alignment success

Fired up the new telescope tonight to see if I could get the initial setup and tracking working. One of the advantages of this telescope is that I can be on the patio, powered up, and aligned in 5 minutes, if everything works. I started by getting a quick manual look at the moon before it headed into the trees. Stunning. I then powered up and went through the alignment procedure. I suspected my problem from a few nights ago was that the scope was not aligned to geographic north accurately enough. I got a better idea of north using a map and tested the idea tonight. After alignment I programmed the computer to slew the telescope to Jupiter. After about 20 seconds of slewing, I looked through the finder scope (the wide field of view scope used to get a large scale sense of where in the sky you are looking) and Jupiter was in the upper right quadrant. Disco. It was not in the main scope field of view, but that will come with some fine-tuning. Bottom line, the telescope and the computer performed beautifully, and now the sky is the limit.

telescope update

I picked up the new telescope this morning and so far, all is well. Fearing another lemon, I started by simply doing a fake alignment on the dining room table (this scope is compact enough that it can actually be used on a tabletop) and the scope performed flawlessly. Having worked with the new scope, I can now confidently conclude that something was very wrong with the first one I received last week. The first one produced a gritty, mechanical sound when the gearbox was engaged. The new scope is silent by comparison and slews smoothly. After examining the packing of the new scope, I suspect the first one I received was a reconditioned unit that had already been sent back to Meade for repairs. Clearly the repairs failed. In any event, I used the new telescope for a few hours tonight, saw Jupiter again, and confirmed that the sky tracking is near perfect. Tomorrow night's challenge will be working on the initial alignment of the telescope.

telescope woes

The acquisition of my new telescope is proving more difficult by the day. I originally bought said telescope this past Saturday, July 22. Smooth transaction, liked the salesman at the camera shop, all was well. I got the telescope home and finally found time Monday night to pop it out of the box and go to work. It did not go well. The telescope I bought, a Meade ETX-125AT, has superb Maksutov-Cassegrain optics that rival more expensive telescopes with larger apertures. However, the unfortunate tradeoff with this scope is the inferior construction of the gearbox that provides sky tracking-it is contructed of several gears made of hardened plastic rather than metal. This is the only way to have great optics and sky tracking in an affordable package. Very well, I'm willing to accept delicate mechanics for great optics. Well, upon powering up my telescope and attempting to align it I quickly discovered that my gearbox was suffering from a "drive motor fault". This problem seems to be the most common and dreaded problem discussed on Meade telescope sites. So, I was dead in the water, and from my research I knew there was no troubleshoot, this scope was DOA. I repacked it and proceeded to call my guy at the local camera shop on Wednesday. When I told him about the drive motor fault over the phone, I got an "uh-oh" in response. He immediately told me to repack the scope and bring it in for an exchange. I will do so tomorrow. I'll give this particular telescope one more try. I did manage to look at Jupiter through the broken one and it was spectacular. If the second scope fails me, I'll seek another model or cash out of the endeavor altogether with a refund. Stay tuned.

the hunter and the warrior

NASA has chosen the name for the next generation manned space vehicle and it is Project Orion. In the spirit of Apollo, the first spacecraft to take men to the moon, NASA chose the name that will apply to the vehicle itself (previously named the CEV, the Crew Exploration Vehicle) and to the overall program. So, get ready to hear about the Orion capsule and Project Orion in the coming years.

A name has also been chosen for the launch vehicle that will loft Project Orion vehicles and astronauts into earth orbit and beyond. The CLV (Crew Launch Vehicle) is now Ares I and the heavier lift launcher that will place equipment into earth orbit is Ares V. These names are also in the spirit of Apollo, which launched missions with the Saturn V.

The latest word on initial awarding of contracts for these vehicles is mid-September 2006.

Saturn

I took this modest photo of Saturn in the summer of 1996 from Boston. It's not bad considering I was using an old 6" refractor with sluggish tracking and an ancient camera. Thankfully, Saturn gives up it's major detail with even the most limited magnification. The rings are easily visible as the protrusions on either side of the disk. While you could never claim to see the Cassini division (a gap in the rings) in this photo, you can still get a sense of the delicate structure of the rings. This image is probably along the lines of what Galileo saw through his early telescope in 1610. He described Saturn's "ears", which were of course the rings.

Shuttle update

All is well with STS-121, the second shuttle flight since the loss of Columbia. The shuttle has been docked with the International Space Station for several days now and the astronauts have transferred new equipment onto the station and have performed a series of spacewalks and re-entry safety checks on the shuttle orbiter itself. NASA has officially green lighted a return to Earth on monday, as planned. However, the orbiter will be examined again before re-entry for any damage inflicted by micrometeoroids or space junk (tiny man-made debris orbiting Earth and not so tiny decommissioned satellites). Obviously the astronauts would sense any impact with something as large as a satellite, but the small stuff is very worrisome because it can create nearly undetectable damage to the orbiter. However, it would appear that the shuttle is in perfect health for a monday return to Earth.

To see some unbelievable video of the separation of a solid rocket booster from the shuttle during launch, head to the NASA homepage. The video is 12 minutes long, but stick with it, the separation is fantastic and the subsequent descent of the SRB back to Earth and finally into the ocean is a unique look into the operational lifetime of a shuttle launch component.

China moon

We learned last week that China intends to put a man on the moon in 2024. I posted a few months back about American intentions for sending men back to the moon by 2018. Assuming all schedules hold, we will easily beat China to the moon. Of course, this isn't a race, at least not like the one we were in with the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

The Chinese space program has a fairly long history and had various points of contact with the Soviet space program. While Chinese launch vehicles and crew capsules are largely homegrown, the Chinese space program is rooted in the communist camaraderie of China and the former Soviet Union. So, what can we expect from China? The Soviets never put a man on the moon, but they came closer than most of the American public realizes. If not for the death of their foremost rocket engineer, Sergei Korolev, in 1966, the Soviets might have beaten us. Imagine how the American space program might have fared if Wernher von Braun had died in 1966. The Soviet space program also managed to kill a few hundred engineers, launch site mechanics, and a few cosmonauts during the push for the moon with catastrophic rocket failures that were covered up for decades. China of course subscribes to state secrecy and has a recent history of success at all costs. Thankfully the 24 hour news cycle and availability of satellite reconnaissance should blunt any attempts at hiding launch failures and any associated loss of life. Regardless, the Chinese space program is robust and if their recent economic aspirations offer any clue, their space program is being pursued with equal or greater vigor.

China and the United States have wary relations, but at the moment there is no reason for either nation to feel threatened by the other. I hope that relationship holds for the foreseeable future such that our mutual efforts to reach the moon can be accomplished in each nation's own time. Mankind's first exploration of the moon was largely driven by political posturing and ideological conflict. I would like to think that in the 50 years that will pass between the last time we were on the moon and the next, we can all go there simply because we want to.

the battle

The article below was featured in National Geographic in May 2006.


When Science and Politics Clash

by Joel Achenbach

Last fall, many people asked a simple question: Did global warming cause Hurricane Katrina?

Here's a complicated answer: Global warming hasn't caused any specific storm. There is no evidence that it has changed the number of hurricanes. But there is new data showing that, as seas have warmed in recent decades, tropical cyclones, such as hurricanes, have become more intense. So no, but yes.

But before anyone fires off an angry email , we need to remember that global warming is both a scientific and political topic, and science and politics don't mix well. Science deals with tentative conclusions, and politics in absolutes. Science is invariably an enterprise built on uncertainty, and people who make policy decisions see uncertainty as a reason to do nothing at all (or to demand more studies).

Journalist Bill McKibben, writing recently in the New York Review of Books, laments the "overhedged" scientific reports about global warming and argues that journalists in general have "proved unequal to the task of separating scientific consensus from minor or trivial dissent." In almost any debate that incorporates science, they tend to give equal time to both sides of every argument (which is like giving five minutes to those who say the Earth is round and five to those who say it's flat). It happens with the whole issue of global warming. Almost all scientists are persuaded that human activity is altering climate in a perceptible way. But there's always a maverick voice demanding airtime and ink.

Now consider hurricanes again. In the fall of 2004, after four hurricanes had struck Florida, Kerry Emanuel, an MIT climatologist, said that there was no evidence that hurricanes were either more numerous or more intense. But there was evidence-buried in unexamined data. Emanuel found it himself over the next year. "I hadn't looked at the data carefully enough," Emanuel says. "We believed that if there was a global warming signal, it wouldn't be detectable yet in the data."

In August 2005, just before Katrina, Emanuel published a paper showing that since the 1970s there has been a marked increase in the intensity and duration of tropical storms, including North Atlantic hurricanes. Then in September, right after Katrina, a different group of scientists published similar findings.

Theories are always being tested. This is just how science works. All the more reason for citizens to become as scientifically literate as possible-to figure out where the center of gravity is in any given debate. Because at some point, a scientific civilization has to take action, uncertainties notwithstanding.

"At what point in the evolution of uncertainty does one choose to act?", Emanuel asks. Good question. How about now.