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The Greatest 'Amateur' Astronomer You've Probably Never Heard Of
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "From a true dark-sky site, the kind that was available to all of humanity for the first 200,000 years or so of our species' existence, the human eye can discern tens of thousands of stars, detailed features of the Milky Way and a handful of deep-sky nebulae. With the advent of the telescope, our reach into the Universe was greatly enhanced, as the increase in light-gathering power opened up orders of magnitude more stars and nebulae, and even allowed us to see a spiral structure to some nebulae beginning in the 1840s. But in all the time since then, the largest telescope ever developed is not even six times bigger than the largest from nearly 200 years ago. Yet the details we can observe in the Universe today aren't limited by what our eyes can perceive looking through our telescopes at all. The combination of astronomy and photography has changed our understanding of the Universe forever, and we owe the greatest advances to an 'amateur' you've probably never heard of: Isaac Roberts."
We just called him Zak. Good guy.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
How the modern world is built on the intuition of the old. I wonder how these people would fare today, would they thrive, or would their unorthodoxy be dismissed.
We have all dreamed new things under the sun, or at least, what we believe to be new, only to discover there is prior art. Hats off to a man who truly did so. There are not enough gentleman scientists anymore. And no, the world is not moe complex, or more informed, it just has a different view of reality.
piggyback astronomy tl;dr: put camera on equatorial mount telescope (disregard the telescope part) so you can do long exposures without (most of) the motion blur.
Vary your insane beliefs and I won't need to mock them. Maybe watch some more Star Trek to "inspire" you to build Mars colonies!
Maybe it is just me, but why does the article look like it is written for 8-year olds? From the layout to the writing and includes errors that show the writer is not really an amateur astronomer. For example they used an image to show "piggyback" mount. Well, they took an image from a webpage that is titled Questar telescope piggyback mount, only from that article they took the image WITHOUT the piggyback mount! There are better articles about Isaac Roberts, the ones I had read were better. But of course it wouldn't be /. tradition if the summary linked the best ones!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
No one cares about your guzzling gallons of Tang and then washing it down with 20 pounds of Ho-Hos.
> the human eye can discern tens of thousands of stars
"This is a common misconception. There are about 6000 stars in the sky ... you cannot see all 6000 stars at the same
visible to the unaided eye
time. The Earth itself blocks half the sky, so you can only see at most
half the stars in the sky at any one time."
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badstarlight.html
"The Yale Bright Star Catalog catalogs the "naked eye visible stars",
which they consider to be those with a magnitude of 6.5 or brighter.
Those have been catalogued and listed, and there are 9110 entries
in that list"
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/742414.html
Not by my math. The largest on that Wikipedia page was over 10 m. That's over eight times the 1.26m telescope's diameter from 1815. Which is around 64 times the surface area. Please: better math, more precise statements.
John Dobson did way more for amateur astronomy, showing people how to make huge light buckets for as little money as possible and taking astronomy to the sidewalks so regular people could discover it. Amateur astrophotography didn't really take off until digital cameras and post processing became available, after Isaac's time and that's mostly done through the scope.
Was he a professional? Did he do it for a living? if not then he is an amateur. If he did receive money then he is not an amateur.
He may still be an expert since this is not dependent on whether someone does something for a living.
What is the technical term for an expert who has not received formal training?
6 times the diameter or really more importantly 36 times the area which is what really maters.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
I'm not British so I don't know the correct way to spell that cheer.
Still, I just want to say, good article or bad (according to Ecuador 740021), it opened up my eyes to a remarkable individual. Especially illuminating was the photographs of the Andromeda Galaxy which shows how much his techniques improved astronomy.
Enough with the jokes. I wish to praise him, not pun-ish him. (no, really). Maybe in his case instead of "Here, here!" we should say "See, see!".
How are you getting six-fold? Am I missing something crazy obvious? Let's look at the parameters, shall we?
"But in all the time since then, the largest telescope ever developed is not even six times bigger than the largest from nearly 200 years ago."
It is currently 2014 -- at least, in my world. That makes "nearly 200 years ago" fall pretty darn near 1815. If he meant the 1845 date, he should have specified it, as there is one closer-to-but-not-hitting 200. The one from 1815 is 1.26m. 10.4 (the largest mirror mentioned) is 8.25 times larger, or 68 times more area. If, indeed, the 1845 number were intended, it should not have been phrased as it was: not only was there a closer candidate for "nearly 200 years," but 2014-1845 = 169. I guess that you could rationalize a rounding up to 200 with that, but I think most would round down to 150... or maybe up to 170 -- both of which it's nearer to than "nearly 200."
Do you somehow come up with something different?
We can see tens of thousands of stars with the naked eye? I don't think so. Try 1,000-2,000 under normal, clear dark sky conditions.
The one who watches your mom get changed in front of her window every night
Probably the biggest contribution to terrestrial astronomy has been the CCD,
It's now possible, common even, for an amateur with a 20cm telescope to take images that were beyond the capabilities of a chemical photograph from a few decades earlier. And so far in advance of what could be observed before there was any photography at all that it's almost a completely different scientific discipline.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There is a lot of sky, and the the best telescopes can only image a small portion of it at a time, so there is still plenty things that can be discovered by equipment that an amateur could reasonably expect to obtain.
However, I think the title of "greatest" amateur probably goes to Tycho Brahe, who gathered the data that were eventually used to produce Kepler's laws of planetary motion.