Cutting back on light pollution isn't too hard if lighting and building designers and the like would just care. For highlighting a building, rather than have lights pointing up, put the lights under the eaves pointing down. (I actually don't get why people light up their houses so much, especially if there are street lights nearby as well, that makes that much more light for a thief to have in the house without having to use a flashlight or turn on lights or anything else to give away their activity, plus it just doesn't make sense to me to highlight a house 99.999% of the time) Along the sidewalk of the local shopping center strip, they have these big 3' round lights shining light in all directions, but if they simply capped it, and had a reflector on top to direct light down and around, they could achieve better light distribution for pedestrians for far less energy, a win all the way around for them. Light is still reflected off the ground up, but isn't as intense. Street lights can be made to cause less glare and direct light better, which again saves energy while keeping the light needed for the road just as good if not better. The problem is, those fixtures aren't widely used yet, so they cost more than the normal ones (supply and demand working out there, plus just gouging). I would bet that even a major city could greatly cut their light pollution down without sacrificing safety, and perhaps increasing it, and saving energy with just a few steps. Problem is most people don't know much about it, nor care, save for those of us who would love to have a nice telescope, but find it hard to justify especially when the skies nearby aren't dark enough... Really just need to start modifying zoning laws and restrict accent lighting and do better on street lighting where/when needed (and cutting it when not needed, which is perhaps far more often the case, since it is usually just a security blanket while not providing any security at all)... But yeah, since that isn't likely to happen, not much is likely to happen and those of us wanting to see the night sky in its glory are stuck with long drives...

Lyrics:
Im gonna smoke some weed, only got 20 dollas in my pocket
Imma huntin, looking for a pot shop, this is fucking awesome!

Walk into my house like what up, i got some good pot
I'm just pumped up got some herb from the pot shop
Ice in my fridge it used to be frosty
My friends like "Damn, that's a stoned ass donkey!"
Rollin' in hella high, looking like it's fifa time
Dominating all my friends, as I eat some chili fries
Draped in a snuggie with my girl sitting next to me
Probably shouldn't have had a big gulp full of ice tea
PISS!
But shit it was 99 cents!

I be blazin and smokin it
Bout to go and get some munchie snacks, passing up on those cracker jacks
Reeces Pieces are where it's at, Gotta get me some soda pop
Cotton mouth has been creeping up
But can't remember where I put my keys,
Yeah, that's what's up.
Imma take your grandpa's ride, Imma take your grandpa's ride
No for real, ask your grandpa, Can I take his 65?
Deville Cruisin to my local Publix
Nothing better than rolling with 2 super fly chicks!
They had frozen burritos, I bought frozen burritos
I bought some Ben and Jerry's, then I bought some Cheetos
Hello, Hello, my main man Obama
A couple states have just reformed their laws on marijuana
Whatcha gonna do, send the feds there? Hell no!
The DEA's would be like "Ah, they got Volcano"

What you know about the science of marijuana?
What you know about people suffering from glaucoma?
They need it, they need it, it helps them with their condition
If don't believe me, then just ask some eye physicians
Thank your granddad for voting for that guy Richard
Nixon is the President who made the plant illegal
But science is now showing that its medicine for people
And the private sector's fighting to keep all of that illegal
Alcohol and Tobacco, Pharmaceutical, Prisons
I'll take those four major lobby groups and fight those motherfuckers
They making money day and night, all those motherfuckers
And bribing congress out of sight, all those motherfuckers
They be like, "Oh, it's immoral and unhealthy"
I'm like how many people are you making wealthy
Anti-marijuana lobbies are making all kinds of profits
And they don't want you to stop it cause of all the special interests
I call that getting swindled and pimped, shit
I call that getting tricked by the government, that law's hella old
So its time to update it, regulate it, and then get it under state control
Peep Game, look into my political telescope
Think it's going to stay like this forever, nah, it hella won't, nah, it hella won't.

Let's end the war on drugs, It's time to pull the plug
These special interest groups are nothing more than corporate thugs
Let's end the war on weed, the people have agreed.
These special interest groups have kept these laws with bribery

Imma smoke some weed, only got 20 dollas in my pocket
Imma huntin, looking for a pot shop, this is fucking awesome!

I was thinking the same. They never showed it running at full speed! I saw another newer documentary bout this same telescope and you couldn't tell it was liquid under normal operating conditions. it looked like a curved piece of mylar.

It is probably a near perfect mirror from this liquid mecury.

The big problems with liquids for telescope surfaces are -

1) gravity - the mirrors can only point straight up

2) the thermal coefficient of expansion for liquids is huge, as temps change, liquid components are dimensionally unstable

I suspect what you see is the state of the art for liquid mirrors and you shouldn't expect to see much more in our lifetimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_mirror_telescopes

Check that crap out, ferrofluid mirror potential! What I wonder is are the optical properties of liquid metal any good. For instance, they are using gold in the James Webb telescope because it reflects nearly all infrared light. What would the optical quality of these metals be? Sometime tells me polished glass structures would be both higher resolution and use materials that are optimized to reflect the spectrum you are interested in. The Wiki seems to indicate the real advantage isn't in the optical quality, but the relative inexpensive in creation. Much like paying a hooker for 5 years of polishing your nob, polishing a mirror is costly.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'liquid mirror telescope, spinning mercury' to 'liquid mirror, telescope, spinning, mercury, astronomy' - edited by kulpims

Some of the best ideas are too obvious to conceive.

Liquid mirror telescope- what a great simple idea.

This reminds me of liquid mirror telescopes, which use a spinning plate of mercury as a lens. I had thought that they were no longer used, but it appears I was mistaken... see:

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Liquid-mirror-telescope

Liquid mirror telescope has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

I once sold a telescope to a man in Austria named Norbert. I ordered the lens for it from a man in Germany named Markus. The lens was made in Russia, but was designed in Ohio by a man named Thomas. I designed the tube assembly but had a guy in Iowa named Richard machine it for me.

@shinyblurry

I have a concession, perhaps a confession to make. An admission if you will. I accept your thesis: every scientist on earth, more or less (except a few religiously devout who still see the truth for what it is) are lying, or they are caving to the pressure of their lying peers, or they have been duped somehow to lie to you. In reality the universe is about 10000 years old, give or take. But all these scientists are, for whatever reason, contributing deliberately or undeliberately to the false claim that the universe and earth is many orders of magnitude older, something like billions of years old. Its all lies. Just about every scientist for the last 200 years have been contributing to this lie, and alternative ideas are being supressed for some dogmatic reason.

Lets suppose all that is true.

Suppose that all these lies, published in peer-review, has been backed up by equally lying peers.

Fine.

I give you that point

I dont think its logical, in fact I think its an insane conspiracy theory, but nonetheless, I concede the entire point. Right now.

How about that shit, eh?

Theres just still one problem for creationism, and its fucking everywhere, its called EVIDENCE. Like maybe you are reading this on a smartphone, with a GPS in it. That GPS unit is communicating right now with 2 sattelites, in freaking ORBIT, triangulating your position right now. Thats some insane science at work right there, but actually thats not the crazy part: The crazy part is that it wouldnt work at all, unless the people who designed that GPS system understood Relativity. Thats right, Einsteinian freaking relativity. The satellites, and their speed relative to earth, would actually give the wrong postion if they relied on Newtons laws.

THOSE VERY SAME principles and knowledge actually is used to tell us how far away stuff in the universe is. some stuff are actually (As in your-GPS-can-ACTUALLY-tell-you-exactly-where-you-are kind of "actually")really fucking far atway, like billions of light-YEARS. which means the light left from other parts of the universe literally BILLIONS of years ago, before they reached our telescopes. Like Bill Nye explained, a smoke detector works on principles that we understand about the half-lives of atoms, again the same shit used to understand the age of fossils and shit we find in the ground. the LCD screen you are likely looking at is an innovation that comes from understanding wavelenghts of light, again used to measure the distance of galaxies that emitted light billions of years ago.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

You should instill a love of reading first. If the lil one can't read yet,then read to them...every night. Get a telescope and let them look at the moon. The love of reading and the wonder of science is the best memory from being a kid

Doing a simple calculation of the area of a disk 10,000 light-years vs. 100,000 light-years (but 50,000 light-years in radius) yields an area of our galaxy about 25 times larger that we can NOT survey for supernova remnants vs. what we can.

That's incorrect. We have radio telescope images of the galactic center which is 26000 light years away. Second, the estimates are based not on what we can't see, but the percentage that we can see and then averaging for the rest.

The next part is that supernova remnants don’t just form out of nothing, they form from the explosions of dying stars. The stars that live and die the fastest still take about 10,000,000 years before they “go nova” and release a cloud of debris that will later become what we observe. That’s pretty much the minimum time a star can “live” during the current epoch of the Universe. Only after that will we see a supernova form.

Actually, O3 type stars can go nova in about 3 million years time, according to that model.

So, add that to our estimate of the age by the number of stars and we have 10,250,000 years, or 10.25 million years for the age of the galaxy. You should note at this point I’ve been saying “age of the galaxy.” That’s because this would only be used to date our galaxy, not the Universe as a whole. So you need to add in the time for galaxy formation … which is still a number that’s hotly debated, but no respected astronomer will say happens instantaneously.

You can't argue that the galaxy is that old because the stars are that old, when that is the thing in dispute. The argument is intending to prove the stars couldn't be that old in the first place, thus proving the galaxy is not that old.

BUT, there’s another complication to this situation which shows why this apparent “method” for dating our galaxy isn’t valid: Supernova remnants fade! They only are visible for a few tens of thousands of years. What does this mean for our estimate of 1,000,000 years for the age of our galaxy? Well, by the time the “oldest” supernova is fading, we starting to observe supernova 200! We should only expect to see in the neighborhood of a few hundred supernova remnants in our vicinity, regardless of how old our galaxy actually is."

According to

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/supernova/snrfab.html

"Obviously, Davies never went SNR hunting in a galactic environment, but I have. For one thing, an SNR becomes essentially invisible, even in a non-crowded environment, within 1,000,000 year tops, maybe less, depending on the specifics of the supernova and environment. But in practice they become essentially invisible long before."

So, they can be visible up to 1,000,000 years, yet we don't find even one at the maximum range of expansion that we are able to detect (or anywhere near it). We should be seeing the entire range of the spectrum, but the biggest we can find (according to their model), is 20000 years old. So this evidence doesn't hold up and the point remains.

>> ^grinter:

>> ^deathcow:
Panorama Done!
frame 1920 of 1920
back LCD lights up
<< NO MEMORY CARD >>

I shot some sun rays breaking through the early morning mist over the mountains around Machu Picchu. It was gorgeous - dream lighting - and about an hour later realized that the camera was set to a ludicrously high ISO. I was devastated. I can't imagine how that guy would have felt if something had gone wrong.


Man... bummer... I hope you got some pictures you liked out of it anyway.

I shot a few hours of a galaxy through the telescope the other day with the ISO set on AUTO. Also a bummer but nothing compared to your story.

> You let a kid play with a coin collection, or telescopes or chisels and by and large,
> they are not at huge danger of killing themselves or someone else.

> Let a kid play with a collection of guns on the other hand.

You're a bad parent !!!

Do you let your kids play with lighters and nail polish remover too? Sheesh!