Today

Today, in my part of Michigan, six inches of new snow fell and I had to go outside twice on my tractor to blow the driveway clean.  Now it's drifted over again.

Today there are Russian troops gathering near the eastern Ukrainian border, and an American general said that the U.S. is ready to enter the Ukraine with military force.

Today the United State government went further into debt at the rate of one billion dollars per hour, when measured with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles -- which they do not use.

Today a Facebook executive was in the news because she has recruited a number of celebrities in her campaign to ban the word "bossy" as applied to girls and women.

Today a Chinese satellite may have spotted pieces of a Malaysian jetliner that disappeared four days ago, with two hundred and thirty-nine people on board.

Today Edward Snowden, recently of the NSA, said that he had no regrets about revealing the fact that the US government has engaged in massive spying upon its own citizens, to better protect their freedoms.  Senator Dianne Feinstein, who recently defended the government's right to collect such data, expressed indignation at discovering that it has been spying on her, too.

Today a building in Harlem, on Manhattan Island, exploded because of a gas leak, killing between three and twelve people, injuring many others, and causing the collapse of two nearby building.

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average was almost unchanged at 16,340 points.  The donut company Krispy Kreme rose sharply in after-hours trading.  More than 90% of all trades were executed by high-frequency trading computers.  The average period of ownership for a given share of stock dropped to less than 1 second.

And today, somewhere in the two hundred thousand trillion trillion cubic miles that constitute our solar system, there is a rock drifting in space that will intersect our orbit, enter our atmosphere, and strike our planet sometime between next week and a million years from now. 

Well, of course there's more than one.  Those like the one I saw long ago, or like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Siberia early last year -- those are exciting enough.  But the one that worries me is about five miles across, will strike with the force of about 40 teratons of TNT, will raise a tsunami about 100 feet high that strikes the entire pacific rim about 8 hours after impact, and will end up killing somewhere between one half and two-thirds of the human population with prompt plus delayed effects in the two or three years after impact.  Assuming the wave doesn't bust open any nuclear plants.  Oops.

I like galaxies, and planets, and nebulae, and all those things.  I really like all the stuff that people look at through telescopes.  But myself, what I want to find is that rock.  As far in advance as possible.

In this blog, I will be talking about some ideas -- that I think might be original -- for finding asteroids with telescopes.  I don't want to do it the way we used to do with film, or the way I see people describing on the internet (which is pretty much the same as what we used to do with film).

I want to be able to find the tiniest little streak of an asteroid, so dim that it's right down in the background noise, so dim that an astronomer who knows what he's doing will tell me "You can't detect an object of that brightness with an instrument of that size."

Doesn't that sound like fun?

Sailing Home

I had a nice long Christmas vacation, and right at the start of it I decided to spend most of it on fantasizing.

I decided that this was a mid-life crisis thing, which I've been in the midst of for a couple years now. I am at the point in life where I finally come up for air after thirty years or so of straight work and wonder How Did I Get Here and What the Heck Am I Doing?

Men do all kinds of crazy things when they reach their mid-life crisis. They buy speed-boats or fast cars. They leave their wives and find new wives. They get hair implants.

What are we looking for when we do stuff like that? I think we're saying I'm scared of the dark. I'm pretty sure that my death is closer to me in the future than my high school graduation is in the past, and I want to stay young.

With those examples in mind, I decided it wouldn't be so bad if I allowed myself to fantasize about any damn thing I wanted, no matter how silly or meaningless. I theorized that it was like a one-person version of the exercise of "brainstorming" that I've done once or twice in corporate settings. Don't suppress any ideas, no matter how apparently bizarre, because you never know what might come from one of them.

So at one point, of course, I found myself daydreaming about telescopes. What else?

"Honey?", I called into the living room at one point, "Can I spend two hundred thousand dollars on a telescope?"

I only call her "honey" when I am about to talk nonsense.

"Sure!" she called back. "No problem!"

The telescope of my fantasy was the 1-meter monster from Jim's Mobile. I do not know the actual price, I was just estimating based on the cost of smaller scopes, and throwing in some extra for a nice, permanent dome.

It did not upset my fantasy at all that my financial net worth is probably negative just now, and I doubt that I could borrow money for a new car let alone two-hundred large for a telescope. So what? we're fantasizing, right? That's what fantasy is for!

But, alas.  Upon some rocks even the gossamer ships of Fantasie must founder, spilling their cargoes of hopes and dreams, desires and schemes into the cold salt water of reality.

The problem is, I live in Michigan.

Let's say I get two hundred large to spend.  In fact, why not make it four hundred!  There' s no limit on fantasy-money, is there?  (Apparently not.  Just ask the Fed.)

Let's say I buy a beautiful enormous telescope, and put it in a beautiful dome.  In fact, let's put that dome up on top of a tower, and I will wear white and silver robes like frikking Gandalf every time I go up there!

Fine.

You want to see what my first few nights of observing would look like?

Night one.  Clouds.

Night two.  Clouds.

Night three.  Starting to see a pattern here.

The Great State of Michigan, the largest state east of the Mississippi, the state with the longest coastline in the continental United States, once the most prosperous state per capita in the union  -- Michigan is not on anybody's top ten list of places to put telescopes.

I checked.  It truly is not.

Now, I'm sure that Jim would say "Yeah, that's why I made it mobile!"

Okay.  But where will I go pulling a monster like that?  Frikking Arizona?  And then who will take care of my ducks, while I am wearing my Gandalf robes and enjoying the crystalline skies of far-off countries?

Okay -- but why not just imagine being somewhere else, then?  If you're already imagining impossible things, why not one more?

Well, um, shucks.  I think it's because my land, where I have built a house and planted oak trees, where I have planted American Chestnuts that were almost extinct -- I think that my land has extended its own roots down even to the level of my dreams.  I can imagine having lots of money to spend.  I cannot imagine leaving this place.


The Ship of Fantasy, the Ship of Dreams, broken on the rocks, its cargo of glowing hopes floating into the dark waves.  Flickering.  Darkening.


And that was when my Christmas Miracle happened.

I kept believing.   Wiping the bitter tears from my eyes (more salt water!), I climbed back on to that foundering vessel Fantasie, wrestled her battered wheel around and launched off once again upon the darkling waves of the Internet.  We smote the sounding furrows!  Our purpose held!

If I could not imagine owning a telescope in Michigan, then I would instead imagine the great instruments to come!  I would read about instruments with names out of legend:  the Giant Magellan Telescope.  The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.  The European Very Large Telescope.  The European Extremely Large Telescope.  (I guess the Europeans must have shot all their poets quite some time ago.  Seriously guys.  Could you use some help naming these things?)

And it was while I was looking at the Giant Magellan with its seven great mirrors, and the Europäische Unglaublich Riesige Teleskop, with its seven hundred and ninety-eight hexagons -- that's when my dreams looked back at me out of the internet, and smiled.

I found a page and thought, "Huh.  What's that?"

It was a place called iTelescope, and they had telescopes for rent.  By the minute.


In retrospect, it seems obvious.  All astronomical photography is digital, right?  Digital stuff travels over wires, ja?  For years we have had "GoTo" telescopes that, once oriented, can find any star, any point in the sky you want.  So why not robotic telescopes, operable over the internet, that you can use for a few bucks a minute, and then download the picture you took?

Why not indeed?

Except I didn't know about it, and would have never have found it, if not for the Good Ship Fantasie.

So, would you like to see my new telescope?
It's big, it's beautiful.  It is of a quality in its optics, its mount, and its camera that I did not even know enough to dream about.  And it's real.

It's 20 inches across.  Even larger in metric!

Finally, it is in the distant land of Mayhill, New Mexico, at an altitude of 7300 feet, where the skies are not cloudy all day.

My ship has come in.