Make sure your case is hardened. Every little critter, including mice, will want to live in the warm case. We had a computer in an astronomical observatory dome and mice built their nest on the CPU. The acid in urine from the mice destroyed the motherboard.
I'm certain Bush will win everywhere these machines are used.
The chances of Bush winning Maryland is almost nil. Registered Dems out number Reps 2 or 3 to 1. If Bush does take MD, it won't matter anyway because MD's puny E-college numbers won't mean anything.
Use outside lights that are on all the time. Lighting your home up costs a bit, but nothing says go away like a nice clean home that is well lit.
Hahahahahaha. Really. Won't help at all. In fact, might even invite them in since they'll be able see real good like. And sure makes your place stand out from everyone else!
This is a waste of money and waste of resources.
Buy a dog.
If all else fails and you have to have lights, be sure to only light your house, your yard and not light the night sky. Use full cut off lighting that points down and doesn't trespass. And make sure the cops aren't going to be blinded by glare when they approach the house after you've called them when you've been hit again.
Oh, why you are at it, be sure to cut out all bushes and trees and scrap the yard bare so those bad guys don't have any shadows to hid in.
Back when being a Republican stood for lower taxes, smaller government and keeping Big Brother out of your damn business.
Pretty funny statement when Dubya lowered taxes (more then any one since Kennedy) and we learn today is a key player in letting the assault weapons "ban" die on the vine. As for smaller government, most of the increases have been related to the formation of DHS... an evil result of 9/11.
Good luck. I crossed once many years ago and regret doing it to this day. Certainly JK isn't going to do ANY of the things you want as a conservative.
Thanks. Noticed your quip only after the post (sigh). Indeed war is the main issue and I certainly can't believe Kerry will be a good war leader. He certainly wasn't in Nam.
If you don't like either of them, you do have a tough uphill battle. But I hope you can muster a vote for someone... they didn't care how those people in the WTC voted... or if they didn't vote... only that they were Americans and they wanted them dead. You might think you have unfreedom, but yes, you can write in Micky Mouse. That's more freedom then the terrorists want you to have.
Duh... walk/ride (certainly don't drive) your butt to your local Dem. central committee HQ office and volunteer.
Spend some weekends walking the streets, knocking doors and urging people to vote. Ask them to put signs in their yard.
Dig holes for big signs, visit your favorite local store and ask them if you can put up a big sign (gasp, human contact?).
Put a bumper sticker on your car (well, since you are a lib, your bike... you don't drive do you?)
Volunteer to drive people to the polls. Volunteer to stand at the polls and pass out lit. for the master flip flopper.
Volunteer to stand on a street corner during rush hour and wave a sign.
Volunteer to learn to pilot a swift boat.
Volunteer to sign wave at a bus station or other mass transit station and pass out lit. for the do-nothing Senator.
But you know what? DDOS a silly website, deny a few people, give your lib friends a bad name, give the repubs good press. After all, it is the only thing you can do, right?
So while you are burning bandwidth, I'll be burning shoe leather, sign waving and helping the local Repub committee build a database of voters and their voting records for the street walkers to use.
That will get votes for W. It's proven. It worked in '00 and has for years and years.
Ah, could it be that when they built Vogager's camera's they didn't what to look for? They didn't know the nature of Titan, so how could they build cameras to look for it?
My point is this. If the probe doesn't land on the surface.. it's useless.
Ah, again, I don't think any space or land based telescope is going to be able to directly sample the makeup of the Titan atmosphere... you know actually measure the parts? Nor will remote sensors be able to measure the pressure and temperatures nearly as well as a in-situ sensor. And we haven't reached the surface yet. BTW, Huygens isn't designed to reach the surface... it will just be a bonus.
The gyros fail. I think IUE started out with six and had regular failures. At the end, they were even able to predict when one was about to fail. When launched, it had to use three to point the telescope.
When they got down to three, they figured out how to use two. Then they figured out how to run it with one. I believe SOHO is currently running on either one or two gyros. While it had experienced problems in it's final years, IUE was finally killed by budget.
They have pretty good engineering data on the gyros. In the case of Webb, it a matter of putting enough on it to last the life of the sensor coolant. With Hubble, they've been replacing them during service missions. Interesting question is if the gyros have a different life span in LEO vs. higher orbits.
Running Webb at L2 will save money. It's difficult and expensive to run a large space telescope in low Earth orbit (LEO). Observations have to be planned carefully since the Earth gets in the way for most of the sky every 90 or minutes. The satellite also has to have batteries to power the systems when the satellite/telescope is eclipsed by the Earth. Batteries are heavy, have to be recharged and they fail. Hubble's are failing. Large satellites in LEO slowly see a degeneration of their orbits because of drag from the very highest parts of the Early atmosphere. This requires them to be reboosted very so often. Any future service mission to HST needs to also reboost it.
Finally, satellites in LEO - least ones in orbits like the one HST is in - have to travel through a radition belt every orbit that can cause electronics to fail and bits to flip. This sometimes causes the telescope to go into safe mode and ruins observations. While in safe mode, operations crews are standing around and more observations have to be either cancelled or rescheduled.
Many of these problems are avoided at L2 or similar locations. Webb's life will be limited by the amount of sensor coolant on board, but space telescopes like the International Ultraviolet Explorer have operated for 20 plus years. IUE used a small crew, was easy to operate and produced more then 3,000 papers at a very low cost - a great return in value for tax payer.
US Government websites have to conform to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Sounds sort of silly, but it ensures that US govt sites are accessible to all, including the disabled and elderly. You can learn more here. You will find some nice guidelines to follow, save some time and have some evidence to back you up.
Some govt webmasters wine about this, but it's really a good thing, given that all should be able to access govt data.
There was little question this would happen... if you watched the daily news briefings for the two weeks after the landings, each day there were fewer and fewer reporters in the room.
The rovers quickly became "old" news for most editors. How many pictures of rocks and sand dunes can the average public handle? Niche writers - the hardcore science writers - could be handled one on one. No doubt travel budgets were a factor. Even/. stopped covering it.
Besides, the daily press briefings were likely a real time sink for the rover teams, getting ready, attending and following up on the questions.
Besides, when the briefings stopped and the daily news articles stopped, the real science could start. The really great thing is while 15 years ago, we could have never followed what was happening day-to-day, these days, all you had to do was check the rover website.
But, I bet we see a flurry of articles Thursday/Friday as they release the color images of Endurance. But just for the day. Perhaps some more when Opportunity dives into the crater.
My feeling is that it is scattered light from the corrective lenses, and not the primary and secondary mirrors...
Yep, that's my sense too. Of course it would not be there if the corrective lenses didn't need to be there:-)
Truth be told, a researcher likely isn't bothered by the stuff, unless their object is near a brighter star. But I've already seen stylized artwork based on the famous "pillars of life" image that includes the halo! The public thinks that junk belongs there!!!!!!
Here is a pretty good example... there is more noise around the brighter stars then I would expect, specially from a space based system.
Perhaps this is introduced in the sensor, or in the instrument's optics. But a quick look around shows this type of noise in many HST images taken with different instruments. And it's not a type of noise I've learned to associate with a CCD type sensor.
I know if I made an optic that had noise like that, I'd likely hit the pitch lap again.
A final point is it's not like they are just going to shut ST down tomorrow (like they did IUE). Unless something bad happens, ST will be producing great science for years to come, we can only estimate its EOL.
Hubble is a (reasonably) wide field optical imaging telescope.
Personally, I'd hardly call ST even a "reasonably" wide field telescope.
But the REAL point is if you listen to the emotion at the surface, you'd be led to believe HST is the only telescope up there and life will end as we know it with HST.
...and NONE of them work in the optical. They complement the Hubble, not replace them.
And again, my point is we are spending lots of money on astronomy from space... the science is alive and well and more and more of the optical work can be done from the ground at a fraction of the cost.
SM4 O&M costs are $5-7 million PER MONTH. It's a good guess SM4's total cost will be a cool $1 BILLION after you add up the mods that will need to be made to the shuttle for a single mission.
And the return? An extra five years for a telescope that's past it's design life, is of moderate aperture, is very awkward and expensive to operate and has bad optics (even an amateur who has made a mirror can look at bright stars on press release images and see the defects... we now have an entire generation who think bright stars just don't have four spikes coming off them, but have hairly thingys sticking out of them too!).
You are on the money, but there really isn't a gap. Look at
SIM - launch in 2009 - BEFORE JWST
and perhaps TPF, perhaps 2014. Both of these guys will make Hubble look like an out-of-date toy.
Many people are acting like HST is the only astro mission up there. Here some others:
Spitzer, Chandra, GALEX, FUSE, INTEGRAL, RXTE, WMAP and XMM-Newton - all flying now.
The idea that NASA astro budget has been axed is bunk.. it's higher then ever.
While John's design is good and will work great, there are others - many others. One good source is this book.
Build the scope yourself, don't spend all that much money on the focuser (better yet make your own focuser) and spend the saved dough on additional eyepieces. You can get a "better" focuser later.
A 6-inch f/8 scope is a wonderful starter - much better then the junk you find in stores. Hundreds of deep sky objects, craters on the moon, moons of Jupiter and rings are Saturn are all easy to see.
Final advise. Locate and join your local astronomy club, go to a regional star party (can you find both here and get out under dark skies.. sorry, this requires getting out of the city.
The national pride in this thread is great to read, but if I were a brit, I wouldn't be counting my eggs yet just because the chicken has started to squawk.
There are still many things that can go wrong; remember the poor record of successful missions to Mars spans all countries... Russian, Soviet, US and now Japanese.
For one thing, be sure to keep an eye on growing
dust storms on Mars... they appear to be mostly confined to the southern hemisphere now, but that might change... and Beagle 2 is landing at only 11 degrees north.
We ALL stand to gain from a successful Beagle 2 mission as well as successful NASA missions.
It's difficult to predict when a distributed process will finish... someone out there decides to shut their machine down and go home... what happens?
You wait for the the response to time out and then send it out to another node.
Meanwhile the weather has come and gone, houses are destroyed and people might be dead.
Something like distributed net would work fine for running, say, a global model for next year, or ten years out.
AWIPS is used by forecasters to predict what's going to happen in the near future and more important monitor real time data streams like radar and satellite imagery and then to process watch/warnings that have TTL's in the hours, minutes, even seconds.
Some might want to explore the US National Weather Service's newest toy, the NDFD. Forecasts every three hours for 5x5km grids (not the normal counties) for the lower 48 out seven days.
Use this software to download the compressed binary data and save it different formats or create
graphics
Beware, though... the datasets are pretty large and normally updated every hour.
"This time, however, astronomers did not report the presence of any potential nearby impactor," Dighaye said.
SL9 was pretty bright and very noticable on the discovery films. Even though it was broken up in to small pieces, they tended to make big spots.
If this is a result of a impactor, given the smallness and light color of the spot, the impactor would have likely been small, very faint and would have likely gone unnoticed.
Especially since the current crop of astroid/comet hunting teams use automated imagers that focus on areas likely to find near Earth orbiters and stay away from areas around Jupiter since Jupiter is so bright.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, you mean to say they had SUV's 5,200 years ago?
Make sure your case is hardened. Every little critter, including mice, will want to live in the warm case. We had a computer in an astronomical observatory dome and mice built their nest on the CPU. The acid in urine from the mice destroyed the motherboard.
The chances of Bush winning Maryland is almost nil. Registered Dems out number Reps 2 or 3 to 1. If Bush does take MD, it won't matter anyway because MD's puny E-college numbers won't mean anything.
First rule of war is that you can predict it.
Anyone who believes in a "plan" with hard dates to end the conflict in the Iraq is pretty ignorant of history.
"President Roosvelt: we demand a detailed plan as to how soon our troops will be out of Europe and those horrible pacific islands!"
Yeah, right.
Hahahahahaha. Really. Won't help at all. In fact, might even invite them in since they'll be able see real good like. And sure makes your place stand out from everyone else!
This is a waste of money and waste of resources.
Buy a dog.
If all else fails and you have to have lights, be sure to only light your house, your yard and not light the night sky. Use full cut off lighting that points down and doesn't trespass. And make sure the cops aren't going to be blinded by glare when they approach the house after you've called them when you've been hit again.
Oh, why you are at it, be sure to cut out all bushes and trees and scrap the yard bare so those bad guys don't have any shadows to hid in.
Pretty funny statement when Dubya lowered taxes (more then any one since Kennedy) and we learn today is a key player in letting the assault weapons "ban" die on the vine. As for smaller government, most of the increases have been related to the formation of DHS... an evil result of 9/11.
Good luck. I crossed once many years ago and regret doing it to this day. Certainly JK isn't going to do ANY of the things you want as a conservative.
If you don't like either of them, you do have a tough uphill battle. But I hope you can muster a vote for someone... they didn't care how those people in the WTC voted ... or if they didn't vote ... only that they were Americans and they wanted them dead. You might think you have unfreedom, but yes, you can write in Micky Mouse. That's more freedom then the terrorists want you to have.
Spend some weekends walking the streets, knocking doors and urging people to vote. Ask them to put signs in their yard.
Dig holes for big signs, visit your favorite local store and ask them if you can put up a big sign (gasp, human contact?).
Put a bumper sticker on your car (well, since you are a lib, your bike ... you don't drive do you?)
Volunteer to drive people to the polls. Volunteer to stand at the polls and pass out lit. for the master flip flopper.
Volunteer to stand on a street corner during rush hour and wave a sign.
Volunteer to learn to pilot a swift boat.
Volunteer to sign wave at a bus station or other mass transit station and pass out lit. for the do-nothing Senator.
But you know what? DDOS a silly website, deny a few people, give your lib friends a bad name, give the repubs good press. After all, it is the only thing you can do, right?
So while you are burning bandwidth, I'll be burning shoe leather, sign waving and helping the local Repub committee build a database of voters and their voting records for the street walkers to use.
That will get votes for W. It's proven. It worked in '00 and has for years and years.
Ah, could it be that when they built Vogager's camera's they didn't what to look for? They didn't know the nature of Titan, so how could they build cameras to look for it?
My point is this. If the probe doesn't land on the surface .. it's useless.
Ah, again, I don't think any space or land based telescope is going to be able to directly sample the makeup of the Titan atmosphere... you know actually measure the parts? Nor will remote sensors be able to measure the pressure and temperatures nearly as well as a in-situ sensor. And we haven't reached the surface yet. BTW, Huygens isn't designed to reach the surface... it will just be a bonus.
When they got down to three, they figured out how to use two. Then they figured out how to run it with one. I believe SOHO is currently running on either one or two gyros. While it had experienced problems in it's final years, IUE was finally killed by budget.
They have pretty good engineering data on the gyros. In the case of Webb, it a matter of putting enough on it to last the life of the sensor coolant. With Hubble, they've been replacing them during service missions. Interesting question is if the gyros have a different life span in LEO vs. higher orbits.
Running Webb at L2 will save money. It's difficult and expensive to run a large space telescope in low Earth orbit (LEO). Observations have to be planned carefully since the Earth gets in the way for most of the sky every 90 or minutes. The satellite also has to have batteries to power the systems when the satellite/telescope is eclipsed by the Earth. Batteries are heavy, have to be recharged and they fail. Hubble's are failing. Large satellites in LEO slowly see a degeneration of their orbits because of drag from the very highest parts of the Early atmosphere. This requires them to be reboosted very so often. Any future service mission to HST needs to also reboost it.
Finally, satellites in LEO - least ones in orbits like the one HST is in - have to travel through a radition belt every orbit that can cause electronics to fail and bits to flip. This sometimes causes the telescope to go into safe mode and ruins observations. While in safe mode, operations crews are standing around and more observations have to be either cancelled or rescheduled.
Many of these problems are avoided at L2 or similar locations. Webb's life will be limited by the amount of sensor coolant on board, but space telescopes like the International Ultraviolet Explorer have operated for 20 plus years. IUE used a small crew, was easy to operate and produced more then 3,000 papers at a very low cost - a great return in value for tax payer.
Some govt webmasters wine about this, but it's really a good thing, given that all should be able to access govt data.
The rovers quickly became "old" news for most editors. How many pictures of rocks and sand dunes can the average public handle? Niche writers - the hardcore science writers - could be handled one on one. No doubt travel budgets were a factor. Even /. stopped covering it.
Besides, the daily press briefings were likely a real time sink for the rover teams, getting ready, attending and following up on the questions.
Besides, when the briefings stopped and the daily news articles stopped, the real science could start. The really great thing is while 15 years ago, we could have never followed what was happening day-to-day, these days, all you had to do was check the rover website.
But, I bet we see a flurry of articles Thursday/Friday as they release the color images of Endurance. But just for the day. Perhaps some more when Opportunity dives into the crater.
Yep, that's my sense too. Of course it would not be there if the corrective lenses didn't need to be there :-)
Truth be told, a researcher likely isn't bothered by the stuff, unless their object is near a brighter star. But I've already seen stylized artwork based on the famous "pillars of life" image that includes the halo! The public thinks that junk belongs there!!!!!!
Cheers
Perhaps this is introduced in the sensor, or in the instrument's optics. But a quick look around shows this type of noise in many HST images taken with different instruments. And it's not a type of noise I've learned to associate with a CCD type sensor.
I know if I made an optic that had noise like that, I'd likely hit the pitch lap again.
A final point is it's not like they are just going to shut ST down tomorrow (like they did IUE). Unless something bad happens, ST will be producing great science for years to come, we can only estimate its EOL.
Personally, I'd hardly call ST even a "reasonably" wide field telescope.
But the REAL point is if you listen to the emotion at the surface, you'd be led to believe HST is the only telescope up there and life will end as we know it with HST.
And again, my point is we are spending lots of money on astronomy from space... the science is alive and well and more and more of the optical work can be done from the ground at a fraction of the cost.
SM4 O&M costs are $5-7 million PER MONTH. It's a good guess SM4's total cost will be a cool $1 BILLION after you add up the mods that will need to be made to the shuttle for a single mission.
And the return? An extra five years for a telescope that's past it's design life, is of moderate aperture, is very awkward and expensive to operate and has bad optics (even an amateur who has made a mirror can look at bright stars on press release images and see the defects... we now have an entire generation who think bright stars just don't have four spikes coming off them, but have hairly thingys sticking out of them too!).
You are on the money, but there really isn't a gap. Look at SIM - launch in 2009 - BEFORE JWST and perhaps TPF, perhaps 2014. Both of these guys will make Hubble look like an out-of-date toy.
Many people are acting like HST is the only astro mission up there. Here some others:
Spitzer, Chandra, GALEX, FUSE, INTEGRAL, RXTE, WMAP and XMM-Newton - all flying now.
The idea that NASA astro budget has been axed is bunk.. it's higher then ever.
Shheezzz, as others have said, this concept is perhaps a hundred years old.
Build the scope yourself, don't spend all that much money on the focuser (better yet make your own focuser) and spend the saved dough on additional eyepieces. You can get a "better" focuser later.
A 6-inch f/8 scope is a wonderful starter - much better then the junk you find in stores. Hundreds of deep sky objects, craters on the moon, moons of Jupiter and rings are Saturn are all easy to see.
Final advise. Locate and join your local astronomy club, go to a regional star party (can you find both here and get out under dark skies.. sorry, this requires getting out of the city.
Spaceweather.com has a good animation of the dust as seen from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in orbit around Mars.
There are still many things that can go wrong; remember the poor record of successful missions to Mars spans all countries... Russian, Soviet, US and now Japanese.
For one thing, be sure to keep an eye on growing dust storms on Mars... they appear to be mostly confined to the southern hemisphere now, but that might change... and Beagle 2 is landing at only 11 degrees north.
We ALL stand to gain from a successful Beagle 2 mission as well as successful NASA missions.
It's difficult to predict when a distributed process will finish... someone out there decides to shut their machine down and go home... what happens?
You wait for the the response to time out and then send it out to another node.
Meanwhile the weather has come and gone, houses are destroyed and people might be dead.
Something like distributed net would work fine for running, say, a global model for next year, or ten years out.
AWIPS is used by forecasters to predict what's going to happen in the near future and more important monitor real time data streams like radar and satellite imagery and then to process watch/warnings that have TTL's in the hours, minutes, even seconds.
Use this software to download the compressed binary data and save it different formats or create graphics
Beware, though... the datasets are pretty large and normally updated every hour.
That and an invasion.
SL9 was pretty bright and very noticable on the discovery films. Even though it was broken up in to small pieces, they tended to make big spots.
If this is a result of a impactor, given the smallness and light color of the spot, the impactor would have likely been small, very faint and would have likely gone unnoticed.
Especially since the current crop of astroid/comet hunting teams use automated imagers that focus on areas likely to find near Earth orbiters and stay away from areas around Jupiter since Jupiter is so bright.