gammarator

> NASA really needs to just fill their telescopes with gyros upon gyros

It’s an interesting tradeoff. Missions are designed (and costed) for a nominal mission lifetime; adding more redundancy increases costs. But it’s true that the successful missions tend to stay in operations much longer than their normal lifetime.

This article says that she corrected her name when she posted the scanned paper to her website around 2000.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-tm-54188...

> that people they don't like at the old place are allowed to have opinions again.

Sorry, but I think that deliberately obfuscates the changes Musk has made at Twitter. See https://ketanjoshi.co/2024/04/19/you-are-the-fuel-that-energ... for one summary.

See the third page of https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5473

That’s exactly why they are using commercial lenses! Canon’s modern AR coatings are so good that the performance for low-surface brightness imaging beats larger-aperture telescopes which can gather more light but scatter it around the image. See the third page of https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5473

Different science goals, though.

> they point to publications that look to be behind pay walls.

If you click the “ADS” link you will find most will have links to a free preprint on arXiv.

> other than a reduction in time required to take N images with one camera.

Life is short!

> They're wide field of view, long-duration exposures. That used to be the way astronomers imaged space,

Sorry, but one of the two example images (https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw1946a/) is a single 333-second exposure with a modern survey camera, the Dark Energy Camera. This is not particularly long nor does it represent some outmoded observational strategy. Large, wide-field imaging sky surveys (such as the upcoming Rubin Observatory) are among the highest-profile ground-based astronomy projects today.

Masking and stacking can mitigate the problem but it does not of course compensate for the lost area and sensitivity. And the brightest satellites (like BlueWalker) saturate the readout electronics and spoil the whole exposure.

Narrow field instruments (such as spectrographs) have less geometric chance of seeing a satellite but tend to take longer exposures (tens of minutes), so there is a greater loss of telescope time when a streak does happen.

Even space telescopes are affected by streaks (https://www.space.com/hubble-images-spoiled-starlink-satelli...).

> It takes a bit more work and software

Equivalently, it takes more money and time. That just means less science, given flat to declining funding from Congress.

> private company that is doing the job more efficiently than the government

What?? The id verification that Clear offers is not substantially faster than the TSA examining your id. The only value Clear offers is jumping the line.

> a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?

If you amputate your fingers, the rest of us bear the cost of your reconstructive surgery through higher health insurance premiums.

I would prefer woodworkers pay more for table saws than I have to pay for their reconstructive surgeries via higher health insurance premiums.

“Removal” here means “masking”—the pixels under the bright streaks will always be scientifically unusable because the streaks inflate the noise irrevocably. (You can’t see stars in the daytime by “removing” the sun.)

The 7th magnitude limit just minimizes the streak signal cross-talk through the rest of the camera. It also means the satellites are invisible to the naked eye.

Sorry, but “ Children didn't play in city streets because it was a death sentence.” is just wrong. Perhaps not on the major downtown arterials you describe, but there’s ample historical record of kids playing stickball and similar games on urban streets.

Virtually all of this is false in the US.

Be sure to plan for enormous traffic jams after the eclipse ends. Even extremely rural back/side roads will be bumper to bumper.

It’s a fine beginner program, and as the original article inadvertently shows, one common failure mode is not getting enough calories. GOMAD is tough to mess up.

Not denying that a megathrust earthquake will be a severe disaster. But I think this article is unduly panic-inducing, particularly for the New Yorker.

This follow-up article by the same author is more levelheaded: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-to-s...

Notably:

> Perhaps no line in the entire six-thousand-word piece attracted as much attention as this declaration by Kenneth Murphy, head of the fema division responsible for Cascadia: “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” The first important thing to note about that remark is that, needless to say, Murphy really said it, and stood by it in the fact-checking process—so, clearly, fema is anticipating that the region will be in very grave shape. That said, “toast” is not what you would call a precise description, so let me be more specific. What Murphy did not mean is that everyone west of I-5 will be injured or killed; fema’s casualty figures, while horrifying, amount to under one-half of one per cent of the population of the region. Nor did he mean that every structure west of the interstate will fail.

Complain to your congressperson!

https://theneedling.com/ is excellent for Seattle fake news.

Users interested in a broader range of astronomical tools beyond coordinate transformations may be interested in https://www.astropy.org/ and its affiliated packages.

What? The average truck on the road is absolutely substantially larger today than in the past.

https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history

What you want now is Hanes Premium slim fit, which is a cotton/poly blend similar to the old ComfortSoft.

Watch out because some Hanes Premium are 100% cotton, which is not what you want at least at this price point.

https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics is aimed at learners who aren’t enrolled in a degree program.

A commercial product that does the same thing and has worked very well in my experience is https://mathpix.com/. The free tier has met my needs to date.

If there are too few kids the schools will let teachers go. Funding is provided based on enrollment.

If I look at the plot in the linked study I see essentially the same trend for men.

Nope! The problem is that Congress chose to liquidate the reserve’s holdings below market cost a decade ago.

Nope! The problem is that Congress chose to liquidate the reserve’s holdings below market cost a few decades ago.

As well as

> By the way, about these epic pics: you can't just fly a drone this close to the airport without getting in trouble with the Federal Aviation Administration. This is restricted airspace. That's why I went through the process of requesting and receiving drone flight clearance from the FAA, just so I could show you these photos. You're welcome.