Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

About an hour ago, Tim and I placed the Sony DSC-F828 on a tripod and snapped some pictures of the moon. Because the recent 20-some inches of snow is melting, we’ve had some very thick fog here today, and this evening was no exception. So in order to gauge whether the camera would be suitable for eclipse pictures come March 3, we went ahead and shot the moon, so to speak, through the fog.

And we’re very happy with the results.

As large as the moon may appear to your eye and brain, it’s only 1/2 degree wide, and the entire sky is 180 degrees. Using the camera’s 8.9x digital zoom, we got a picture like the one below. I present it here to demonstrate how small a target the moon is. I’ve significantly compressed the original for display on this site. Click the picture for the full size file.

Now here’s the moon cropped out of that first picture, at native resolution.

For shooting with only the camera’s zoom on a simple tripod through very thick fog, that’s a great result. All camera settings were auto.

We were going to try some shots through the telescope, but because of the lousy weather we didn’t think it was worth the setup effort.

On March 3 when the moon is full and yellow-red, and the weather is (hopefully) clear, we expect to get some good pictures of the eclipse, both from the standalone camera and through the scope.

I created this movie using Starry Night Pro 5.8.2 to share with my friend Tim Miller so he would know what to expect from the lunar eclipse happening March 3. The movie starts at sunset, 6:30 PM EST that day, and ends at approximately 9:30 PM EST, and is sped-up 300x. The moon is seen from my house in Bellbrook, Ohio, although I assume the view is roughly the same for anyone east of the Mississippi.

Lunar Eclipse 2007-03-03 (QuickTime H.264, 712k)

As the moon comes over the horizon, it is just past totality, and the first part of the movie shows the moon in the glare and haze of the horizon at sunset. The inner circle represents the Earth’s umbra (the darkest part of the shadow) and the outer circle represents the penumbra (the lighter outside part). Tim and I plan to attempt to take pictures (weather permitting) once the moon is high enough. We may catch the moon just as it exits the umbra, and we will most certainly get some shots while it passes through the penumbra.

Tim and I have taken eclipse pictures before. On January 20, 2000, there was a very good lunar eclipse visible from Ohio that we took pictures of.

This is the moon at totality during that eclipse. We took a lot of shots, but this is my favorite. The temperature outside during the eclipse was -11F! Were we crazy or stupid? I don’t know if I’d do that again. I’ve become less tolerant of those kinds of extremes in my old age.

Anyhow, if we’re able to get some eclipse pictures this time around, you can bet I’ll (eventually) post them here.

When the scientifically illiterate drive-by media writes a blurb like this, can we really trust them to accurately portray scientific topics that are of importance to day-to-day life?

I have my doubts that Americans will ever walk on the moon again, or any planet besides Earth. Scientifically and technologically illiterate politicians and taxpayers will take the axe to any such program at the first sign of fiscal trouble. I don’t want to be a pessimist, but I think history has provided some clear examples that, as a country, we don’t participate in many long-term projects that lack an immediate benefit. Additionally, our extreme aversion to risk of any kind will make such an undertaking expensive and complicated to the point of being near impossible to accomplish. As much as I personally would love to be witness to a more active manned space program in my lifetime, I have serious doubts.

I just wanted to note that my friend Tim Miller and I saw Comet SWAN last night at Spring Valley Nature Reserve right after sunset in the location shown in this chart. It wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but it was a decent binocular object. Our 10″ Newtonian Dob gave a better view of the nucleus, which was very bright in the center with a haze around it, but no noticeable tail. The tail also was not apparent in binoculars either. The sky wasn’t as dark as it should have been if we expected to see a tail because cities, and hence, light pollution, from the northeast and northwest are growing. I’m glad we got our chance to see it because the next several nights are supposed to be rainy and the comet is expected to dim by the time that’s over. If you have access to a dark sky tonight or tomorrow night and you can follow the chart, I recommend seeing the comet.

All this reminds me, Comet Hale-Bopp was almost 10 years ago - spring of 1997. Wow! That’s hard to believe. I still have pictures I took of that comet, which were not bad for a first effort. I gave a bunch away at the time and they were very popular. I was surprised at how many people wanted to give photos of the comet to others as a gift, and even though I didn’t charge for the pictures, I broke even because some people insisted that they pay me. An astronomical rule of thumb is that a good naked eye comet comes along every decade or so, and it seems like we’re due. Hopefully when the next comet comes around, I’ll have the experience and equipment to get some really good pictures.

SkyTonight.com blogger Robert Naeye wrote an interesting article explaining his hypothesis that intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy are few and far between. I’m not sure I agree with that, so I wrote a comment to his post which was subsequently featured on the article page with Bob’s reply. Since my reply may not be featured as part of the article in the future, I want to reproduce my comment and his reply here.

The example I always like to fall back on is ants. Humans are obviously aware of ants, and we see ants in a bunch of places. We observe them and their way of doing things and try to understand their ant world, but in the end, what is it we have to say to them? What conversation is it possible to have with ants? What can humans and ants do collaboratively? They’re obviously not stupid, but they’re not on the same intelligence level as we are, and it’s extremely unlikely they’ll catch up any time soon, so we don’t make the attempt. They go about their ant lives and we go about ours. We don’t even know that the ants are aware of who or what we are when we put our faces right next to them.

Perhaps the human-alien relationship is similar. Regardless of any reasonable value for L, a few centuries or millennia difference in development between technological civilizations would likely make them unrecognizable to each other unless the more advanced cares to reach out. As the article stated, think how far we’ve come in 100 years. Now imagine 10,000 years (small, in astronomical terms) difference between two civilizations at a similar development acceleration curve.
Aaron Adams

Bob’s reply:

Aaron’s comments are very interesting and insightful. What I’m about to write could be totally wrong. But my gut feeling is that humanity has passed some kind of threshold that would make us interesting to at least some aliens (those with an interest in science and technology). No matter how advanced they are, we have developed mathematics, science, and technology to a level where they probably could talk to us at our level, in a way we can’t talk to ants. ‘We share something in common with aliens — the language of mathematics — and our ability to generate electromagnetic (EM) waves and use them to send information across interstellar distances probably gives us a framework for exchanging information. After all, we and they would see stars and other objects that emit EM waves, so we would both be familiar with the EM spectrum, and would be able to distinguish artificial EM signals from natural EM signals.

As a blogger myself, I’m smart enough to know that at SkyTonight, Bob gets the last word. But here, I get the last word.

It’s true enough that we certainly have the foundations necessary to communicate at least rudimentarily with another technologically-oriented civilization. I won’t argue that because I know it to be true. But I don’t think Bob has addressed the thrust of my point which is, what would we talk about? Do we have anything to say or do that a more advanced (even slightly so) civilization would find of any interest? Could it be that more advanced civilizations are so busy doing their own thing they don’t have time or motivation to deal with us right now? Perhaps there is some kind of upper limit as to how advanced a civilization can be, and they’re busy talking to their equally advanced buddies while they’re waiting for us to catch up. Maybe the 10,000 years or so that modern man has existed on Earth hasn’t been long enough for them to notice us.

If we take a step back, we have to question how many civilizations that are intelligent take the path of science and technology. Perhaps creatures in other parts of the galaxy are indeed intelligent, but they’re preoccupied with religion, music, literature, weather forecasting, avoiding predators, curing disease, or whatever self-involved issues they consider most important. Maybe they don’t care about other beings, or maybe the thought that we’re out here hasn’t crossed their mind. None of these situations makes aliens any less intelligent, it just means they have different priorities than we do. Maybe only one civilization in 50 takes the science and technology route. And maybe there’s something inherently self-limiting about that course of action. Or maybe space really is so vast and interstellar travel really is so hard that technological races rarely or never meet.

Obviously, we just don’t know. Absence of evidence of alien races is not evidence of their absence. We simply don’t have enough data to even know what questions to ask. The best we can do is listen intently and hope someone else, purposely or accidentally, gives us a clue. Until then, it’s all guesswork. I’m not ready to dismiss the possibility of a densely populated universe until more data is available.