July 8th 2023: The Roads
From Mars Hill 2nd Edition - Now Available in Hard/Softcover!
My latest book The Roads From Mars
Hill is an epic desert road trip in search of Percival Lowell and his
extraordinary legacy – from giant Edwardian telescopes to nuclear Mars rockets,
UFOs and SpaceX. Now a completely revised 2nd edition with lots of
new astro’ content and available as a paperback or –
my personal favourite – a handsome hardcover (as well as on Kindle).
If you like my travel section, you
might like this! Download the Kindle sample and see what you think!
If you’re in the UK I have a few
signed hardcovers to give away as well, just drop me an email or a tweet if you
want one…
April 11th 2023: I’m on
the Waitlist…
I sometimes get slightly irritable
letters from readers asking why I haven’t reviewed the latest pair of premium
bino’s. Believe me I share your pain. And, no, it’s not (just) because I’m
lazy. Most of the emailers seem to expect that I’m on some kind of master list
to receive loaners the moment they’re released. Sadly that’s just not true.
In reality, the only people who
actively loan me kit for review are friends (thanks guys!) and kind readers
like you. So when a new and tasty piece of gear comes out for review I have two
choices: Buy it, or go on the waitlist for a loaner if available. The former
gets expensive fast. The latter can be frustrating.
A case in point is Zeiss’ new 32mm
SFLs. I’m super-keen to review a pair, but I need to keep the buying fund for
brands who don’t do loaners (at least not for the likes of me), so I’m on the
waitlist at TryZeiss just like you are…
March 1st 2023: Astro
Physics 110 GTX Update
Last November I blogged about Astro
Physics’ new refractor, the 110 GTX: a super-compact photo visual 110mm F6 with
superb correction and a massive in-house focuser to take a heavy imaging rig.
The 110 GTX is effectively the
replacement – 20 years on – of one of my all time
favourites, the Traveler, so I was pretty excited
about it.
Yesterday, AP finally released the
dates for the draw and I spent the evening (and unfortunately some of the
night) fretting over whether I was going to try and get one. The reason for my
angst? The price…
Last November I estimated $5000-6000
including case and rings. I based that estimate on AP’s other current models:
the 92mm Stowaway ($3750) and the 130 GTX ($7490).
I was wrong. The 110 GTX is $6750
including the case but without the rings and plate that I got thrown in
with the Stowaway. So why is the 110 GTX so close to the 130 GTX in price
despite being slightly closer to the Stowaway in aperture? Some thoughts…
“Why? Because they can…” Opined a
friend. But then AP could doubtless have charged (a lot) more for the Stowaway,
but didn’t. There has been talk of delays, so perhaps the objective or the
focuser have proved more challenging or more expensive to produce than expected?
To achieve a 110mm F6 foil-spaced triplet
(i.e. avoiding big air gaps for ruggedness), with 90% Strehl
across the whole visible spectrum, AP are using the very latest ED glass –
FPL55 in place of FPL53. Is it possible that they’re having to reject a lot of
blanks? Roland has noted that Ohara don’t guarantee
internal homogeneity beyond a basic level, writing:
“It can be so bad that the entire
batch of 50, 100, 250 or 500 blanks that were delivered show 2 to 5 waves of
astigmatism and must be thrown into the landfill. On another day they may all
be good enough or almost perfect. The chance is one the lens maker always has
to take and live with the consequences. The glass manufacturer never takes the
glass back, nor will they ever give any refunds”
Another possibility is that the
focuser has proved problematic. The Stowaway has a 2.5” Starlight FT with a
custom visual back, but for the 110 GTX AP have returned to making their own –
a heavy-duty 3.5”. Now you might point out that the 130 GTX has an in-house
3.5” too, but it’s not the same focuser. The new one has a very short
body for compactness and it’s possible they’ve struggled to make it both rugged
and resistant to image shift.
Whatever the reason, the 110 GTX is
an expensive scope: with import duties and shipping about the same as a
Takahashi FSQ-106 here in the UK, but you’ll need to fork out for a flattener
to go imaging with the 110 GTX. But at least with AP quality is pretty much
guaranteed.
So am I still going in for the draw?
Sigh. Probably…
February 24th 2023: Borg
125FL
Image credit Digiborg.
This week, Borg revealed a brand new
scope at the Japanese Photo Show, a 125mm in a super-light OTA. This is an
exciting announcement; to explain why I need to unpack the details.
They’ve produced larger scopes with
ED (not FL) lenses before, but those older ED Borgs can be of dubious quality.
In comparison, all current Borg objectives, including the new 125mm, are
fluorite doublets made by Optron in Japan and all the
FL Borg objectives I’ve seen have been superb.
Currently, Borg’s largest scope is a
107FL at F5.6. The new scope has a slightly slower focal ratio of F6.4 (800mm),
but that’s inevitable: refractor aberrations get worse at larger apertures and
need slower f-numbers to control them. So F6.4 is (typically for Borg)
ambitious for a 5” apochromat, a focal ratio you’ll usually find in faster triplets
of that aperture. Borg say this is the largest fluorite doublet Canon produce.
The question is whether such a large
fast doublet will have too much false colour? I guess not. By using the right
mating element and a larger air gap, both the 90FL and the 107FL are well
corrected and the 125FL will be too (for context, Tak’s FS-128 was very well
corrected at F8, but was foil-spaced and used an older mating element).
Borgs are mainly aimed at imagers and
the 125FL will work with Borg’s current 0.7x reducer to take it down to a
super-fast F4.5 (that’s faster than either an NP-127 or even a FSQ-130
natively) with good coverage at full-frame.
But, taking their cue from Tak’ and
AP among others, Borg also intend to offer a dedicated 1.0x flattener with a
whopping 55mm image circle for even larger CMOS chips and those brave souls
using their Hasselblads for imaging.
The good stuff doesn’t end with the
glass: the 125FL will use a special carbon-fibre composite, with a
scratch-resistant textured finish, for the tube. Borg are specialists at doing
small and light, so how much will the 125FL weigh? My Twitter feed says under
4Kg which would be just amazing for a 5” APO.
The tube will have the same 115mm
diameter as their current largest for backward compatibility and the photo
shows it with the existing large M75 helical focuser (part 7875 if you’re
interested).
The 125FL is slated for release this
year and for me it couldn’t be more timely: a super-light 5” is exactly what I
need. But there’s a problem. My tiny 55FL setup cost about £1500, so I imagine
the 125FL will be very expensive.
February 15th 2023:
Vixen’s New PF-L II Polar Scope
I’ll write a full review when I get
the chance, because I’m impressed with this updated polar scope for Vixen’s AP
and SX mounts.
Polar scopes are a pain in the neck
(often literally), but they offer quick and precise polar alignment if you can
see Polaris. My old one was probably faulty, but in any case messing around
with meridian offsets can be fiddly.
This new polar scope does away with
that, by pattern matching Ursa Major and/or Cassiopeia: just twist until the
patterns are in the right position, then set Polaris into a scale calibrated to
2040. I found just basic alignment sufficient to get perfect tracking for
exposures of a minute or two at focal lengths up to a metre on my SX2, but for proper
alignment you can set Delta-Umi and 51 Ceph into their
own scales.
The polar scope is easy to use too.
It has plenty of eye relief and positive focusing. The eyepiece has a rubber
bumper ring so as not to scratch my glasses. Illumination is by an internal red
LED with fine brightness control that turns off after a few minutes to save
leaving it on and draining the battery (inevitable otherwise).
Build quality is first rate too, but then
at ~£260 it’s not cheap.
February 7th 2023: Zeiss’
old 8x32 Victory FLs
Zeiss old 8x32 Victory FLs were a
Scope Views best buy for years and one of my all-time favourites. Their
replacement as Zeiss’ premium 32mm bino’, the 8x32 SF, is good but very
different. Now the 32mm SFLs (see my post here from a few weeks back) promise
similar characteristics to the FLs and I’m curious to compare them, so I bought
an old pair of FLs in advance.
I’ve been taking the FLs hiking most
days and they’ve reminded me what a great binocular they were (and still are):
unbeatably small and light, with a wide bright detailed view, good eyepiece
comfort and a superb focuser that’s as fluid as the SFs’ but even faster. This
pair has seen some heavy use, but remain optically and mechanically as good as
new (better, because the focuser has freed up: even more fluid but losing none
of its precision).
Zeiss really knocked it out of the
park with the little FLs and it will be interesting to see how the new SFLs
compare; they have a lot to live up to. Meantime, used prices for the FLs have
finally dropped and they make a great used buy.
January 29th 2023: Keep It
Dry
It’s obvious you should keep your
optics dry, right? Well, given the lenses I’ve seen with fungus or haze lately,
maybe not.
The most acute problem is small dead
air spaces like the air-gap in air-spaced objectives that trap moisture. Condensation
gets in when you take cold gear into a warm house or car, but also if kept
indoors in a steamy kitchen or outdoors in observatories, sheds and garages. I
once saw a £40,000 Takahashi rig (EM500 + Mewlon 300
+ FS-128 + 5” Hα filter) destroyed after just a year
in a little dome set straight onto earth, but even ones on a proper concrete
pad with a damp membrane can suffer. I kept a dehumidifier running 24/7 in my
own observatory and it kept things perfectly dry – buy a decent one, I found
Mitsubishi’s excellent.
Always store your optics with silica
gel desiccant in the case. You can buy the little pouches cheaply on Ebay or Amazon, but not all are created equal. Some have a Tyvek
outer and can be safely microwaved to re-activate once they’re saturated. I’ve
recently discovered the large ones intended for cars, see above, which are an
economical way of getting lots of gel in a robust pack.
I strongly recommend putting a
desiccant plug in the eyepiece holder of your focuser to keep the inside of
your scope dry. Annoyingly, these are not as widely available as you might
think. Starlight Instruments make the best, but it’s out of stock everywhere.
If you’re stuck you can make one yourself by drilling some holes in the bottom
of a 35mm film cannister (perfect fit in a 1.25” hole) and then filling it with
little gel sachets (wash the swarf out and dry thoroughly first).
You owners of sealed bino’s and
scopes are looking smug at this point, but don’t be. Seals can leak and the
outside of lenses can get mould and fungus which etches coatings; rubber can
get mildew and degrade. Always air-dry your bino’s before putting them away and
avoid long-term storage in a leather case which can house fungal spores.
January 23rd 2023: Zeiss 30mm
SFLs
My little Swarovski Curio 7x21s are
wonderful for their size, but are limited to full daylight and are too small
for astronomy.
The smallest general purpose
binoculars that work for nature viewing or birding at dusk, or some casual
astronomy, are in the 30-32mm size, but premium models – Zeiss’ SFs and
Swarovski’s NL Pures - are relatively large and
heavy.
Meanwhile, Swarovski’s 30mm CL
Companions are good but the view and handling aren’t up to high-end standards.
Nikon make the venerable 8x30 EII porros, but they’re
relatively expensive now and neither armoured nor waterproof.
What’s needed is a modern premium
binocular that’s truly small and light. Zeiss’s ultra-compact Victory FLs once
filled this niche and were a Scope Views Best Buy, but they’re long
discontinued and getting less available used.
Enter the 30mm version of Zeiss’
successful and excellent SFLs. These are (almost!) as small as the Victory FLs and even
lighter at just 460g – the lightest premium binoculars I know of outside the
folding class. What’s more, they boast top-quality optics and mechanicals and
have decently wide (65° apparent) fields and promise good
eye relief of 18mm too.
I’m looking forward to reviewing them
and might even by a pair for myself!
January 7th 2023: Cost
Cutting
Every year I buy a Christmas pie from
Fortum and Masons on London’s Piccadilly. Fortnums is
expensive and their Christmas pie has always been suitably fancy – like a
beautifully cooked turkey dinner with all the trimmings in a pie. But not this
year. With too much dark meat, too much gelatine and voids and without the
decoration on top, it’s clearly been a victim of cost-cutting.
This week I treated myself to a brand
new pair of Swarovski 12x50 Els (from a UK main dealer) and I’m rather afraid
the same thing has happened. Gone is the nice semi-rigid case. In its place a
simple fabric bag. A bar of that soap from the NL Pures
is no substitute.
Much more troublingly, though, this
pair had an optical problem. Fine by day, they showed a nasty smear of light running
vertically from a first-quarter Moon across the whole field. Investigation with
an LED revealed bad prism spikes in the right barrel (above). All roofs do show
some spiking on the brightest lights, but this was much worse than usual. I
sent them back to the (fortunately most obliging) dealer for a replacement.
The replacements are an older pair
and have the nice size L case that SW won’t even sell as an accessory any more
(and no soap). Spiking on the LED is minimal and the Moon perfect. Stray light
is much lower overall and star images tighter. It’s the great bino’ I reviewed
and want to own.
I hope the combination of
cost-cutting on the accessories and the optical fail are a coincidence, but
there’s a moral here: buy from a reliable dealer and test your new purchase
carefully and without delay.
December 28th 2022: Where
have all the Monos gone?
Some of these planetary eyepieces are
becoming rare.
I noticed a post this morning wanting
TMB Monocentric eyepieces. I’ve been looking for a 4mm for a while myself, and
not only. I can’t find a Tak’ 2.8mm Hi-Ortho’ anywhere. Meanwhile, the price of
Pentax XOs has soared way above original list and sure enough my contact in
Japan tells me they’re rare and expensive in their homeland too. Even the
once-common TV 2-4mm Nagler Zoom is hard to find.
A few years ago, classic planetary
eyepieces like these were readily available; not anymore.
Takahashi’s multi-flattener is a
clever way to save on kit if you own several Takahashi fluorite doublets
(except for the Sky90 and FOA60 which use a different lens design). You just
need the inexpensive spacer (‘CA’) ring for each scope. Originally, Tak’
brought out seven CA rings to fit a range of scopes, new and old. But we’re
already down to five: I went to buy one for my FC-50, only to find it’s
discontinued, even in Japan. I snapped up the ring for my FC-60 because it’s
been discontinued too.
Try finding a pair of Nikon SE bino’s
– same story.
It’s a reminder not to assume
long-term availability for the gear you want: high-end optics are often
produced in small batches and when they’re gone they’re gone. Some are replaced
by a newer equivalent but not always (AP Stowaway F5 anyone??)
December 18th 2022:
Telescope or Camera Lens?
This image of Venus is distorted by decentred
elements in a Samyang 24mm F1.4 lens.
Camera lenses and telescopes are
functionally the same; but the way they do it is different, despite some recent
telescopes that blur the line (the WO Cats come to mind). This was brought home
to me by a recent viewing session with an old friend, comparing various scopes
on Mars and Jupiter.
I had been told that Takahashi’s FSQ
scopes, four-element Petzvals based on an old camera
lens design, are a bit compromised for high-power visual use – that they are essentially
just camera lenses. Our planetary viewing session proved that’s not true. The
FSQ-106 gave good views of Mars at 200x, if perhaps slightly less sharp than a
fluorite doublet FC-100D alongside. Meanwhile, the little FSQ-85, equipped with
its 1.5x extender, excelled: views as sharp and colour-free as the finest at
this aperture, arguably better than a TV-85 for example.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve
spent a lot of time with a different four-element Petzval, the Tele Vue NP-101,
which is an excellent visual scope and produces fine images too.
No camera lens could do this, even if
you could fit an eyepiece. For one thing, camera lenses typically have lots
more elements to achieve an even faster focal ratio, elements whose centring is
often slightly off (sometimes too much so even for landscape astrophotography –
see above). But more fundamentally, I’ve read that camera lenses are fabricated
to an optical quality of about one wave – ¼ of the usual minimum for
astronomical objectives.
Of course, camera lenses are
plug-and-play in a way that few imaging scopes are. Anyone trying to get the
flattener spacing just right with a Borg system will discover this. Still,
Takahashi’s achievement in making an ~F5 camera lens that will also give
high-power views is real. And for imaging, a good telescope with a flattener
(whether built-in or not) and a precise focuser still has an edge over any
camera lens for pin-point, low-bloat stars across a wide field.
December 11th 2022: Zeiss
SFL: Made in Japan!
To avoid preconceptions, I make a
point of trying not to read forum posts or other reviews of new products
before I review them myself. So I was genuinely surprised to find Zeiss’ new
SFLs are Made in Japan: something of a first for a top-line Zeiss birding
bino’. But does it matter? Maybe.
Around the time as I was finishing
the review, I got an email from a reader whose Canon binoculars’ armour had
deteriorated and Canon wouldn’t (couldn’t?) repair them. The owner was
surprised and disappointed but honestly and sadly I wasn’t, because I’ve
struggled with repairs to optics made outside Europe (even more so when
outsourced to another company). And in fairness, I do always point out in
reviews that Canon’s IS bino’s – much as I like them – are an electronic
consumer item, i.e. not something with an indefinite life.
Don’t misunderstand me, I love stuff
made in Japan. Between Canon, Takahashi and Vixen, a lot of my personal optics
are Japanese (though not my birding bino’s). The trouble is distance. Japan is
a long way to send stuff for repair, but outsourcing also means operational
distance between the brand and the manufacturing of its products.
Leica and Swarovski have repair
facilities on site with a huge library of spare parts and employees dedicated
to repair of their products and only their products. No 3rd party
manufacturer can do that. And because they know they’ll have to provide
support long into the future, they design for repairability.
The upshot is that if the armour on
your Swarovskis (or Leicas)
perishes out of warranty, you can get it replaced easily, quickly and cheaply
(I was quoted £40 by Leica); on your Nikons or Canons or Fujis or Kowas maybe not so much. I really liked the SFLs,
but this is an issue I’d consider before purchase, especially for birding
bino’s that will lead a hard life. I’m sure Zeiss have made unusual efforts to
ensure they can repair the SFLs, but the question of long-term
out-of-warranty repairs is still moot IMO.
There is also the question of whether
you should support a European brand and employer outsourcing its production,
but that is a separate issue and a very personal decision.
November 29th 2022: Why
I’m Excited about the new Astro Physics 110 GTX
Image credit: Astro Physics inc.
I don’t often visit the Astro Physics
website, but recently I went looking for an accessory for my Stowaway and
stumbled across an announcement from earlier this year – AP is releasing a
completely new model, the 110 GTX.
Not only is this a rare event (even
the most recent Stowaway is a reboot of an existing model), but the 110 GTX
is pretty much my dream scope from AP because it’s effectively their famous
Traveler (my review here) re-invented.
The Traveler
is one of my all-time favourites: a 4” refractor (actually 105mm) in an
incredibly compact package that slips onboard and does everything when it
arrives. The 110 GTX promises more of the same, but with even better
correction, a better focuser and 5mm more aperture. Sounds exciting, right?
Let’s look in a bit more detail…
The basic facts are these: the 110
GTX is a 110mm F6 triplet that’s the same size and weight as the Traveler, despite the extra aperture and has a special
(super compact) 3.5” AP focuser. The tube and sliding dewshield are the same
style as other recent APs like the Stowaway and 130 GT. For some idea what to
expect, read my review of a recent Stowaway here.
What really impresses me is that the
110 GTX is an imaging machine that’s also designed for observers. Most small
refractors these days are optimised for best correction at shorter wavelengths
for imaging. The 110 GTX is designed to remain diffraction limited across the
whole visual spectrum, from deep red to violet – from O stars to Mars.
This being AP you can be confident
that everything else, from the homogeneity of the glass to the fit and finish
of the tube, will be absolutely first rate. Cost? They haven’t announced it
yet, but I’m guessing ~$5-6000 incl. case and rings.
The only problem is going to be
getting one. As for my Stowaway, it’s going to be a draw and they’ll send instructions
to anyone who signed up, after which you’ll have to act fast to enter. For
reference you can read about the Stowaway draw and order process here. You can find more info on the 110
GTX at AP’s website here.
Good luck if you’re entering the draw
(on second thoughts to hell with that cos I want one!)
November 21st 2022: Time
for Mars
Mars at transit on opposition day.
It’s Mars opposition time (when Mars
is closest to Earth and best for astronomers) and there’s good news and bad.
The good news is that this opposition
by far the most favourable of recent years in terms of altitude for
northern observers: right now, Mars transits at about 60°. This matters because you’re looking/imaging through less
wobbly atmosphere. Back in 2018, the opposition from here was at a virtually
unobservable 6° altitude: even if you could set your scope
that low to the horizon, the thick atmosphere between you and Mars meant the
Red Planet was just an orange fuzz.
Also potentially interesting this
year is that on opposition day, Mars will be occulted by the Full Moon at about
04:55.
The less good news is that this
year’s is not a very favourable opposition in terms of closeness and so
apparent size. At the moment, Mars is 16.9” across and will make 17.1” on
opposition day. But by Christmas it will already have shrunk to 15.6” and will
be down to 11.5” a month later. Realistically, this means only another six
weeks or so to get the best views and images. In comparison, that 2018
opposition saw Mars get up to 25” apparent size. You can’t have it all.
Remember, Mars is the only planet
where you can see surface markings, so just get out and image/observe if you
get a clear night over the Christmas holiday period (but don’t try observing
after a few drinks – I’ve dropped eyepieces that way).
The raw opposition facts for the UK are
these:
Mars Opposition Date/time: 8 December
04:26
Rises: 3 pm
Transits: Midnight / 60° / 17.1” / Mag -1.9
You can find some more info and tips
of gear for Mars in the latest of my ‘How to’ articles here.
November 14th 2022: A
Scope for Planets and Terrestrial?
I recently had an interesting
question from a reader that got me thinking and prompted me to write this post.
The planets are in the sky again and
we’re headed for a Mars opposition in early December, one that’s better placed
for high-latitude observers than recent oppositions. Perhaps that’s why the
reader contacted me to ask for a recommendation on a quality scope for
terrestrial use that could work for planets too. Hmmm…
This is a difficult one. For
terrestrial use and some casual astronomy, the best terrestrial scopes
can work well. I’ve had good experiences with Zeiss Gavia and Harpia models for the Moon and basic deep
sky. Trouble is such scopes are too low powered for the planets and their
prisms can smear the light too much.
Small astro’
refractors are successfully used by some for terrestrial viewing, with small
Tele Vues particularly popular, perhaps because they
are so rugged; but the TV-85 is probably the only one that might
deliver convincing views of Mars. Meanwhile, the wonderful-for-planets Tak’ FC-100DZ is just too large; but the much more portable FC-76 does work well for planets despite its modest aperture. A classic Vixen FL80 could work – it’s light, rugged and of very high quality with decent
aperture. A Questar Field Model could be a great choice,
if its narrow field works for your terrestrial viewing.
The very best option I can think of
is perhaps AP’s outstanding Stowaway 92mm, but they’re difficult to get hold of. Any other suggestions? Let
me know…
October 25th 2022: Simple
Astronomy
Ever had a simple meal you enjoyed
more than a Michelin star? Astronomy can be like that. There’s a lot of
expensive gear on Scope Views, but the most basic astronomy can be the most fun
and spontaneous.
Today’s partial solar eclipse was a
reminder. I’m away in London with nowhere to setup a scope and camera, so for
once I just projected with bino’s and snapped away at a partially clouded Sun
with my phone. It was fun! What I should have done for the 2017 US eclipse,
instead of fiddling about with cameras.
Reminded me of the 1999 Great British
eclipse, which was partial in London (and mostly clouded out for totality in
Cornwall). Conditions were similar – I bunked off work and just projected it
with my bino’s between the clouds.
I sound like a lifestyle guru (ugh),
but sometimes best to live in the moment.
A starry night can be like that too –
at its best with just a dark corner and a pair of bino’s. Enjoy your imaging
rig and specialist eyepieces, but don’t lose sight of the simple, immediate
beauty of the sky.
April 24th 2022: Ethical Optics
Shopping Post-invasion
Czech Meoptas
and Japanese Canons – alternatives to Made in PRC.
My 1960s Hacker valve (tube) radio is
in for a service. It was made in Maidenhead, but not only: just about every
component is British. Nowadays no radios are made in Britain, all are made in
China. This is true of most optics too. We take this outsourcing of
manufacturing as a given, but should we?
The shift of optics manufacturing to
China has largely happened in the eighteen years or so I’ve been reviewing.
It’s made high-performance bino’s and telescopes available at much lower prices
and forced the high-end to innovate and compete. All good then?
Trouble is, China’s aggressive
posturing on Taiwan very sadly (because I admire Chinese culture and industry)
makes them look more foe than friend now. Is our addiction to cheap Chinese
products a national security risk like our addiction to Putin’s oil and gas,
then? Some analysts are saying so.
Contentious perhaps, but personally
I’ve started to look at where the goods I buy are made.
So what’s the situation with optics? Mostly
it’s just at the high-end where it’s possible to avoid Chinese manufacture (feel
free to contact me if I omit something or get it wrong):
For bino’s, Swarovski is the most
straightforward – all are made in Austria. I believe all Leicas
are made in Germany or Portugal. High end Zeiss are still German or Japanese,
but the Terras are made in China. I believe Steiner are still German made (I
really must review a Steiner!)
High end Vortex are made in Japan,
ditto some Nikons and Kowas, some Canons (?), Fujis
and perhaps Minox too. Meopta
are staunchly Czech of course (see above).
In terms of astro’
scopes, AP and TEC are all U.S. made, whilst Tele Vue makes its optics in Taiwan
and Japan. I think Orion Optics still makes its reflectors and catadioptrics in
Crewe (UK). Some Vixen products are still made in Japan. Takahashi are still
entirely Japanese made, as are Borg to my knowledge. The proverbial elephant in
the room are LZOS lenses, which is a real blow for me as they’ve always been
among my favourites: they probably won’t be available now since LZOS is a
Russian defence contractor.
As for the future, if this terrible
war widens into a global conflict who knows? Perhaps the West will have to
start mass-producing its own stuff again, optics included, but that would be
hugely inflationary.
Feb 12th 2022: More Big
Scopes to Look Through
I’ve just returned from another US astro’ road trip with some inspiring big-scope viewing, so
it’s on my mind. Then I received a kind email from a reader who likes my
descriptions of looking through big observatory scopes. That’s great ‘cos it’s
a become a bit of a pre-occupation for me.
Views through the biggest scopes
aren’t always as amazing as you’d expect (which can be interesting in itself),
but sometimes they really are. Highlights include: masses of structure in the
Crab and Spirograph nebulae plus the moons of Uranus through the Struve 82” at
McDonald (above); Hubble-image detail on Mars, Galileo Regio on Ganymede, Saturn’s
Encke division and the Alpine Valley Rille with the
Mt Wilson 60”.
My big-scope views have all been
either through century-old instruments from the golden age of visual astronomy,
or through smaller (16-36”) modern RCs bought or re-purposed as mixed-use
outreach instruments. But I’ve just discovered a third possible pool of large
telescopes for observing.
In the sixties, NASA funded several
large long-focal-length classical Cassegrains for lunar mapping to support
Apollo. With small fields of view and slow photographic speed, these aren’t
ideal for modern astrophysics, but would make great visual instruments.
I know of one – the 61” on Mt
Bigelow, part of the Steward Observatory – which has had an eyepiece in it.
Great solar system reviews were reported. But there are others, for example the
31” NURO telescope at Lowell’s Anderson Mesa site. Meanwhile, Lowell’s 72”
Perkins Telescope is also a long-f Classical Cassegrain and seems to be
struggling for work at a super-cheap $800/night, a sum easily exceedable with a public observing session.
I’m hoping that if some of these fall
out of professional use, their owners will consider converting them (at least
part-time like the Struve 82”) for visual outreach, allowing new generations of
astronomers to witness with their own eyes what they could only otherwise see
in photos.
Jan 13th 2022: Is Software
Eating Your Bino’s?
Stock Sony image.
I’m a believer in the maxim that
profound tech’ changes are overestimated short term and underestimated long
term. So when a WSJ journo’ wrote ‘Software is eating the world’ a decade ago,
everyone got excited for five minutes, concluded ‘yeah, not really’ and moved
on; long term, he was undoubtedly right though.
So what about our little world of
optics then? One famous reviewer was predicting electronic (i.e. fully
sensor-based) binoculars even back then and such things do exist in the form of
Sony’s DEVs. They haven’t caught on yet, mostly because they’re still very
expensive. But a couple of things converged this week to get me thinking that’s
the future, like it or not.
The first was a message from a friend
who’d discovered his new iPhone now did astrophotography using automated
stacking. I’ll doubtless buy one soon. Software is inexorably eating my DSLR.
Then a reader emailed me to say
something that’s been troubling me for a while too. He’d loved the view through
a pair of NL Pures, but feared he’d spend big on them
only to reach for his stabilised Canons every time he actually went out to
view.
Same. You see, I’m off on another
observing trip soon (fate and irony willing) and I’ve decided to pack my Canon
12x36 IS bino’s again. You might find this surprising, since the 12x42 NL Pures are currently my favourite ever binocular view. But
in reality, stabilisation just reveals more, even if the view isn’t as wide,
beautiful and immersive. Last time I was able to spot the historic V-2
bunkhouse deep in the White Sands Missile range with the 12x36s. With the NL Pures I probably wouldn’t have.
Hopefully as part of this trip I’ll
re-visit Lowell Observatory (if it re-opens in time), where one of their
outreach instruments uses an integrating video camera to give near-real-time
views of DSOs that the naked eye never could.
Put these things together and I
suspect that by 2035 most serious binocular users will never see actual light
from the thing they’re viewing. Amateur astronomers the same. I’ll moan that this is somehow
the march of Meta - RL replaced by VR. I’ll keep a few pieces of cherished
optics. But when I go out to view, it’ll be through some combo of optics,
sensors and processors. All driven by software, of course.
Dear Sony, please could I have a pair
of DEV-50s to review ‘cos I can’t afford them (yet).
Dec 18th 2021: Can you
see Venus’ Crescent tonight?
“Can you see Uranus?” is a popular
question when I’m astronomising publicly, but a more
interesting question is “Can you see Venus?”
Well, obviously you say. But what I
mean is can you see its phase? With your naked eyes? I’d read
that it’s possible, but never convinced myself.
Then yesterday, on a cold but very
clear night testing some scopes at the top of our local fell, we were looking
at Venus setting into the orange sunset over the sea and my wife suddenly
announced that she could see the crescent.
So I squinted and strained and... no,
not really. Well, maybe.
It got me wondering, how many people
can do this (my wife does have excellent vision)? The thing is that now, when
Venus is close and large (52” as I write) and a thin crescent, is the ideal
time (see above for its simulated phase for tonight).
So, give it a try! It’s a great
example of how you can have a lot of fun doing astronomy with no gear at all. You’ll
find Venus as the brightest star by far, low in the west just after sunset.
If you can (or if you can’t) make out
the crescent with your naked eyes, please let me know. If I can get enough
responses, I’ll publish the stats.
November 27th 2021: More of
this please!
This is the first blog post I’ve made
in six months. That’s not because I lost interest or had nothing to say. I’ve
just struggled to find any free time at all over summer and early autumn. Really?
Really. You see, 2021 has been the busiest and most stressful year I can
recall. Full-on doesn’t even touch it.
Most recently the culprit has been a
tentative return to education, or so I supposed. It’s something I’ve wanted to
do for years and to make up for lost time I threw myself in at the deep end.
It’s been rewarding certainly, but hugely time consuming.
But the course hasn’t been my main
problem this year. To say I’ve sold one home and bought two others doesn’t
begin to account for a hell of multiple moves and the aftermath of endless
paperwork, DIY and decorating. And all that following a short but “interesting”
period of homelessness in hotels with no astronomy at all.
What has this to do with ScopeViews? Everything really, because that’s what
precipitated it all.
Low planets in recent years
compounded the problem of living in a valley with high horizons. Meanwhile the
trees in the woodland to the south had grown taller ... and taller. So my
permanent set-up just wasn’t getting as much use as it had. Free time had
already become a problem too: maintaining my ageing house and large,
high-maintenance garden were swallowing much too much of it: “I don’t
want to repair the damned terrace, I want to go watch an eclipse from the
Atacama!”
Then I had a bit of an epiphany.
Before lockdown I had been doing
quite a lot of travel to dark sky sites and observatories, mainly in the US. It
had made me realise just how poor my seeing often was: quite dark but often too
turbulent for high magnifications. Then there was the weather. Britain is
famous for rain anyway, but up here it can rain for weeks. Finally, living so
far north means no truly dark skies at all in late spring and early summer.
Then on the last trip to the US I
enjoyed night after night of clear, dark and steady skies, with incredible birding
and nature viewing by day. I wanted more of that, a lot more.
So I made the (very) tough decision
to let my permanent setup go – at least for now - and return to peripatetic
astronomy, with more time and opportunity to travel - to great skies yes, but
for birding and nature viewing too.
How will this affect ScopeViews? More astronomy travel, I hope - to dark sky
sites and observatories; eclipses too. More reviews of smaller, more portable
gear, including an AP Stowaway at last! More viewing through the remaining big
visual instruments from the Edwardian golden age of visual astronomy. More
reviews of binoculars from the very best and most challenging locations.
Exciting times ahead, fates willing
of course.
April 29th 2021: Elon Musk
is an alien, ‘obv’ – and this week proves it
I love Elon because IMO he’s the only
hope for humans on Mars in my lifetime. Many people hate him, though, and one
reason is that he refuses to behave. Specifically, he refuses to play the part
of august and serious CEO and VIP. And in that refusal, he subverts and
devalues those things. Elon can be downright childish and un-PC; worse, he’s
not remotely sorry.
This week was a perfect example.
Someone, no one like the rest of us, tweeted to ask if he’s alien. Elon tweeted
back, ‘obv’. But oftentimes, when serious journo’s
ask serious questions about his giant business empire, he doesn’t even bother
to respond. Aaaaarrrrrgh!
But in a way, that ‘obv’ was true. Because in a way Elon really is an alien and
this week’s events prove it. Because whilst most of us slow down as we age,
Elon is accelerating at full plaid.
Yesterday was the fifth anniversary
of SpaceX’s first successful booster landing on a barge; since then, they’ve
done it 56 times and counting. This year all their launches have been on a used
rocket. Nine days ago, Starship SN11 exploded in mid-air; yesterday SN15 was
already on the pad. Two days ago, the latest batch of Starlink
launched and Shotwell announced near global coverage; eighteen months ago,
‘experts’ said Starlink was a fantasy.
And that’s just a week at one arm of
‘Musk Industries’ (think giant dystopian pyramid and Vangelis at the opening of
Bladerunner and hold that thought).
Today, Neuralink
released a video of a chunky monkey playing a video game with its mind, whilst
mainlining banana smoothy in a virtual forest. Last summer the naysayers were
all ‘Neuralink is BS’, but today’s casual Elon-tweets
suggest life-changing innovations coming fast for the severely disabled.
Down in ‘Vegas, meanwhile, the Boring
Company has today announced completion of its first cheap underground rapid
transit for the cost of a small bus fleet. Yes, for now it’s basically Teslas in tunnels, but autonomous shuttle buses will surely
follow. I bought my Boring Company cap back when it was an Elon joke.
And that’s not to mention
‘ex-growth-company’ Tesla posting 103% y-on-y for Q1. But that was ages ago,
right? Six days, actually.
How do you feel about this warp-speed
innovation? I love it, obv. But it really, really
winds some people up. Yesterday, a Tesla-enthusiast tech’ journalist called
Joanna Crider was goaded on Twitter to kill herself by an ex-VW marketing exec.
How could so much love, fear,
loathing, expectation and anticipation, bile and hatred and yes sheer progress,
derive from the humungous dreams of one bullied South African schoolboy? Is it
because Elon really is an alien? Obv.
Wednesday March 24th 2021:
No Bernie, Space Travel isn’t just an ‘exciting idea’
A couple of my areas of interest
collided this week. The first was an eruption in Iceland, not far from Grindavik in a beautiful if desolate part of the Reykjanes
Peninsular that I’ve visited. Volcanoes are a lifelong fascination for me and I
wrote a book about them. If not for lock-down I’d have been on a plane to
Iceland by now. But it also reminded me how unpredictable eruptions remain,
despite improved monitoring techniques.
The predictability problem isn’t
really an issue for eruptions like the current one: modest, gentle effusions of
liquid lava like this are the least dangerous kind and are classified as VEI 0
or ‘Hawaiian’ – the first rung of the logarithmic Volcanic Explosivity Index.
The biggest risk is from eruptions at
the other end of the scale. The very largest have a VEI of 8 and are termed Ultra-Plinian
(Pliny was a classical author who witnessed an eruption of Vesuvius). There
hasn’t been a VEI 8 eruption for some 27,000 years, but there are a number of
volcanic centres that could potentially produce one and we might not get a huge
amount of warning; even if we did, there isn’t that much we could do.
You see, the problem with a VEI 8
eruption is that it would have global climatic effects, possibly catastrophic
ones for human civilisation. It’s an example of an existential risk that
couldn’t be mitigated with known technology. There are others, many
astronomical in nature, including such diverse threats as a rogue comet or
extra-solar asteroid; perhaps even a freak solar flare.
Then there are various human risks,
such as technology accidents. Such accidents have been mooted as a chilling
explanation for the Fermi Paradox. A leading expert in existential risk, Nick
Bostrom, put it this way:
“It is not farfetched to suppose that there might
be some possible technology which is such that (a) virtually all sufficiently
advanced civilizations eventually discover it and (b) its discovery leads
almost universally to existential disaster.”
As I’ve written in a previous blog
post, the overall existential risk we face is surprisingly large, maybe 20%
over the next century. Most of the component risks that can’t be mitigated by
any other means can be by just one – Elon’s goal of becoming multi-planetary.
And just like any insurance policy, it’s too late to buy once the actual risk hoves into view, we have to get started now.
And that’s why I was triggered by
Bernie Sanders’ recent tweet that space travel is just an ‘exciting idea’. No,
Bernie, it really isn’t. And that belief – that the money is better spent on
social programs and other (genuinely worthy) causes here on Earth - is one that
gets trotted out a lot by the Left. It also happens to be dead wrong, thanks to
the uncomfortable reality of existential risk.
As I tweeted back, social equality
isn’t much use if we’re extinct. Unexpected Big Nature events, like Iceland’s
eruption, should remind us that our world isn’t quite the safe haven we’d like
to think. Politicians, left or right, should heed the warning; maybe the one
from the pandemic too: civilisation and even human existence is surprisingly fragile
and we shouldn’t have all our proverbial eggs in one planetary basket.
Sunday 21st March 2021:
National Park Clear-cut on UN Forest Day
There’s a local beauty spot that I
use(d) a lot for testing optics: full of wildlife and birds at close range,
it’s got wonderful long-distance views too. You’ll see the place in my reviews,
a mix of wooded crags and forest paths clustered around a reservoir. Except
last Friday they clear-cut it. Today, two days later, it’s the UN’s
International Day of Forests.
The extraordinary thing is that the
devasted landscape you see above lies deep inside the Lake District National
Park, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a World Heritage
Site, famous home of Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
Now you’d think that when they need
to take timber out of a national park, they’d use sensitive selective methods,
but no. They got in this machine from John Deare that
does just amazing damage – rips up the soil and under-storey down to a metre
across the whole site and leaves it strewn with smashed wood and stumps like
the army tested tanks on it.
I suspect that Federal authorities
would never permit this in a US NP, so why does it happen here? Jobs? I’d guess
a man week per year, tops. Money? If the whole area yields as much gross profit
as a local B&B I’d be surprised. Carbon sink when it re-grows, maybe? From
the volume of smashed timber left to rot and the soil damage, I doubt it.
It is, however, typical of the UK’s
two-faced attitude to the environment. This is the same county (Cumbria) where
up until last week they were planning to open a new coal mine. What’s the point
of UN Forest Days and Davos summits if nothing changes on the ground?
Meanwhile, all the birds and deer I
once came to view have departed to leave a wasteland. But if a local resident
wants to change the colour of their front door, they’ll need planning
permission.
Monday 1st March 2021: I
Saw Starlink Last Night and it Wasn’t Good
I’m a fan of SpaceX, especially their
plans to colonise Mars. People think it’s crazy, it’s not. Experts like Nick
Bostrom think the risk of human extinction this century might be as high as
20%. Elon is right: to mitigate that risk, we have to expand off-world.
Starlink is a big part of those
multi-planetary plans. Launch services just won’t fund Elon’s Mars ambitions.
And for me Starlink has personal meaning too. I live
in the countryside and our internet is terrible. I was without any connectivity
for three months last year and wasted countless days battling Vodafone. It’s still
almost never good enough for streaming radio, never mind Netflix. I need Starlink. So I’ve hesitated to join all the criticism.
I actually haven’t seen Starlink myself since a year ago when I took the photo
above. Then last Sunday night I did, quite by accident.
I was testing some Zeiss binoculars
in the dark-sky hour before Moon rise, at about 6:30 p.m. My view was the
region of Auriga around the open clusters M36 and M38 (the Pinwheel and
Starfish). A satellite shot through from west to east, then another and
another: a continuous stream of them seconds apart. This went on... and on: Starlink.
The interesting thing is that those Starlink satellites all followed closely on the same path,
right past bright star Phi Aurigae, so I was able to
compare their brightness. And it isn’t good news. By now, the sunshade and
black paint mitigation efforts have presumably been implemented. But those
satellites were still much brighter than I’d like. In terms of magnitude, Starlink can’t have been fainter than about 6-7, possibly
even 5-6. And there really were a lot of them.
Even for a binocular astronomer, Starlink was distracting. If I’d been taking subs, they
would have been useless. Was I unlucky to catch the Starlink
train lower than their target altitude? Maybe. But it’s starting to look like Starlink – great news for people struggling without decent
internet access – really is bad news for astronomy.
But here’s the thing. From the press
hate you’d think constellations like Starlink are a
plague sent by Elon. They aren’t. Other companies, including Amazon and One Web
aren’t far behind. And as a professional astronomer recently pointed out – at
least Starlink are listening and trying to mitigate.
Will Amazon be as responsive?
I’m worried ...
Sat 20th Feb 2021: Is a
Flying Tesla just ‘more Elon BS’?
The press has a short memory, so when
it picked up a few Elon tweets about a flying Tesla this week it acted like
this is more capricious fantasy and BS from their love-to-hate billionaire,
dreamed up over a late-night joint. In fact, Elon first mooted a SpaceX version
of the upcoming Tesla Roadster over two years ago. I know this for sure because
Scope Views has had an article about it since Jan 2019.
In the latest round of
sneer-and-smear, various journo’s have waded in with their opinions on how
impossible a flying Tesla is. Significantly, though, I have yet to find much
analysis of the actual physics or engineering: ‘cos, you know, that degree in
Media Studies makes you far more expert on rocketry then all those SpaceX
engineers with PhDs from MIT, right?
Well, no, actually. As a physics and
engineering problem, the question of whether SpaceX technology could allow a
Roadster to lift off, hover at a few metres above ground, then drift across a
car park, is easily analysed. I’ve updated my original article with some new
figures provided by Musk and it’s clear – like it or not, a hovering Roadster
is entirely feasible from a physics and engineering standpoint. Don’t approve?
That’s a different issue ...
You can read my updated piece on the
physics here (BTW, I’m not a rocket scientist either. If you are, then
feedback most welcome!):
http://www.scopeviews.co.uk/SpaceXTesla.htm
22nd January 2021: Is Wide
the New Normal?
No, I’m not writing about the obesity
crisis (although I did put on a few pounds over Christmas). Instead, I want to
ask myself (and you too) if we’re so used to wide fields of view that it’s near
impossible to go back.
I’m shopping for a pair of 7x42s as
my regular walking/birding glass to replace the Zeiss Victorys
I regret selling. I was tempted by a pair of Swarovski Habichts.
I tested the 10x40s a while back and liked them, but the 7x42s are even
simpler, even more pared to the minimum - something that suits my lockdown
mood.
I like the Habichts’
retro’ style and low price (for a Swaro’). I
appreciate the fact that I could get them serviced locally if necessary. I
really like the idea of a pair of bino’s with only five lenses between eye and
view (yes, really – they have a basic doublet objective and a three-element
Kellner eyepiece), that have unrivalled transmissivity and very low weight as
the result.
The Habichts’
do have a big downside, though - a very narrow field by modern standards, just
46° apparent. That means
their true FOV is the same as the 12x42 NL Pures.
I’ve tried to convey this in the title image by showing it on the FOV of the
8x42 NL Pures: you really do lose a huge area of
view. Still, I’d been convincing myself it’d be fine. After all, that’s how
FOVs were when I started observing. Then something happened to change my mind,
when I was out testing a new scope last night.
In schizoid opposition to my own
advice, I do prefer simpler eyepieces for monocular planetary viewing with the
best telescopes. In particular, I favour the TMB Monocentric which has just two
air-glass surfaces (it’s a cemented triplet). The difference is marginal, but I
think I can perceive it – a very slightly sharper, more contrasty and richly
coloured image of Mars for example. However, the Monocentric has a narrow field
of view as the price for its outstanding on-axis performance, rather like those
Swarovski Habichts in fact.
Usually, I only ever use the Mono’s
for planets, where field of view isn’t even really noticeable, let alone
important. But on this occasion, I swung the scope from Mars over to the nearby
Moon without bothering to swap eyepieces. And oh dear. I habitually view the
Moon with an 80° Nagler or a 100° Ethos because I love the porthole, lunar-module-window,
view. But that narrow FOV just ruined it. Sorry to sound like a TeleVue ad’, but gone was the majesty and awe, absent the
sense of being Michael Collins alone with the Moon’s rugged primordial
grandeur. Now I was looking at a picture in my lunar atlas through a straw.
So, for the Moon at least, I’ve been
spoiled. I can’t go back to the narrow Huygens eyepieces of my childhood Tasco. But what about bino’s? No coincidence, I suspect,
that most of my favourites recently have had wider fields. The Meopta 7x50s were an exception, but there it was the hugely
comfortable eye relief I loved, something those simple Habicht
Kellners don’t have either.
So could I live with a 46° FOV in return for light weight and a super-bright view?
We’ll see, as the Zen Dojo said, but I’m not optimistic.
11th January 2021:
Dreaming of another Astro Road Trip
Early January just isn’t a great time
of year, any year, never mind a pandemic. But for 2021 we can add Covid
uncertainty and lockdown fatigue to Divorce Day and Blue Monday. This time last
year I decided to do something about it, moving my planned big road trip from
the usual spring/summer into winter. It was a bit of a leap into the unknown.
I’ve driven maybe 50K miles in the US over so many road trips I’ve literally
lost count. But I’ve never done one in the snow and freezing temperatures of a
Rocky Mountain February. We Brits aren’t really used to driving in the snow.
How do you fit chains, anyway (don’t laugh)?
It certainly threw up a few moments.
Snowshoeing and wildlife viewing in the Yellowstone backcountry at minus
twenty, I found myself going all drowsy and just made it back to the car. I
discovered the hard way that tap water plus motel shampoo just ain’t gonna cut it as winter
screen wash. My first car’s engine warning light came on in a blizzard south of
Billings Montana and I prayed all the way to the airport Hertz desk. Driving
the loneliest road, in pitch darkness and even thicker snow west of Cimarron
NM, a herd of deer leapt into my lane. By the time I reached Raton that night
the snow was so thick I was the only car on the interstate. Still, I had the
best time, from the moment I opened the curtains of my Denver airport motel
onto snowy prairie and a rising Moon.
Icy trails and birding at Rocky
Mountain Arsenal NWR. Incredible big telescope, dark sky views at Lowell, Kitt
Peak and McDonald. I found the Project Paperclip V2 blockhouse deep in the
White Sands Missile Range with my Canon bino’s and got chased away from the
Blue Origin ranch near Van Horn. It was all spooky-no-Mulder on a weird late
night visit to the Marfa Lights viewing area; lonely landscape astrophotography
from an isolated lookout in Arches NP proved a bit creepy too. I was
disappointed not to get a look through the 20” Clark at Denver’s Chamberlin
Observatory, but I’ll never forget the atmosphere on the observing floor with
heavy snow whispering into the pines beyond the windows. Nothin’
finer than gazing at an icy Moon through a motel window with a cold bottle of
Blue Moon in one hand, a pack of hot Tapatio Doritos
in the other.
Despite my worries and too much on-piste driving, maybe my favourite road trip ever. So much
so, I’d planned to repeat it this winter, with a coast-to-coast trip stopping
off at more observatories, more landscape astro’ in
the red rock deserts of Utah and Arizona; maybe see how things are progressing
at SpaceX Boca Chica and Spaceport America. Nothing doing though. Locked down
again and all the observatories’ public viewing programs shut down.
So here I am, looking at the photos,
reminiscing and dreaming when I’ve got a backlog of binoculars to review.
20th December 2020: How To
See The Jupiter Saturn Conjunction
You’ll most likely have read about
this, so I’ll be brief with the intro’. This Monday (21st) will see
an unusually close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Planetary conjunctions
are fairly common, but ones close enough that they look like a single star are
not – this will be the first for centuries. It’s particularly timely, too,
because a few days before Christmas it brings to mind the Star of Bethlehem,
one theory for which is a close conjunction just like this one.
So how to see it? This is a bit
tricky, because in northern latitudes Jupiter and Saturn are low in the south
west just after sunset. From London, the pair will be at just 17° altitude at 1500, dropping to 14° at 1600. From more northerly areas it will appear even
lower. So for most places in northern Europe, you’ll need a viewing spot with
a clear southern horizon. Realistically for me and many this will mean up a
hill!
You need to be in position and set up (if you’re using a
scope and/or camera) by about 1530 GMT. The best views will likely be between
1550 (sunset) and 1650. For the most spectacular view in a dark sky, you might
get lucky between 1700 and 1800, but it will be very low by then (just a few
degrees above the horizon).
The images above simulate the view at
1530 from London. The blue circle represents a 1° field of view for reference –
roughly what you’d get in a small refractor at about 80x magnification.
If you don’t have a scope (or can’t
be bothered lugging one up a hill), bino’s should split the pair, whilst the
naked eye view should be a very bright single star.
As you can see, Monday and Tuesday
are almost equally good, but the pairing diverges rapidly from Wenesday. Still, Christmas Eve (Thurs) currently looks good
for weather and still well worth the effort. If you’re locked down for Covid,
make it part of your exercise walk! Good luck!
4th December 2020:
Chang’e-5 – Yes, but where the heck is Mons Rümker?
SpaceX has been getting most of the
space news lately, as usual. But one of the most exciting missions of late 2020
is actually China’s Chang’e-5 to return a core sample from the Moon. If
successful it will be the first time we’ve had a fresh lunar sample to study
since the USSR’s Luna 24 mission in August 1976.
It’s a complicated mission, involving
a two part lander that looks and works a lot like the Apollo Lunar Module. That
Chang’e-5 lander has successfully touched down and is preparing to launch its
sample back into orbit and from there (hopefully) to a landing back on Earth in
the Mongolian steppes.
But if you’ve been following the
coverage, you may have found yourself asking, ‘touched down where exactly’?
The answer is a ‘unique complex of volcanic lunar domes’ (the largest such on
the Moon) called Mons Rümker, but where the
heck is that?
You’d be forgiven for not knowing,
because Mons Rümker is an important formation,
but not a very easy one to find – binoculars certainly won’t show it and
casually observing with a telescope you’re unlikely to stumble across it
either. Mons Rümker is located in the far
north west, in Sinus Roris, just off the limb of the Moon’s
visible face, to the west of the famous Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridium).
I’ve marked the location on a photo
from my own library of lunar phases, taken on the 13th day of a
lunation – the best time to find Mons Rümker.
If you want to try to find the place where Chang’e-5 landed for yourself, the
best days of the lunation are probably between the 12th and 14th
days of a lunar cycle. The domes of Mons Rümker
are low and rounded and show up best when they’re near the terminator (the
Moon’s day/night dividing line), when the long shadows bring them into sharper
relief. Your next such opportunity (and last this year) will be from the 28th-30th
of this month. Try it!
28th November 2020:
Impossible Tech
(The NYT has form here – a few decades later they said rockets
wouldn’t work in space).
I just reviewed Swarovski’s new NL Pure binoculars. They achieved
something I thought was impossible – a 70° flat field in a birding
bino’. This week, SpaceX launched and landed an orbital booster for the seventh
time; lots of people said that was impossible too. Meanwhile, the MSM churn out
pieces saying self driving cars are impossible, but I
watch a guy called Joel Johnson taking spooky long night drives completely
alone as a matter of routine (Joel’s taken over sixty now, check this video
out, you’ll be amazed):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gnqiOVhEZh0
So what’s
going on? Of course, some pundits just don’t know what they’re talking about
(looking at you Rory), but there’s something more profound at work. To
understand it we need to go back almost fifty years.
In 1973
the eminent Cambridge mathematician James Lighthill
published what became known as The Lighthill Report.
In it, Lighthill basically trashed the entire nascent
field of A.I. He later presented a televised lecture covering similar topics. Lighthill based his arguments on sound maths – he cited the
‘combinatorial explosion’ inherent in non-trivial A.I. tasks like facial
recognition and natural language processing, even playing masterly chess, as
the reason none of those things were feasible. Trouble is, fifty years later my
phone does those things with free apps. What happened?
Lighthill was certainly an ‘expert’, he held the Mathematics
chair at Cambridge later occupied by Stephen Hawking. His reasoning was sound
too, given the technology of the time. But right there’s the problem.
Saying
‘faster than light travel is impossible’ is based on a set of equations, a
complete physics of the problem. It could be wrong, but if so the fundamental
physics must be wrong in some way. To claim that facial recognition is
impossible ignores numerous assumptions not about physics but about technology.
In mathematical terms, there are too many variables in the equations, with
assumed values that may be very wrong. When Lighthill
refers to a ‘very large computer’ he means something orders of magnitude less
powerful than the one in my toaster. Tellingly, Lighthill
refers to ‘specialised neural networks of extreme complexity which there is no
question of imitating’. It’s that ‘no question ...’ clause which betrayed him.
I actually
think something else was at work here too – emotion. I think James Lighthill was a brilliant intellect and took pride in being
one. He refers to the ‘uniqueness of Man’. I think he hated the idea that a
machine might be superior at things he held dear as part of his intellectual
pride, playing chess perhaps. I think you can see this in his lecture – Lighthill may have been brilliant, but his rambling,
populist rhetoric employs cheap sophistry, including ‘argument by bombast‘ – a
sure sign of a shaky argument since 400 BCE. Lighthill
sneers in his cut glass English, the audience giggles; fate loves irony.
So next
time you read a headline saying some tech’ is impossible, remember James Lighthill.
21st November 2020:
Seventy Degrees - SW NL Pure and TV Panoptic
Almost exactly a decade ago, I
published an open letter to the Alpha bino’ makers, challenging them to deliver
the following:
· No visible
in-focus CA
· An
apparent field of 70° or more
· A field
which is sharp, flat, bright and coma-free to the edge
· Eye relief
of at least 16 mm
· Minimal blackouts
(spherical aberration of the exit pupil in technical terms)
· A focuser
as smooth, fast and accurate as Nikon’s HG range
· All the
usual features, such as waterproofing, twist-up eyecups, etc
I’d become
fed up with reviewing astro’ telescopes systems that
performed on a different level to my binoculars.
Not long
after, Swarovski launched the Swarovision ELs which
featured most of these things, except for the field of view. What we got was
60° - an improvement of just a few degrees on the best flat field models like
Nikon’s SEs.
Now 60° is
pretty yawn in the world of astronomical eyepieces, the entry level for Tele
Vue’s range. Back then they’d just launched the Ethos with 100°, although even
I admitted they’d struggle fitting two of those optical grenades in a pair of
ELs. Still, a quick play with Tele Vue’s eyepiece calculator suggested a ~70°
field from a binocular-spec telescope should be possible with another venerable
eyepiece design, the 68° Panoptic. Specifically, a 19mm Panoptic (see above)
would give about the right numbers with a 42mm objective of ~F3.5 and crucially
it wouldn’t be too large for a bino’ barrel.
So I
waited, expectantly, hopefully, for a 70° EL based on a Panoptic-like eyepiece
design. And I waited ... and waited.
Eventually,
we got the Zeiss SF with a few degrees more than the EL, but still not 70° and
not really as flat as I’d like for astronomy either. Leica’s Noctivid was no better. I am no optics designer and I
started to assume I’d missed something, maybe prism vignetting or something,
that meant it just wasn’t possible. Then last year, Nikon’s WXs seemed to
confirm it. Here was a 10x50 with 70°, but it was gigantic! Maybe my dream of a
truly wide field birding bino’ just wasn’t optically possible.
Funny how
things often happen right after you’ve finally given up. Because a few weeks
ago, Swarovski launched the NL Pure as a successor to the EL as a
top-of-the-range birding binocular. And here in the NL Pure at last was a 70°
field, even (almost) in the 8x model to give a whopping 9.1° true field – the
maximum of any current binocular that I know of. And by the way, the NL Pure
finally fully ticks all of my original boxes too ... just a decade late.
Something good finally came out of 2020.
18th November 2020: SpaceX
Pad Problems
Flame Trench below Pad 39A, with
Falcon Heavy above it, taken by me in 2019.
Seeing pads 38 and 39A at the KSC up
close last year made me realise what massive structures they really are. And no
wonder. Launch pads take one hell of a battering. When SpaceX took over historic Apollo Pad 39A
at Cape Canaveral, from which Crew-1 launched on Sunday, they did lots of work
to the service structure and built the futuristic new crew access arm. Less
publicised was the work it had needed underneath. The giant flame trench (see
photo above) and deflector had suffered damage and erosion since the Apollo
years and lots of refractory bricks had to be renewed.
Ironically, given all the new
technology in Starship, it now seems it wasn’t the rocket or its Raptor engines
that caused the spectacular failure during a static fire in Texas a few days
before Crew-1, but a much more mundane technology – the refractory coating half
a continent away at the Boca Chica launch pad.
In case you missed the event, the
static fire – always a spectacular flame fest – threw up unexpected sprays of
huge sparks. Afterwards, molten metal was seen dripping from an engine and
later a one-use valve on the nose burst to relieve pressure that had been building
since the static fire. Many assumed some engine problem and one of the Raptors
was indeed replaced the next day.
Yesterday, Elon finally tweeted the
surprising root cause of all the trouble: not a Raptor failure per se, but the
coating of Martyte on the pad, which had smashed into
‘blade-like’ shards that flew up into the engine bay and severed an avionics
cable (Martyte is a proprietary name for some kind of
ceramic coating intended to protect the concrete). Perhaps we shouldn't be
surprised. Those loose Pad 39A bricks are said to have reached 680 mph during a
final Shuttle Launch.
Loss of avionics then led to all
sorts of trouble. First, one of the Raptors suffered a bad shutdown: presumably
the complex full-flow Raptor engine needs a specific sequence of shutdown
events, perhaps to prevent a pre-burner meltdown, hence the dripping metal. But
even that wasn’t the end of it. Next, the severed cable prevented valves from
opening to allow a normal detank. Pressure built up
in one of the header tanks and would have ‘popped the cork’ (per Elon), had it
not been for a burst-disc emergency valve which did its job.
Elon has announced that in future
avionics cables will be run in metal pipes to protect them and that they will
water-cool the pad (instead of the Martyte?) But the
ultimate moral of all this may be that SpaceX is pushing its luck with the
simple pad design it’s been using at Boca Chica – just a support of girders
above flat concrete, with no flame deflector or trench. Past static fires and
launches with a single Raptor have caused problems, presumably hence the Martyte. But given this latest failure and likely
protracted exposure to the blast from three Raptors (with close to the combined
thrust of a Falcon 9) during the next launch, it may be that SpaceX will have
to start using the massive pad, under construction nearby for the heavy
booster, sooner rather than later.
12th November 2020: As
Crew-1 nears launch, press FUD is at Max-Q
When I typed SpaceX into Google this
morning, I was hoping for news on the upcoming Crew-1 mission, the static fire
tests at Boca Chica. What I got first was this hate piece on Elon from the
Daily Mail. It’s far from unique. SpaceX ‘fanbois’
like me call this ‘FUD’ for the fear, uncertainty and doubt it seeks to spread
about Musk and his ventures. Whenever there’s a big SpaceX event coming up and
there’s no launch failure to concern troll or disaffected employee to
interview, it’s back to the old standby of smearing Elon.
If you think that hit piece from the
DM is as low as the gutter press can go, think again. Far deeper in the
journalistic sewer was a recent article about Musk in Vanity Fair, that called
him a vainglorious psychopath and ended by mocking him for purported mental
health issues. If you really believed Elon was mentally ill, would you troll
him for it? For clicks? Vainglorious psychopath right back atcha.
Then there was a third rate tech blog which ran with ‘Elon Musk is kind of a
Dick’. I could go on. It’s journalism at its ugliest.
Now admittedly, these outlets aren’t
exactly the pinnacle of journalism, even for someone whose greatest literary
achievement is their own Wikipedia bio’. Still, that level of hatred begs the
simple question, ‘why?’.
Some of the hate, especially from
members of certain Twitter groups, derives from bitterness over short-selling
losses on Tesla. Other hangers on to the same groups are conspiracy theorists
who convince each other it’s all some kind of gigantic fraud which they have a
mission to out. But tellingly, when Tesla competitor Nikola’s CEO resigned last
month under allegations of actual systemic fraud (and sexual misconduct too),
the press response was, ‘meh’.
Another group are all men in their
thirties. The Vanity Fair guy is one of them. It’s a Freudian thing with them.
It’s a difficult age for guys – marriage, kids, career angst. And Musk – with
his big rocket and billions and beautiful women – just makes them feel
inadequate and under endowed. The result is as feral as a ram in rutting season
spotting another with lower hanging opportunities.
In truth, more worrying are the
‘serious’ journalists that relentlessly attack Musk and his companies as their
day job. Some if not all of these are being paid to do it, some with the
collusion of editors, some not. Who’s paying? Hedge funds with big short
positions are the prime culprit. Next are disrupted industries – at least one
smear piece was traced back to Boeing (no surprise). I wonder about Russia. The
chief of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rozogin,
is known to loathe Musk. Meanwhile, one of the most prominent anti-Tesla
Journos has a Russian surname.
Pinned to the top of Elon’s Twitter
feed was the same tweet for weeks. It read simply, ‘We must pass the great
filter’. This refers to the Fermi Paradox and the idea that some kind of filter
sifts out civilisations before they can become spacefaring. It is the primary
motivation for SpaceX. Mad? Not at all. Given that the risk of human extinction
in the next century is estimated at ~20%, the number of lives at stake - the
billions alive now and the countless potential trillions unborn - is
incomprehensibly immense. For this reason, reducing that risk, even by a tiny
amount, equates to millions saved. Conversely, increasing it, even by a tiny
amount, is like annihilating a multitude.
Seen in that context, and given
SpaceX’s mission to reduce existential risk by making us multi-planetary, all
the sneering FUD doesn’t seem like such innocent bully-boy fun. I guess few if
any SpaceX-smearing journos – uneducated in science as most sadly are - look in
the mirror and see a perpetrator of crimes against humanity. But maybe they
should.
31st October 2020 - Full
Moon Halloween
It’s Halloween again, but what is
Halloween anyway? Halloween is short for Hallowe’en – All Hallows’ Eve. In this
case, ‘hallow’ is old English for saint: Nov 1st is the Christian feast of All
Saints Day and has been for over a thousand years. The spooky bit comes in
because it’s also the start of the season when Christians remember the dead,
including the now-famous ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrations in Mexico.
So why am I writing about Halloween?
Turns out this year’s Halloween will be a bit special (and not only because of
Covid). In an event described as ‘once per generation’, Halloween coincides
with full moon tonight (and indeed the next Halloween full moon won’t be until
2039).
Werewolves are said to transform at
full moon (Potter fans will remember what happened to Remus Lupin), so I guess
a Halloween full moon has an extra spooky feel. And for rural kids not in
lockdown it’ll give a welcome flood of silvery light for that trick-or-treat
trip down the dark and rutted track to the local haunted house ...
Sadly, full moon really isn’t a great
time for astronomers – its light floods the sky and blots out all but the
brightest stars and pretty much all deep sky objects, for both observers and
imagers. It isn’t even a good time to observe the moon itself, because no
shadows mean a flattened landscape without the usual drama of mountains,
craters and rilles to explore.
It’s still worth taking a look at the
full moon, though, with the brilliant rays arcing across its face and all the
dark maria on view. Trouble is, the full moon is blindingly bright in almost
any telescope or even larger binos. One way to view
it is with a filter of some kind. Moon filters once shipped with every scope,
but they’re a bit of a rarity these days, though ‘neutral density’ or
‘polarising’ filters do much the same thing.
One great way I’ve discovered to
enjoy the full moon is through a (preferably good quality) pair of miniature
binoculars, typically 8x20 or 10x25. The small aperture makes the view much
less blinding and helps you pick out all the main features. If you’ve got a
pair, try it!
However, there is something
astronomers can still enjoy at full moon – planets. And right now, that pretty
much means Mars. Easy to find tonight, it’s the bright orange (not red!) star
to the right of the full Moon.
Mars is about as close and large as
it will be for many years, so it’s a great time to view. Even binos will show that it isn’t a star and the smallest
telescope should show some vague dark markings on the surface and perhaps the
tiny bright south polar cap. What’s more, from mid evening the most prominent
and famous of Mars’ dark markings will be on display – the triangular region
called Syrtis Major.
Last but not least, if it turns out
clear tonight and you don’t do anything else, get out into some dark
countryside and experience just how brightly the full moon lights up field and
lane and copse. If you’ve never experienced this, I
guarantee a surprise, one given some extra spookiness by Halloween. And if you
should hear a hideous screech, it’s probably not a werewolf, just the local
(female) Tawny owl, or maybe a roosting pheasant ... probably.
28th January 2020 – I say
XD, you say HD, let’s call the whole thing off!
Back in the mists of time, my
favourite binoculars were Nikon’s HG range for their meltingly beautiful and
immersive view, their super-twirly focuser. But the HGs had an Achilles’ heel.
The goddess must have neglected to dip one of their lens elements in the Styx
because they had too much false colour.
Then came the ‘HD’ revolution.
Technological progress meant high fluoride special-dispersion glass became
cheaper and easier to polish. Binoculars started having objectives with it to
follow the trend started (arguably) by Takahashi in consumer telescopes thirty
years before.
Thing is though, Takahashi were
typically thorough with their branding. Their original triplets without ED
glass were labelled ‘Semi Apochromat’, fluorite doublets ‘Apochromat’, ED
triplets ‘Super Apochromat and finally double-ED triplets ‘Ortho Apochromat’. I
mention this because I do wish bino’ makers would be similarly consistent.
I recently reviewed a pair of ‘HD’
binoculars with significantly more false colour than another makers’ non-HD.
Kowa labelled their double-EDs ‘XD’, but Zeiss called theirs ‘HT’; meanwhile
Swarovski’s 56mm SLCs with similarly low false colour were still just ‘HD’. I
am just finishing a review of some ‘UHDs’ which actually have too much
chromatic aberration, at the same time as some ‘HDs’ which have almost none.
This situation is confusing for
customers. Just as one binocular’s 15mm of eye relief will be another’s 18mm,
so one binoculars ‘HD’ will be another’s ‘XD’. The only way to find out how
much false colour you’ll get in advance is go into a shop and point them at a
light (I immediately split Zeiss’ Conquest HDs and Leica’s Trinovid
HDs this way). Or read my reviews!
1st January 2020 – Elon
Musk photobombed my New Year!
The first properly clear sky in weeks
saw me braving the New Year’s Eve frost yesterday evening to take some
long-exposure photos of the dusk sky with my new Samyang 20mm f1.8 lens. It was
a beautiful evening, with a crescent Moon and Venus setting into a pale blue
twilight. And that was the point – my last Samyang lens went back because it
produced terrible flare on Venus and I wanted to be sure this one didn’t do the
same.
So there I was, in our darkening
lane, hoping no drunk drivers came along and working around the local Christmas
lights, taking frame after frame of test shots. Only when I downloaded them
this morning did I notice a series of punctuated trails following each other
across the sky at about 5:30 p.m.
I Immediately suspected I’d
inadvertently captured SpaceX’s train of 100+ Starlink
internet satellites, which have garnered a lot of negative press recently for
‘spoiling’ the night sky and interfering with astronomy. A quick check online
confirmed it.
Ironically, I’d been planning a blog
post about Starlink for a while. Now I’m not sure
what to think about it.
On the one hand, I hadn’t spotted the
satellites with my naked eyes (still pretty sharp according to my optician,
despite my years) and Elon has promised to coat future iterations with a
non-reflective paint to make them less visible. What’s more, they only appeared
in my images for a period of about 5 minutes.
On the other hand, between SpaceX,
Amazon and OneWeb, there will eventually be thousands
of the things up there. I don’t think this will be too much of an issue for
professionals, who typically image small areas of sky and usually aren’t
bothered about aesthetics. However, landscape astrophotographers
in particular may soon find it almost impossible to take those ethereal ‘Lonely
Speck’ images of wilderness vistas beneath a pristine Milky Way. Enthusiastic
though I am about improved internet in rural areas and about SpaceX’s long-term
goals, which Starlink will help fund, that would be a
minor tragedy.
Saturday December 7th 2019
- Another Irrelevant Apollo Anniversary?
A Twitter storm erupted a few days
ago because the singer Billie Eilish “admitted” in an
interview that she had no idea who Van Halen was. Look, I’m old and I get that.
After all, Van Halen’s first and best album launched forty years ago. But if
Van Halen are “irrelevant” to Billie and her generation, what about Apollo?
Because in the era of VH1, Apollo was already old news and fast fading into
history. Meanwhile, Billie is just 17 … coincidentally.
The big Apollo anniversary was back
in July, but today we have another, much more low-key one: 47 years ago today,
Apollo 17’s Saturn V left Pad 39A in a night-time blaze of … what? Glory?
Because that was the end. Not only the end of Apollo, but of deep space
exploration. Put it another way – on the 20th December (two days
after Billie turns 18) no one under the age of 47 was alive when a human last
walked on the Moon.
I decided to write about it only
because of one thing. When I went looking for images from Apollo 17 – that
incredible shot of the lunar rover on the edge of a crater abyss, for example –
I quickly got into conspiracy theories about how it was all faked. It amazes me
how people still re-hash that one, because the real mystery is right there in
plain sight and they’re ignoring it. The mystery of why, really, we have never
been back. The longer it goes on the more preposterous it seems, to me anyway.
If you think of time as linear,
stretching in both directions, we are as far from Apollo now as the era of
great refractors when professional astronomy was still done with an eyepiece.
Appropriately, if it’s clear where
you are, look out and you’ll see a nice gibbous Moon overhead tonight – an
Apollo Moon as some used to call it. Grab your binos
or a telescope and find the bright crater Proclus with its V-shaped rays on the
edge of Mare Crisium. Just to the west lies Taurus
Littrow and the Apollo 17 landing site (follow the arrow). There’s no one
there, hasn’t been for 47 years. That’s thirty years before pop icon Billie Eilish was even born. Irrelevant like Dave Lee Roth and the
boys, now grown old as everyone (even Billie Eilish,
even Eugene Cernan) does? I hope not.
Saturday 23rd November
2019 – The World’s Most Expensive Binoculars?
I was idly surfing around on a
Japanese astro’ shop website the other day, when I
noticed a pair of Nikon bino’s I didn’t recognise. They looked a bit odd and so
I delved further to find a remarkable new model.
The good news is that Nikon have
produced the first dedicated high-end hand-held astronomy binocular since the
Prostar, something binocular makers generally don’t do because the market is
just too small. The bad news … we’ll come back to that. First, I’ll take a look
at the WX’s features and compare them to other premium binoculars.
These new Nikons glory in the catchy
name ‘WX’ and there are two models, a 7x50 and a 10x50. Traditional then and
oddly so because only those unusual and lucky to have truly dark skies would
get much from a pair of 7x50s for astronomy these days. I would have hoped for
a 12x50 or a 15x56, but no.
Nikon market a few special features
for these WXs. For a start they have two ED elements in the lenses to suppress
false colour. But then so do a pair of £1000 Kowa XDs. The WXs also have field
flatteners; just like Swarovski ELs, Zeiss SFs, or even Canon 15x50s. The WXs
use Abbe-Konig prisms, like the Swaro’
SLCs again. But probably the most unusual thing is the eyepieces that give
these binoculars their odd appearance – those eyepieces are huge.
Nikon say they’ve re-purposed their
NAV eyepiece technology for the WX. In case you’re not aware of Nikon’s NAVs,
the two flagship models make a Tele Vue Ethos look small and cheap. Those two
have a field of 102° and eye relief of 16mm, which does
make them quite special. For the WXs, though, their NAV eyepieces ‘only’ give
fields of 66° and 76° for the 7x and
10x models respectively.
For optical reasons it is hard to get wide
fields in a 7x50, but Zeiss managed 60° from their 7x42FLs more than a decade
ago. The latest birding binoculars like Zeiss SFs and Leica Noctivids
manage 64° in normal sized binoculars. So Nikon haven’t exactly knocked it out
of the park with the WXs. The eye relief of 15mm again looks good too, but
similar to other excellent designs like Swarovski’s 10x56 SLCs.
No, the most remarkable thing, honestly, about
the Nikon WXs is their price. When I first noticed them, it seemed someone at Kyoei Osaka had
put the decimal point in the wrong place. Except they hadn’t. The WXs cost …
wait for it … £6199 on Nikon’s UK website. Because £6200 would have sounded too
expensive, right?
Let’s put that in perspective. Ok,
they’ve got NAV. So two NAV eyepieces of that spec’ (not the 102° monsters) would be about £600 for a pair. Now for the prism
assembly, let’s take the price of the Zeiss Mark V binoviewer
– maybe £1200. Finally, we have two premium 50mm apochromatic objectives. For
those we could take a pair of Borg (made by Canon) 55FLs for a further £1000
the pair. For the housings and accessories, we’ll allow another £500. Totting
that lot up, I get £3300 – about 50% up on a pair of premium birding
binoculars.
How Nikon get to £6199 I don’t know.
It reminds me uncomfortably of the Tele Vue Apollo. Unless Nikon would care to
lend me a pair to review, I am unlikely to be able to report on whether the
WX’s are worth their astronomical price. Meanwhile, I can recommend a pair of
Swarovski 10x56 SLCs.
Sunday 17th November 2019
– Mars returns
Early mornings often have the best
seeing here, in the autumn and winter at least, when clear evenings see warm
air boil off the land. So there I was a few mornings ago, up at five and doing
some testing on my south-facing balcony and squaring up to Orion.
It’s a great time to be out, with no
lights around and complete quiet to enjoy the night sky. Then, as dawn was
extinguishing the stars in the west, I spotted a bright orange star just risen
over the roofs. I was puzzled. Reaching for the binos,
I realised. Not a star, Mars.
I haven’t thought about Mars much
recently because 2019 has been an off year in the biannual cycle. Though 2016
and 2018 were the closest oppositions for a decade, Mars was too low to be
readily visible from home and I’d had to travel to view it (see above). I wrote
about my experiences viewing the 2016 opposition from the Desert Southwest in
my book ‘The Roads from Mars Hill’.
2020 should be much better, with Mars
reaching a good altitude for us northerners. Right now, Mars is only a few
arcseconds across, but that will improve over the year leading up to opposition
on October 14th 2020 when it will be 22.3” in size and will transit the Meridian at just after one in the morning at 41° altitude here – just perfect.
I strongly urge you to get out there
and have a look at Mars next year, from spring onwards. It will be your best
chance for a while. Try to spot some of the vague surface markings that for
centuries were all we knew. Sure, you can see more with a planetary camera and
careful stacking. Heck, just check out the high-res images being beamed back
from Curiosity. But seeing in real time with your own eyes is important too.
I met a leading professional
astronomer from UC Santa Cruz during my visit to Lick observatory this year,
Ryan Foley. He told me that when he takes a team to one of the major
observatories, he always gets them outside to actually view the night sky,
something pro’s haven’t needed to do for half a century. That’s why he turns up
to Lick viewing evenings sometimes. Ryan thinks it’s important and so do I.
If you don’t have a scope that isn’t
too packed with advanced CCD and tracking gear to do the job, try to get a look
at Mars from a star party or an observatory outreach session like the ones at
Lick. The new decade may see Elon put a man on Mars if the stars align (well Starlink anyway) and there are some exciting discoveries
happening around oxygen and methane. But the Real Mars for most of us will
still be that brilliant orange star that reappears now and then, just when we’d
forgotten it.
Sunday 29th Sept 2019 - Be
More SR-71: Elon Reveals His Business Strategy
This morning (UK time) Elon Musk
updated us on his plans for SpaceX’s deep space future in front of a gleaming
silver retro starship. The whole thing was wonderfully surreal. The hour-long
talk and Q&A held many interesting factoids and reveals, breathtaking stuff
that many will scoff at, but that stand a fighting chance of coming true:
millions of tons per year to orbit; double the thrust of a Saturn V; a Raptor
engine built every day from 2020; renewable rocket fuel from solar power. Among
all shock and wow, was an off the cuff comment that really caught my interest.
Elon’s business strategy has long
perplexed old skool money men like Warren Buffett and
his partner Charlie Munger. Munger, by the way, is on record as saying he would
never hire Musk, as if that means something. I suspect Musk would rather flip
burgers than work for a corporate bean counter like Munger. Anyway, Munger and
Buffett believe in ‘moats’ – barriers to competition; Musk scorns them, saying
that only the pace of innovation matters.
In last night’s presentation, Elon
doubled down on that view with an evocative metaphor. Elon is a fan of
aerospace history and lore and for his metaphor he chose the Lockheed SR-71
Blackbird, the fastest plane ever. The SR-71 is a favourite of mine too. I saw
one fly at Mildenhall airshow in the late Eighties and saw the same plane a
couple of years back at the Blackbird Airpark at Palmdale (pic above). As Musk
said, the SR-71’s only defence was to accelerate; it was literally able to
outrun missiles. SpaceX and Tesla are doing the same: innovating, as Musk put
it, at a recursively accelerating rate to outrun the competition like SLS and
New Glenn too.
The pace of innovation at Musk’s
companies may seem almost reckless at times and there are inevitable slip-ups.
But overall, what SpaceX and Tesla have achieved in just the last decade is
astounding. At Musk pointed out, Falcon 1 achieved orbit for the first time
just eleven years ago yesterday. That break-neck rate of change and progress
must be tough on Elon’s workers, but it makes his endeavours uniquely exciting
for you and me to watch. If SpaceX and Tesla can survive the storm of
negativity whipped up by the industries they are disrupting, who knows what
another eleven years will bring.
NASA’s Jim Bridenstine
just tweeted that SpaceX needs to deliver on Crew Dragon (even though Boeing
hasn’t delivered either, at almost double the cost). Right back atcha, Jim: time for you to deliver on SLS, the
‘cheap’ expendable booster, based on existing hardware, that’s taken years,
cost billions and still shows no signs of actually carrying a payload into
orbit. Apollo went from zero to Moon in just seven years. The radical SR-71 was
developed in just two years by Lockheed’s Skunkworks. Shame NASA can’t re-discover
that 1960s sense of can-do.
Weds 26th September 2019 –
T^4: Of Stars and Starship Heatshields
In a world of fake news, something
you can do to keep grounded is to use basic science to figure out the truth. I
like to do this and publish my workings here now and then. Sometimes these
arguments get a bit technical, like the piece I wrote on why SpaceX might be
able to make a Tesla Roadster fly (or at least hop). Today’s argument is
simpler.
In a recent tweet about the
heatshield of the new SpaceX Starship that is taking shape in Texas and soon to
begin testing, Musk wrote, ‘let T^4 be your friend’. But what does that mean
and why did he say it?
Musk was discussing the way
Starship’s heatshield works. By building the ship’s outer skin from stainless
steel, it can take much higher temperatures than the aluminium structure of say
the Shuttle. This means far fewer ceramic tiles are needed for protection –
just a few on leading edge surfaces, rather than across the whole shield area.
Now this ability for stainless steel
to withstand approximately double the temperature that aluminium can without
melting is even more significant than it seems and the reason is that T^4. It
turns out that when something radiates - say a Starship heatshield or indeed a
whole star – the power that it radiates away is governed by this simple
equation:
P = AσT4
Where P is the power, A is the area, σ a constant (the Stefan Boltzmann
Constant) and finally T the temperature. Elon Musk’s tweeted ‘T^4’ just means T4, i.e. T to the power
four. In other words, the power radiated by Starship’s heatshield will be
proportional to the fourth power of its temperature.
So what?
So, it means that the amount of power
radiated away increases hugely with just a small increase in temperature and
that’s exactly what you want to get rid of all that frictional heating on
re-entry. Having the ability to withstand twice the temperature of an aluminium
structure means a stainless one can radiate sixteen times as much energy in
a given time.
And that’s the mad genius of
Starship! Building it out of heavy stainless actually means you need a much
lighter heatshield and all thanks to ‘T^4’ – Elon’s new BFF.
It also tells us something
interesting about stars: hotter ones radiate much more energy than cooler ones
and that’s why big hot stars have very short lives, small cool ones very long
ones. If you’re radiating much more energy, you’re using your fuel much faster
and it will ‘run out’ much sooner. A hot super-giant might have a lifetime of
just millions of years; a red dwarf will shine (dimly) almost forever.
Examples? The giant, unstable star
Eta Carinae (title image), which I saw from Hawaii this year, is in the hottest
class of stars (spectral class ‘O’). It radiates millions of times more energy
than the Sun. It has lived less than three million years and is already
reaching the end. Compare our nearest extra-solar star, Proxima Centauri. It is
of the coolest spectral class (class ‘M’), a red dwarf. It radiates thousands
of times less energy than our Sun and is already even older. Unlike Eta
Carinae it will continue to glow for billions of years to come. This enormous
difference in energy radiated is partially down to size and so surface area
(the ‘A’ in the equation above), but mostly it’s down to that ‘T^4’ again.
Sometimes simple Physics has
astounding implications.
Wednesday 4th September
2019 – Porsche, Apollo and Tesla
Right about now a famous German
sports car brand is announcing a new model. It’s a giant glitzy launch across
three continents simultaneously. The new car is Porsche’s first fully electric
car, the ‘Taycan’. Porsche has been relentlessly
promoting it for months. The culmination
of all the hype and PR was an acceleration demonstration this week – from 0 to
90mph and back on the deck of an aircraft carrier; and not just any old
carrier. The test was conducted by a top US racing driver on the USS Hornet, the
very carrier which recovered the capsule of Apollo 11 from the Pacific fifty
years ago last July. Porsche are clearly hoping for all the historical
associations with pioneering ‘firsts’ and brave new technical feats that I am
making right here.
The press is unreasonably excited
about the new Porsche, which is widely anticipated as a ‘Tesla Killer’.
Personally, I am much less excited and not because I am a Tesla fan. Indeed, if
the Taycan were an honest project, I would be happy
to see it steal Tesla sales (as, I think, would Elon himself). The problem is
that – as I wrote some years ago – the Taycan is just
more sleight-of-hand by the Volkswagen Group, the very same whose abhorrent ‘Dieselgate’ emissions cheating has likely killed thousands.
You see, just before that last
climactic publicity stunt on the Hornet, Porsche took the Taycan
to the Nurburgring and confirmed the suspicions I
wrote about two years back. The Taycan is fast
alright – slower than a Model S Performance in a drag race, but fast enough
round a track to steal purists away from Tesla. However, the range-topping Taycan Turbo is crucially a little slower than the Panamera
Turbo and 911 Turbo. And that’s unquestionably by design. Porsche could easily
have made the Taycan into their highest performing
car; but they haven’t and for a good reason.
Porsche hope to hurt Tesla without
stealing sales from what really matters to them – their own lucrative
combustion-engined models. Audi has pulled the same
stunt with the recent e-Tron: a nice big SUV, but with too little range for
mass appeal. Some Tesla customers (especially in Europe) will choose it over a
Tesla X, but most will opt for a conventional Q5 or Q7. Similarly, the
soon-to-launch VW ID hatchback is carefully placed to steal sales from the
Tesla Model 3 at the top end and the Nissan Leaf at the bottom. But, tellingly,
VW has left their best-selling Golf range untouched. The intention is clear, VW
have no real interest in EVs.
Let’s be blunt: if Tesla died
tomorrow, Volkswagen Group’s EVs would be left to languish and die –
over-priced and under-sold into oblivion. If VW get their way, we will still be
driving on fossil fuels when Greenland’s ice is gone and The Netherlands have
returned to the North Sea. And that’s why I’m less than thrilled by the Porsche
Taycan, even if they do want me to associate it with
this year’s Apollo anniversary. As with astronautics, a revolution is required.
And just as with SpaceX vs Boeing, only Tesla – love ‘em
or hate ‘em – is going to provide it now, not
ever-duplicitous VW.
31st August 2019 – SpaceX’s flying dustbin is
a triumph: here’s why
Perhaps you watched the short flight of
SpaceX’s prototype a few days ago. If so, you saw a silver cylinder with legs
lift off in clouds of smoke and flame, climb 150m into the hot Texas air and
settle back down on a different pad. That silver cylinder is ‘StarHopper’, aka the Flying Water Tower; but to me it looks
more like an old-fashioned British dustbin. Either way it’s a strange kind of
rocket and so far its achievement seems modest compared to, say, the twin
boosters of a Falcon Heavy landing in unison. Where’s the triumph? To get a
clue, watch the clip again and pay attention to the rocket exhaust.
StarHopper is a test-bed for technologies to be used in
SpaceX’s next giant rocket, Starship. Most significant is the rocket engine, of
which Starship’s Super Heavy booster may have as many as thirty, though StarHopper has just the one. That engine is ‘Raptor’.
Raptor has double the thrust of the Merlin
engines which power Falcon 9, but much more significant is the way it achieves
it. Back to that rocket exhaust. Did you notice how blue and clean it was?
That’s because Raptor burns methane instead of kerosene.
Methane is a great fuel because of that clean
burn, but also because it should be easier to make off-world. Other new rocket
engines are being developed to burn methane, including Blue Origin’s BE-4, but
Raptor’s tech’ is unique and getting it to work is a real triumph; to explain
why, here’s an excerpt from my book ‘The Roads from Mars Hill’:
Rocket engines gulp fuel and
oxidiser. To keep them fed needs high-capacity turbopumps. But how those pumps
are powered varies. Cheapest and simplest is to use an electric motor run off a
battery; but that only works for small engines. The V-2’s engine – the first
large liquid fuelled rocket motor - used a separate combination of chemicals to
power a gas turbine, but that adds weight and complexity.
Most modern rocket motors power their
turbopumps on the same fuel and oxidiser as the main engine. Usually this
involves a separate gas generator powering a gas turbine that drives the pumps.
The gas generator typically runs rich to avoid ruinously high temperatures and
vents its waste gases separately and uselessly. The F-1 and SpaceX Merlin engines
(among many others) work this way. It’s a well-tried technology, but is
relatively inefficient.
However, Raptor uses a still more efficient
configuration that runs all the fuel and oxidiser for the main engine through a
pre-burner stage that powers the gas turbines for the pumps. This scheme is
termed ‘full-flow, staged combustion’. This is more efficient, largely because
the propellants are already gases when they enter the main combustion chamber.
The extra efficiency of full flow
staged combustion can drive performance, i.e. more thrust for the same fuel
consumption. Alternatively, it offers lower stresses for the same thrust as a
conventional design. It is also potentially more reliable anyway, because the
turbines run cooler and at lower pressure and because it eliminates a key gas
seal that can fail. Meanwhile, disadvantages include more components and much
higher pressures in the main combustion chamber.
Given SpaceX’s need for aircraft-like
reliability, a no-brainer then? Well no. You see, a full-flow, staged
combustion rocket engine has never flown before. Some even believed it
impossible. The last to be fully developed was the Russian RD-270 in the late
Sixties and that never actually flew.
So, in typical Musk style, SpaceX has
swallowed the big risk and achieved something truly ground-breaking with
Raptor. Make no mistake, getting such a complex and temperamental engine design
to work really is one of SpaceX’s greatest triumphs so far. Raptor could
disrupt the space industry as much as SpaceX’s reusable boosters have.
Coincidentally (sarcasm alert), this
same week Vanity Fair published an article entitled, ‘Elon Musk is full of shit
…’.
No! No, Vanity Fair, no he really
isn’t. And if you need proof, look no further than SpaceX’s incredibly risky
and bold move with Raptor. But perhaps that’s the point. Elon’s seemingly
super-human ability to take a giant risk and win does something else – it
creates real fear among the competition, whose only response is weak and
hateful gutter journalism.
3rd July 2019 – A revelation about
SLS and Blue Origin?
NASA’s next big rocket intended for deep space
missions, the Space Launch System or SLS, has attracted a lot of negative
press. Compared to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, SLS’s development certainly seems
both expensive and slow, especially since it uses existing hardware derived
from the shuttle – main engines, fuel tank and solid fuelled boosters. SLS
isn’t even reusable, apart from the capsule.
However, NASA is pressing ahead and yesterday
the SLS passed a major milestone – a test of its launch abort system motors
(see image above, taken last week). The test involved firing a mock-up capsule
to launch speeds atop a re-purposed ballistic missile (a solid-fuel Peacemaker)
and firing the motors that lift the capsule clear and re-orient it. The test
seems to have gone well.
Beforehand, I attended a NASA presentation
about the test at the Kennedy Space Centre Visitor Centre. Like those old
‘three people walk into a bar …’ jokes, the presentation was hosted by an
engineer, a bean-counter and a PR rep’. In his introduction, the bean-counter
let slip that Blue Origin, currently building a giant factory just outside the
KSCVC gates, would likely have a ‘major role’ in SLS.
After the presentation, I asked what the role
of Blue Origin might be. Would it perhaps be to build the lunar lander
component? The response was revealing. The PR lady looked uncomfortable and
immediately trotted out the company line that a number of private entities –
including SpaceX - had been engaged to quote for SLS components, as per recent
press releases. Meanwhile, the bean-counter literally and deliberately bit his
lip whilst wearing an amused expression.
Does this suggest that Blue Origin has already
been selected to deliver a major component of SLS and its lunar ‘Gateway’? I
think it just might. Will a major announcement about lunar exploration be timed
for the Apollo 11 50th anniversary in two weeks? Ditto.
15th June 2019 – Are the Great
Refractors at risk?
Almost a decade ago I took a trip across
America and as part of that trip I visited Yerkes observatory in Wisconsin.
Yerkes is famous for housing the largest
refracting telescope of all (the lens for a larger one was made for the Paris
Exhibition, but never mounted for astronomy). Yerkes is also special for its
location – landscaped gardens next to a lake near wealthy suburbs, rather than
some remote mountaintop. Yerkes buildings are also beautiful architecturally,
in a way most built to be purely functional are not.
When I visited, the great 40” refractor (see
my own photo above) was still being used for research. I toured the dome and
took lots of pictures, but the telescope had clearly seen better days. Very
sadly the observatory is now closed and the fate of the 40” very much in doubt.
I heard a rumour the great Clark lens is in bad shape.
The second (I think) largest refractor is the
36” at Lick Observatory in California. A visit to Lick last week was a great
experience and I even got to observe through it. But I got the impression that
it too is in need of restoration. The mechanism that operates the movable
observing floor is broken, making viewing of objects at lower altitude – like
the planets over the next few years - difficult. The Selsyn pointing system
isn’t working well anymore and the dedicated volunteers who run it have to use
the setting circles and manual controls (in the dark, high atop the pier).
The risk to these instruments from the heyday
of visual observing is clear – they no longer have a purpose in terms of
professional astronomy and so funding is scarce or non-existent. When modern
instruments become obsolete, they are unceremoniously decommissioned, a process
I saw in action at Mauna Kea. But in terms of historical importance the great
refractors are different: unlike modern professional astrographs, nothing
like them will ever be built again.
Together with a one or two large early
reflectors, the great refractors are also the only really big telescope you can
look through these days. And much as I love small amateur scopes,
there’s no doubt that a view through something much larger has the potential to
amaze and inspire way beyond anything at a star party. Does that matter? I
believe it does. Interestingly and surprisingly, so does at least one leading
professional astronomer who was helping out at the Lick open evening I went to.
He knows that a view through a big telescope is inspirational to the public in
a visceral way that no instrument-derived result can be. I see this effect time
and again when talking about astronomy to young people.
What to do? Perhaps there is a way to preserve
these Victorian and Edwardian behemoths from the era of visual astronomy to
inspire future generations. The key to preserving these great visual
instruments might be the approach at Mount Wilson, where the 60” and 100” are
kept in top working order, available to book for groups or individuals. What
the Yerkes great refractor needs is restoration back to its original visual
configuration, in the way recently undertaken at Lowell Observatory. It could
then be funded with paid outreach sessions, similar to Mount Wilson, available
to school and astronomy society groups with more serious interests, as well as
for public viewing sessions. Perhaps Lick could do something similar, beyond
its current open evenings.
James Lick was a wealthy businessman who
funded Lick observatory basically as a personal memorial, where others might
have funded a library or college. Could Yerkes likewise become the Bezos or
Musk Observatory? Surely a great observatory – with stunning views or The Moon
or Mars - would be a better venue for SpaceX or Blue Origin corporate PR than
some Vegas casino. Jeff, Elon, how about it?
9th May 2019 - An Inspirational
1960s Ladybird Book – Exploring Space
Virgin Galactic’s long struggle to get a space
tourism service going - from Mojave and Spaceport America - features in my
recent book ‘The Roads from Mars Hill’. Virgin’s lead pilot is an ex Virgin
Atlantic (my favourite airline, btw) pilot by the name of David Mackay who
piloted VG’s second spaceflight in February. Mackay is just a few years older
than me and grew up with the Sixties space race too, so perhaps I shouldn’t
have been surprised that the little book which so inspired his childhood space
dreams was the very same one which inspired me. That book is Ladybird’s
‘Exploring Space’. I have two copies on my study bookshelf.
Exploring Space is a fantastic pictorial dive
into space exploration as imagined mid-century. It features, amongst other
things, finned rockets landing on a spiky Moon and visiting a Saturn-shaped
space station. The paintings are all in the typical lush Ladybird style beloved
by many (including James May) and that borrow from famous space artists of the
time like Chesley Bonestell (another character in my book). Oh, how I loved
those evocative silver rockets with their fins and fiery exhaust, aged six!
One curious thing about Exploring Space is
that there are actually at least two versions. The one which so inspired David
Mackay and me is the original 1964 edition with a Gemini Capsule on the cover.
I also have a later version which air-brushes (or maybe actual paint brushes
back then) Apollo hardware – the Lunar and Command modules and Saturn V booster
- into the very same paintings that once dreamed of streamlined finned rockets.
In that second edition, my favourite painting of all, of a rocket landing amid
Lunar peaks, has sadly been deleted – no longer realistic in a post-Apollo
world of dully-rounded lunar mountains.
That second edition of Exploring Space is a
slightly sad reminder of how those fifties space ambitions kind of just stopped
with Apollo. Now, the New Space movement, including Virgin Galactic, is
starting to pick up those lost dreams. Elon Musk has said that fate loves irony
and now SpaceX, another New Space company, is reviving the whole finned silver
spaceship thing with a new rocket that consciously apes that pre-Space Race
style. Right now, the first version of the new retro finned silver SpaceX
Spaceship is testing in Texas. Could it be that one day the Exploring Space
image of a finned rocket landing vertically on the Moon will become reality
after all? David Mackay says that he’s been called a ‘dreamer’; me too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-48186036
4th May 2019 – Why Apple’s Project
Titan may be more HAL than Herby
Apple has a project – Titan – that has been
going for years, consumes billions and employs thousands. But nobody really
knows what it’s for. People thought it was car. Then Tim Cook said it was ‘the
mother of all AI projects’.
Currently, project Titan is believed to be a self-driving car. On the face of it this
is a fact – the project has as many as thirty sensor-covered self-driving cars
testing publicly in California. Apple has recently been touting for new Lidar
sensors. The only question seems to be whether Titan is an actual car or just
the self-driving software. Except that I have come to suspect it’s neither, but
rather something much more sci-fi.
My suspicions stem from an unlikely source –
the California Department for Motor Vehicles, or DMV. You see California
requires all self-driving car companies testing in the state to submit a yearly
report. That report includes various metrics, including the number of
autonomous miles driven and the rate of disengagements. The latter is regarded
as good way to determine whose cars are best, because it shows how far an
autonomous car drives between incidents when the safety driver has to take
control.
The rate of disengagements varies widely
between companies, surprisingly so. Best is Google’s Waymo offshoot, whose
modified Chrysler minivans manage some ten thousand miles between
disengagements. Next come GM’s Cruise Automation, whose Chevy Bolts can go five
thousand miles without help from a human. From there it’s a sliding scale
through most of the other players in the field, including Uber, China’s Didi Chuxing, Bosch, VW, Delphi (Aptiv)
and many others, some small and preppy, that read like a who’s-who of
automotive and tech. Flat-out last is Apple.
Wait, what? Seriously? Apple, one of the
world’s largest and richest tech’ companies with a track record in deep
learning can’t even better some ten-programmer startup? Well, seemingly not.
But in fact it’s worse than that. For Apple’s billion-dollar project with
thousands of man years of development can’t
even go a single mile without a disengagement. Project Titan is thousands
of times worse than the front runners by this metric; it’s in a place where
Google was almost a decade ago. By current self-driving standards, project
Titan is risibly, embarrassingly bad.
It’s not just this one metric either. Navigant
Research, who study self-driving, places Apple last-of-many as well. To me this
isn’t only bizarre and improbable, it’s just not possible. Not, that is, unless
Apple is doing something very, very
different. And I think it is. I think Apple is developing the very thing Elon
Musk and the late Stephen Hawking counselled against. I think Apple is
developing a general AI.
Perhaps it’s a system; maybe a set of
development tools. In either case, I suspect Apple is working on a general
deep-learning AI that can teach itself new tasks based on simple, general rules
and sensor inputs. This would explain the terrible self-driving performance and
why Apple is pressing ahead despite it. If I’m right, Apple isn’t developing a dumb
driving robot like Waymo and GM, Apple is building a flexible system that can
teach itself to drive, starting with basic high-level rules and a road to
practice on – much the way you learned to drive.
Why might Apple be attempting such a thing?
Apart from the sheer intellectual challenge, something I think would appeal to
Cook, the answer is the usual - time and money. It’s taken Google (Waymo) ten
years, billions of dollars and huge effort to perfect its self-driving software
with its complex system of coded rules and neural nets. Getting Waymo’s
‘driver’ to ‘learn’ a new city or foreign road system would likely take a long
time and much labelling of data, training and testing. But if Apple can get a
general AI to teach itself to drive, it should be quick to adapt to new driving
situations and environments, much the way a human driver can. That would allow
Apple’s self-driving project to scale far more quickly and cheaply than anyone
else’s and perhaps dominate a trillion-dollar market in doing so.
And perhaps Apple’s general AI is learning to
do lots of other lucrative, difficult things too, just things that aren’t as
visible as thirty modified saloons covered in sensors.
Any other evidence? Just the circumstantial.
Cook’s cryptic remark about the ‘mother of all AI projects’ was very
suggestive. So is the name itself. For the Titans were the second race of Greek deities, succeeding the primordial race and
preceding the Olympians. If so, then Apple’s ‘Next Big Thing’ may turn out to
be more like 2001’s HAL than some dumb driving robot.
19th April 2019 – Climate Change
Climate change has been in the headlines this
week: protests in London, Greta Thunberg’s powerful speech to the EU; and last
night a special on BBC1. The latter doesn’t sound much, but it represents a
huge change for the Beeb. Now off the fence, the BBC had ‘the most trusted man
in Britain’, David Attenborough, unflinchingly present the ‘facts’. The FT
found the film horrifying; to me it was mild.
Planetary scientists know that the worst could
look more like sterile Venus than Attenborough’s ravaged Earth. The film
mentioned some tipping points like methane in permafrost, but failed to mention
others like ocean-floor clathrates that could accelerate heating into a human
extinction. Finally, Attenborough was optimistic. Bless him, he’s that kind of
man and we love him for it. Personally, I am less hopeful. You only have to
type ‘Tesla’ into Google to understand that meaningful change will be
impossible until the fossil-fuel lobby stops paying the likes of CNBC to smear
anyone who dares to threaten the carbon status quo.
Alongside all the climate doom this week there
has been a spot of good news: the Kakapos are breeding. The Kakapo is a large
and bemused flightless parrot that has been pushed to the edge of extinction by
climate change and other factors. They only breed every few years, but such was
their enthusiasm this season that one even mated with a photographer’s head.
It’s a cute clip, check it out.
The problem with ‘Saving the Planet’ is that
it sounds a lot like saving the Kakapos: nice to have and important, yes, but
hardly worth disrupting the traffic for. In fact, geologists and planetary
scientists know that the physical planet has endured far worse than we could
ever throw at it. Extinction Rebellion at least have that right: the issue is
not the planet, but life, of the extinction of countless species like the
Kakapo, but also one a lot closer to home.
Couched in those terms, even the most
sociopathic hedge fund manager (yes, David Einhorn, I mean you) could
understand what’s at stake. Surely even the most rabid Tesla-hating analyst
could get that human extinction might threaten his favourite stocks. Yet this
week we’ve added more mainstream denial to the Trumpian roll-call: the ever-handsome
Richard Madeley questioning David Attenborough’s authority; Sky’s Adam Boulton,
whose English degree informed his dismissal of climate change activism as
‘trying to tell us how to live our lives’.
For me, a key turning point in tackling
climate change would be to mandate interviewers and pundits with a scientific
background. Whatever you think of Extinction Rebellion’s methods, having an
ignoramus like Boulton debating climate change on his terms is a sick joke. But
perhaps it’s worse than simple ignorance. After all, Boulton is friends with
the ex-CEO of BP. Years ago I was a bit sceptical about climate change. A long
talk with an eminent geology professor put me straight. We need to listen to
scientists, not corpulent Tories with a Big Oil agenda.
The burning of Notre Dame this week saw me
impotently shouting ‘just put it out!’ at the screen. Metaphor much? One silver
lining is that a century ago the Parisians planted hundreds of oaks at
Versailles in case Notre Dame one day needed them for a new roof. That was a
forward-looking prescience we struggle with today, but which we will need in
spades to tackle the existential threat we face.
Happy Easter.
18th April 2019 – Maundy Thursday’s
Asteroid
A month back, I wrote about the detection of a
173 kiloton detonation over the Bering Sea back in December 2018: the final act
of a ten-metre meteor. I wrote at the time that the ultimate goal is to detect
90% of NEOs (Near Earth Asteroids) above 140m in size. Reading that the other
way around means we are currently missing many NEOs smaller than 140m.
Just such an object is due to pass Earth at a
distance of 136,000 miles - closer than the Moon - today. At a size NASA estimates at between 7.5m and 30m that’s just
a little larger than the Bering Sea bolide. That may not sound big in planetary
terms, but the energy released by a meteor of that size travelling at cosmic
velocities could be in the megaton range. Such an impact wouldn’t risk human
extinction, but could be catastrophic to a city, depending on the altitude at
which it released its kinetic energy as a blast.
The disturbing thing about this is that NASA
only discovered the object around ten days ago - much too little notice to do
anything about it. And what could we do anyway? In another piece of news this
week, one possible answer is a new mission given by NASA to SpaceX.
That mission is ‘DART’, which stands for
‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’. The mission goal is to slam into an object
of just the kind of hard-to-detect size range I’ve been talking about and
redirect it. That DART target object is Didymoon, the
165m companion of NEO Didymos. In a real-life
asteroid emergency, the plan would be to alter its orbit just enough to avoid a
collision with Earth.
DART will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 in June
2021, to impact Didymos over a year later in October
2022. Even if the mission works, we are still vulnerable to undetected
asteroids of Didymos’ size in the meantime. Fingers
crossed for the next few years, then. Seriously. Because if an asteroid of Didymoon (never mind Didymos)
size did collide with Earth, it would reach the surface (unlike today’s
encounter object, which would likely be too small). The result would be a
detonation of Tsar Bomba magnitude.
Today is Maundy Thursday when Christians attend
Tenebrae (‘darkness’ in Latin) services. Tweak the asteroid parameters a bit
and today could really have been a day of darkness. So why we aren’t taking
this threat more seriously? The answer is denialism – just ask Greta Thunberg.
More on that tomorrow after we’ve watched David Attenborough at 9 pm on BBC1
tonight, a film about climate change which the FT described as ‘like a Horror
Film’.
I’m not really a Christian, but I do like the
music. The BBC has just announced that this year’s Proms will be space themed,
but it will all doubtless be Holst and Ligety. If you want mood music more
appropriate to the season and this week’s apocalyptic news (from asteroids to
climate change and Notre Dame too), check out Tomas Luis de Victoria’s haunting
‘Tenebrae’.
14th April 2019 – Falcon Heavy and
the Pace of Change
Cue the Test Shot Starfish. Then it’s sitting
there live. Steaming. Hissing. Moments later and Falcon Heavy is thundering
skywards again in a ridiculous burst of fire and smoke – the kind of spectacle
not really seen since the last Saturn V, certainly not since the last Shuttle.
But, of course, this isn’t a NASA rocket like the Saturn V or Shuttle; it was
built by private finance. Make no mistake, this is a sea change in the space
industry. Falcon Heavy 2 proved the first time was no fluke. A super-cheap
heavy lift vehicle is now here. With Bezos spending his Amazon billions doing
something similar, it’s a new reality for space. What happens next, no one
really knows. As with so many other areas of modern life the pace of change is
accelerating. I watched the last Shuttle on TV; FH2 was on my phone with
Bluetooth earbuds.
I just bought my first vinyl LP in thirty
years. It arrived on Record Shop Day, coincidentally. There are no record shops
around here now. It came from Amazon. I bought it to compare my once-favoured
way of listening to music with the kind of hi-res download I buy now. But
apparently, downloading is now in turn at risk from streaming. A pundit on
Radio 3’s Saturday morning show predicted hi-res streaming will take over.
Before it does, I for one will need better broadband. And for that I’m looking
to SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin and their internet satellite constellation
plans. Musk says those recovered FH boosters may launch the first batch.
Talking of Friday, Amazon and change, I
watched the final Friday episode of Clarkson’s Grand Tour with very mixed
feelings. The show was a funeral for Ford’s now-unloved Mondeo, but it turned
out to be a funeral for the careers of Clarkson, May and Hammond too, at least
as “serious” motoring journalists. The Grand Tour will be an occasional travel
slot from now on. Perhaps thundering around a track in the latest BMW is going
out of favour in the Tesla-led era of electric cars. The funeral at Lincoln
Cathedral was surreal, as was Clarkson bursting into tears at the end of the
show. No mercy for old formats from Amazon and Bezos: Boeing beware.
Meanwhile, clear and cold weather here has
meant an unusual succession of clear skies: a whole quarter lunation’s worth.
Yesterday saw the lovely telescope spectacle of a just-gibbous Moon in the
Beehive Cluster. Yes, a few of us do still look through our telescopes … for
now. But how long before it’s an augmented reality digital eyepiece, reality no
longer?
Likewise, was FH2 a requiem for NASA and
Boeing and the way things have always been done in space? With SLS and
Starliner expensively delayed again, I reckon so. Perhaps I’ll go and play some
Easter-appropriate lamentations or a requiem – as a hi-res lossless digital
download obvs. Did you expect me to bother with an LP-and-needle? My daughter
is on Spotify. The times they are a changin’.
8th April 2019 – Martian Methane
Whether or not Mars puffs out methane gas and
if so whether it’s a biomarker is a big deal. I wrote the following in my
recent book, ‘The Roads from Mars Hill’:
“Methane was
discovered on Mars using infrared spectrometers on Earth-bound telescopes,
including the 10m Keck II on Hawaii, in 2003 and 2006 (the discovery was
published later, in 2009). The methane occurred in substantial plumes – much
less than on Earth, but in releases of tens of thousands of tonnes. About 90%
of the gas Methane on Earth is biotic (cow farts, mostly). But … the
researchers were uncertain whether on Mars it was biotic (though not cow farts,
one presumes), meteoritic or produced by some geochemical process.
Recent
findings, based on measurements over several Martian years by an instrument on
the ‘Curiosity’ Mars rover, confirm indications from the 2009 study that methane
release is seasonal. Once again, this is suggestive of life, but still
equivocal: meteor showers, seasonal melting or other periodic but abiotic
processes may still be the methane source.”
Recently, Mars’ methane has been on and off
like a dodgy wedding. Back at the end of last year, it was reported that ESA’s
Trace Gas Orbiter had found absolutely ‘no trace’ of methane at Mars, throwing
the whole thing into doubt. Now, the BBC reports that a different ESA orbiter,
the older Mars Express, has detected another methane spike with its Planetary
Fourier Spectrometer.
What’s going on? It seems likely that the
methane source is not emitting continuously and perhaps only from specific
areas of the planet at that. Still, this is big news for Mars fans and exobiologists.
Confirmation of Mars methane would be another piece in the jigsaw of evidence
for microbial life on Mars.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47788451
19th March 2019 – Meteor fireball
detected off Kamchatka
Interesting news article on the BBC about a
fireball detected on the 18th December last year in the Bering Sea
off the east coast of Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, a place I happen to know
well. The fireball was detected by “military satellites” – presumably those
monitoring for nuclear tests. Nothing seems to have been felt or reported
locally (we sometimes forget how big Earth really is).
The interesting thing is the size of the
explosion: 173 kilotons TNT equivalent, which is ten times the Hiroshima nuke
and the second largest meteor detected in decades, almost half the size of the
huge Chelyabinsk blast caught on all those Russian dashcams.
In this case, the meteor was just that – it
exploded in the upper atmosphere (25.6 km alt) over the ocean. But it suggests
we might not be as safe from small asteroids as we like to think now the
near-Earth objects (NEOs) are supposedly mostly known. So how big was the
meteoroid? We can get an idea from some simple physics, by assuming the energy
released was all the kinetic energy of the meteoroid.
The news report suggests a speed of 32 km/s
and we know the energy released in kt, so first we can first convert back to SI
units. 32 km/s = 32000 m/s. The
energy in joules of a ton of TNT (according to Wikipedia) is 4.184x109
J, so the energy released by the meteor was 173 x 1000 x 4.184x109 x
0.907 (tonnes/ton) = 6.565 x1014 J.
We can rearrange the kinetic energy equation,
E = ½ mv2 in terms of mass to give m = 2E / v2
Then plugging our values back in, we get mmeteoroid = 2 x 6.565 x1014 / 320002
= 1282,000 kg.
Working back using density (probably between
rock and iron) and volume, that gives a meteoroid likely less than ten metres
across!
That’s
really tiny! No wonder it wasn’t a tracked NEO asteroid! It’s chastening to
realise how much kinetic energy such a small thing contains at cosmic velocities.
In, fact the BBC reports that the ultimate
goal is to detect 90% of NEOs above 140m in size. However, an asteroid of that
size would likely make it to ground level and would release many megatons of
energy. Gulp.
17th March 2019
A local news outlet in Boca Chica is reporting
that SpaceX’s Starship Hopper test bed is about to begin tethered tests of its
Raptor engine(s). This is a big deal, because Raptor is completely new and the
basis for SpaceX’s new Super Heavy/Starship launch system.
Raptor uses a design – full flow staged
combustion – that is radical and has never flown. It should make the engine
more efficient and/or more reliable.
Remote Boca Chica is on the far south tip of
Texas, just east of the Mexican border, where SpaceX has a test facility on the
coast.
14th March 2019
In my latest book, I write about the truly
crazy situation that no human has been more than a few hundred miles from Earth
in pushing fifty years. When and if we do, there may be no astronaut alive from
the previous deep space era to greet the returning crew. Unless …
NASA has a planned (though likely un-crewed)
circum-Lunar mission (you know, like Apollo 8 … in 1968!) next year, EM-1. But
given the endless delays to the Space Launch System (SLS), I’ve never taken that
very seriously. But now, reports are coming out that NASA may open it up to
commercial tender. And that basically means ULA vs SpaceX (again).
If NASA sticks with the planned Orion capsule
and service module, ULA would for sure need at least two and possibly three
missions to hurl the hardware aloft on a Delta Heavy, which can only put about
10 tonnes into trans-lunar injection (TLI).
However, the situation with SpaceX is less
clear. The weight of the capsule and service module at some 26 tonnes seems to
be slightly beyond the limit for Falcon Heavy in fully expendable mode. From
what I can see, Heavy could loft approx. 21 tonnes to TLI. Could SpaceX push
the envelope (maybe with a Raptor for the second stage)? Or could SpaceX even
get the Super-Heavy booster flying by then? Given their almost unbelievably
aggressive development schedule so far, maybe.
Either way, if NASA decides to go commercial
for this mission, it looks potentially good news for fans of deep space
exploration: a successful un-crewed EM-1 might lead to a crewed version, esp.
given SpaceX’s low costs. On the downside, it could be another nail in the
proverbial for SLS.
12th March 2019
SpaceX has been in the news a lot lately.
Meanwhile, Tesla is having another tough week, with the press again smearing
Musk as some pot-smoking flake. Oddly, the same journalists write glowingly how
SpaceX is saving the US manned space program. Hello! It’s the same guy!
Talking of SpaceX and Tesla, I wonder what the
“… and one more thing” will be at Thursday’s big reveal of the Model Y? Could
it be the SpaceX Roadster? Musk was tweeting (what else?) about it again last
month.
In case you’re not up to speed, this will be a
SpaceX branded version of Tesla’s new Roadster hypercar.
The SpaceX Roadster will have cold gas thrusters like a SpaceX booster, powered
by a SpaceX COPV. The thrusters should give the car extra acceleration (as if
1.9 seconds 0-60 isn’t quick enough) and perhaps better cornering and braking
too.
Much more importantly (?!), Musk has promised
those thrusters will let the SpaceX Roadster hover! I take a look at whether
this is even possible in this short piece:
http://www.scopeviews.co.uk/SpaceXTesla.htm
11th March 2019
My new book is now live on Amazon (Kindle only
for now)
9th March 2019
Gave my second talk of the week about the
strange and fantastical legacy of Percival Lowell, the subject of my new book:
The Roads from Mars Hill.
The audiences and venues were geographically
close, but very different! First came a room full of nuclear physicists at the
University of Manchester’s futuristic Dalton Institute Cumbria Facility. Second
was my twice-a-year spot at Low Gillerthwaite Field
Centre’s dark sky event: children, chickens, soup-and-parkin, muddy boots and a
roaring fire.
8th March 2019
SpaceX’s perfect launch, docking and recovery
of the Dragon capsule paves the way for US manned space flight again. More
significantly for me, it gives SpaceX the headroom to focus on Starship, the
Moon and Mars!