x mag.) or 12.5 mm lens (100x mag.). Saw red spot on one occasion. Noted rapid movement (moved visibly over 1.5 hrs). Looked up Jupe's rotation period -- 9 hrs vs. Earth's 24 hrs!

Was going to look at M81 and M82. Looked hard at star charts and thru binocs. Had it nailed. Then clouds covered them. But now I know that part of the sky (NE of big dipper bowl) pretty well.

Scanned sky near jupe and saw nice blob. Looked up in star charts and saw that it is M11. Put scope on it. Nice view. Lots of stars in this "Wild Duck" cluster. Got to know Aquila constellation in which Altair shines brightest.

Moved to Ring Nebula in Lyra near Vega (Altair, Vega and Deneb form the summer triangle). Can make out ring with 100x mag. No doubt would be better in dark conditions.

Looked at Andromeda over by Cassiopeia. Maybe on a really dark night it'd be more exciting through this 10" scope. On a dark night with long film/digital exposure that you can really see Andromeda in detail, so here's a picture:

Image credit: Jason Ware, http://www.galaxyphoto.com/

Also looked at nebulas 884/869, and 654/653 which are near Cassiopeia. Seems easy to play with this dobsonian mounted scope as compared to typical tripod.

Constitutional authority for developing technology / health care / soc. security

[This post is a continuation of an email conversation between my dad Steve and friend Jason .. comments encouraged.]

Interesting discussion :) Long-winded. I'll contribute some more steam before we switch to nuclear.

Jason, your idea about the limitations of the constitution is quite interesting, particularly with regard to energy legislation. A quick read of the constitution reveals that there is no constitutional mandate for our government to develop/maintain/expand our transportation system except perhaps "To establish ... post Roads" -- Art. I, Sect 8. Yet the DoT is a pretty well-funded department. Likewise, the DoE gets a fair chunk of change. Why? It's a good question. Maybe private industry could handle it. Maybe not. For instance, could private industry have collaborated to put together our interstate freeway system? I seriously doubt it. Private industry did the work, but the government orchestrated it, and used taxpayer money to pay for it. Likewise, solving our energy problems will likely require government orchestration. We'll probably need some pretty nifty power and energy transmission infrastructure including conduits for electricity and for "portable power" for autos (e.g. hydrogen).

Sometimes nations/civilizations/organisms can get an upper hand by having big common projects. Think militaries. Think ocean exploration in the 14/15/16th centuries. Think space program (but don't think so hard that your start to wonder what the hell it's done for us so far... mostly i jest .. if you've considered it much, you recognize several crucial benefits that space has brought us). I think state-sponsored technology development is appropriate. How one would write a constitutional amendment to properly sanction it is another question!

In the opening passage of Common Sense, Paine says that government is a "necessary evil", negatively constraining society's vices. Meanwhile, society itself provides the positive influence, "uniting our affections". What you are suggesting (and I expanded on above) is that gov't should be in the business of "positive influence". We also obviously need to worry about gov't properly constraining society's vices. This is where we clearly need corruption control.

Medical care and social security (which is in desperate need of being renamed "managed savings" or being re-directed to being a safety net program) are in the same boat as energy technology when it comes down to it I guess.

On the sub-crime crisis: 1) if the gov't is going to bail out these lenders, they should regulate. 2) gov't shouldn't bail out the lenders. I think I'm with you Jason, voting for #2.

Who is this physicist who told you about the nuclear fuel problem? He/she is right that we have a problem if we don't effectively use fuel. As I recall, if we used all of the available energy in uranium ore, we'd have plenty of power for centuries even if energy consumption were to go up 10x. Using all available energy would involve something quite different than what the French do which is a joke compared to what i'll call true nuke fuel squeezing. French squeeze less than 5% of available energy in fuel. Standard US nukes get only 1%. You can squeeze out nearly 100% of energy with breeder reactor. Breeders are expensive because it's expensive to make them safe. Proliferation is another concern and is a concern for any squeezing operation. But you can squeeze in a safer way using fusion as a source of neutrons (there are other possible sources too) to maintain a sub-critical reaction that uses "fast" neutrons to squeeze energy out. Look for fission-fusion hybrids hitting news in next 5-10 yrs. (physics sidenote: when you don't moderate/slow neutrons [as we do in our current "slow" neutron reactors], the characteristic time of a critical system is very very fast, making it tough [expensive, uncertain] to design a control system with an appropriately small response time).

Oh -- Nanosolar -- i hope it works! But I question their ability to get materials cheap enough to power the globe.. maybe they can tho? I really have no facts on this matter.

Dragontail Peak

Did a trip to Enchantments Lake area with Eina, Paolo, Cihan and Tammy. Camped near Leavenworth on Saturday night. Left Stuart Lake TH at 7 AM. From Aasgard Pass, Eina and I summited Dragontail Peak. The rest (lacking ice axes which were requried for the steep snowfield) enjoyed the Enchantments Basin. Another highlight was swimming in Colchuck Lake. Ci and I thought we were pretty tough but Eina destroyed our egos by outswimming us in the 55 degree waters. I decided that she is part polar bear after she swam around for a couple of minutes after I hustled my skinny ass out of the water.

Some good photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20080810dragontail

The rugged "dragontail" ridge was awesome:


This area is one of the most popular in the Cascades. The mostly cloudy weather stymied WA meteorologists once again (they predicted all sun). But at least it didn't rain more than a drop or two. Only saw two groups of people above 7,500 ft.

Camped illegally Saturday night because campgrounds were full. Road had been damaged and cut off 3 of the 6 campgrounds in the area. Campgrounds were perhaps filled with rock climbers who flock to this area. The parking lot treated us well though except for the disastrous loss of Cihan's prized 2nd sandwich. He was thunderstruck in the morning when the sandwich was missing. He was sure he had it in his pack. He threatened all of us with his K A Bar (Marine) knife if we didn't fess up to stealing his sandwich. We have concluded that either an intruding man or beast must have snagged it.

Hike was a good challenge. It was Tammy's first tough hike and she handled it admirably! We made the pass in about 5 hrs, where we saw a mountain goat which Eina tried to tame:


The climb from the pass (7800') to Dragontail (8800') took Eina and I just over an hour. We made it back to the TH (~3400') after 12 hrs total. 5400 vertical ft .. not bad!

After refueling at the self-proclaimed "number one" diner in Cle Elum at about 9 pm, we drove home. I drove Ci crazy with some country music to keep myself awake. He didn't even enjoy "She's no Lady", so I skipped "Bubba Shot the Jukebox".

SpaceX's 3rd rocket recently wiped out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/science/space/03launchweb.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=spacex&st=cse&oref=slogin

See SpaceX website for posts about what happened (stage separation failed), and what they're doing from here (carrying on with plenty of money). Also info about vehicle is availabe on the site.
www.spacex.com

They are 0 for 3 now. Unfortunately, this rocket was carrying some expensive satellites (previous losses were just dummy payloads unless I'm mistaken). This news makes me feel better about my own rocketry endeavor which had a pretty low batting average. Elon Musk (SpaceX founder) has a helluva lot better funding than we did -- he is the founder of Paypal which was purchased by Ebay for a healthy chunk of change -- and I suspect that they will be able to push on and succeed in the long run. However, maybe they should chalk up a success before loading expensive DoD and NASA satellites onboard.

Why is SpaceX having so much trouble? Well, getting to space is tough and there are about a million gotchas. The experts who designed the Apollo-era vehicles knew lots of those issues, but are mostly unavailable for engineering staff work. Elon's hired good people (well everyone but me), but my impression is that they're pretty young.

Stage separation was a doozie for my company(Space Transport Corp.)'s rockets too. As the rocket travels at supersonic speeds though 100+ mph wind shear, this puts lots of strain on the joints between stages (like most launchers the SpaceX vehicle has two stages). Then these parts might be unhappy about doing their job. Elon's been trying to keep things very light to maximize the allowable payload mass. If the rocket works, this might maximize profits. But maybe the lightweight stage connection was a little too light? On the other hand, it could've been something totally different like a software or electrical problem. Elon usually posts more info about failures on the SpaceX website, so perhaps he'll post some details about what happened here.

Was quality control bad? Probably not. They probably had it built just as planned. It's hard to plan properly when the only way to *really* test the thing is by flying. We humans learn best by trial and error. These are expensive tests though, so hopefully they haven't bitten off more than they can chew. I think they'll be ok though.

Other private space companies that are coming along to rattle the establishment (read: Boeing/Lockheed-Martin) cage:

www.blueorigin.com
(funded by amazon.com's Jeff Bezos)

www.virgingalactic.com
(funded by Virgin's Richard Branson .. following up with Burt Rutan on work [i.e. winning the X-Prize] funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen)

astro party

Had a good time star gazing on Saturday night. I was impressed with the performance of my 10" scope. We bbq'ed at my place and watched Djokovic take out Nadal prior to heading up. Seemed likely to be clear so we headed up to Rattlesnake Lake. Ci, Monica and I drove up and met my roomies and some other friends up there. It was clear .. in a few spots .. for a little while. We got a nice view of the apparent double star in the handle of the dipper -- Mizar and Alcor -- and could clearly see the true binary system of which Mizar is part.


We got a quick look at M13, a globular cluster in Hercules.


By 11:30, cloud cover was quite thorough. So we hung out (Ci stayed warm by huddling like a homeless person in the telescope box) and hoped for clear skies for a while and chewed the fat. For instance, we talked about Starbucks, Shultz, and the Sonics. Kind of an interesting situation... We packed up at 1 am and headed down. Bhuvana called and reported that the skies cleared as they approached Seattle. So Ci, Monica and I stopped short of Seattle and did a bit more viewing. The highlight of that leg of the stargazing was Jupiter.

The image above is plagiarized from the internet. Though our viewing was not as spectacular as shown above, we could see the planet in breathtaking detail. Four of its moons were clearly visible.

We also viewed Andromeda which looked like a fuzzball. I think if it is extremely good viewing, one could make out the shape of the galaxy. Couldn't see the N. America Nebula at all (I assume was too light).

I tried to find M81 and M82 which are in Ursa Major. Couldn't get there. Need better star maps.