[ExI] astonishing

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Sat Mar 20 17:42:53 UTC 2021


 

 

 

 

>>…There is a fun follow up post coming soon but I gotta run.  More later…

spike

 

 

 

 

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] astonishing

 

 

 

 

 

>…Huh, and here I thought you were going to talk about the tree on the left, and ignore all that visual clutter.

>…There is a fun follow up post coming soon but I gotta run.  More later,

 >…spike

 

Well OK I can go there too: I thought it was cool that some starlight punches through the gaps in the branches, as sunlight when it is back there.

Over 30 yrs ago, when I was younger than I am now, I was in an astronomy club in the southern California desert.  In about 1988 the first digital astronomy cameras started showing up, but they needed dry ice cooling and the images they made weren’t really worth the considerable price.  I moved to the Bay area in 1989 and became friends with a guy was the most one-dimensional person, with tight focus on digital astronomy.  Smaaaart as a whip, single, kind of a loner, didn’t talk much, unless you got him on that topic.  Wayne was a lotta fun if you could engage him and follow even a bit of what he said about that topic.  I learned so much.

About that time, there was a new product the magazines were selling like it was the greatest invention since sex: a low cost digital astrophotometry setup which could be cooled with water ice mixed with rock salt.  Cool no more dry ice.  Still a lotta bother but less bother and expense than dry ice: you could have everything you needed right at home.  Not only that, the images were high resolution!  1024 by 1024 pixels x 8 bits!, astonishing!

Wayne bought one, which was about 600 some bucks at the time, play money for him but not for me at the time (he was a ranking Lockheed engineer, technical consultant, single, no children, no expensive habits (other than the astronomy habit.))  We took it out and fooled with it in the back parking lot, then later took it around where we could block the city lights behind Mount Trashmore (a now-defunct garbage dump between Sunnyvale and the bay.)  That worked better, but we were off pavement there, so the water dripping off the salt-ice made a muddy mess, which we tracked home.

But Wayne kept going and using it.  These images were an astonishing MEGABYTE each.  I was an ordinary prole with a 40 MB hard disk, but Wayne had money, so he had an awesome 80 MB external drive on a portable computer.  Oh he was cool.  It was the nerd’s version of a hotrod in those days.

Welllll… Wayne’s drive could hold about 70 images if he cleared off all the previous images onto 1.4 MB floppies (one image per disk (astrophotometry images can’t be compressed without losing the information you went out there to find))  He could fill that enormous hard drive in a few hours (each exposure took about four minutes) then go home and do his analysis for a several days, then go back out.

That megabyte salt-ice imager looked cool and sexy at the time but I chose to not buy one.  I had a tracker and a scope (200 mm catadioptric) but didn’t buy that camera or the 80 MB drive, thinking they might go thru the same dramatic improvement in performance as computers had been doing for the past several years (that part was right, they did.)

Apologies, must interrupt once again, reality is bugging me to take care of it.

Adrian you are right: that is a cool tree there in the image.

spike

  

 

 

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