Adventures in Telescopic Photography
A while ago I lucked into some telescopes that were being discarded as trash - the weren't being kept up, and the owner had moved on to what he termed "professional grade" equipment. His trash was something hopelessly beyond my budget to pick up as a first order product, so I was more than happy to piece them back together, clean them up, and generally invest some sweat equity bringing them back on line.
The result? Moby Dick & Ol' Blue, pictured here (please forgive the mess, lots of the home organization is in remodeling flux):
Moby Dick - 10" Newtonian Reflector Telescope
Ol' Blue - 8" Newtonian Reflector Telescope
Cat included for size reference (she was a good sport about it too, especially considering I had to wake her from a nap; please note that she is a large cat, too).
The barrel on Ol' Blue is 48" end to end, housing an 8" diameter primary mirror. Moby Dick is a hair shorter at 44.5" in length, with a 10" primary mirror, but on account of its equatorial mount with counterweight is WAY heavier and thus harder to cart about for simple experimentation.
They did take some work to get functional again, and there were no objective lenses (eyepieces) with them, so I've borrowed some Plössl type lenses (25mm & 10mm) from a friend to practice with and give me a good baseline for shopping around. All told it's been a good experience, I've learned a ton about Newtonian telescopes, and have thoroughly enjoyed the views they afford.
Enough so that I want to share those views. My eventual goal is to get a good camera mounting kit for Rachelle's EOS 5D Mark II, and haul Moby Dick out to the west dessert to do some awesome astrophotography. Before making that kind of investment (especially regarding time) I figure I should practice a little bit and get used to the variables involved. This morning marks my first attempts, which I will generously label "encouraging."
My setup was about as handicapped as it could possibly be. It was a cool gray (rather than sunny) morning, and my home and yard are poorly situated to see anything at a distance - and I felt like staying indoors, which compounded things by constraining what I could shoot even further: would need to be a distant object through windows that have not been maintained on a particular cleaning schedule. In order to get the telescope positioned correctly to see some mountains (and be pointed far enough away from the sun so as not to risk damage to self or equipment if it happened to come from behind its clouds) I had to mount it on a stool, and then put the camera on its tripod on top of a card table to position it for my first attempts at afocal telescopic photography.
The Manic Pessimism of a Small Sample Set
I don't know if it's because of junk journalism, junk science, or small-minded scientists being the vocal minority in every article pertaining to the subject (probably while all the real scientists are off science-ing), but the most commonly reported views on the probability/frequency of extraterrestrial life are absurd.
I'm not talking in terms of intelligent life per se, and especially not with regard to interplanetary civilizations - most certainly not the bug-eyed probe happy "grays" that are the contemporary lore - but regarding life of any kind in its spontaneous origination on any celestial body distinct from Earth as we know it. Microbes on Mars, or under the ice on Europa, or on one of the dozens of exoplanets now being discovered, or anything of the like.
The views and notions bandied about most often in anything approaching mainstream are something along the lines of, "if there are signs of life there, then it must be incredibly abundant throughout the universe!" Balanced with a similar illogical assumption that, "if there are no signs of life there, then it must be tremendously precious and we are so very alone."
This is like rolling a billion-sided die and looking for it to come up with the same number twice. In sequence. And giving up if it doesn't happen after 2 tries.
In all truth we have so few places to look (in terms of gross numbers of bodies), and so few means to examine those (due to proximity, risk, and simple logistics), that we're not even making consistent assessments of those resources which are available to us humans. Projecting from this immensely small set of incomplete samples into some trend line or tangent as a predictor of the universe at large is ludicrously bad science all around. And they - documentary producers, journalists, scientists (in context or otherwise, who knows) - keep repeatedly taking the same view of immediate doom or glory without really examining the numbers.
The reality? It's closer to that billion-sided die, with a not-insignificant portion of it harboring a probability for life-sustaining conditions, and opportunities to roll it millions or even hundreds of millions of times. We're not even up to half a dozen, yet. Heck, I only spot us 2 tries because we're OK at making it to our biggest natural satellite, and we had some pretty cool probes make it to Mars (and then rounding up generously from those slivers of experience).
Let's take a decent and level view, mkay? Life? It's probably rare, but there are so many opportunities for it in the universe it's bound to be out there somewhere (scales of distance just making it hard to assess that). We should get a statistically relevant sampling before plotting conclusions.
Or attach some dynamometers to Carl Sagan's final resting ground and use that to power major metropolitan areas every time someone re-publishes the same ignorant coin-flip perspective.