The Astronomy Thread

Those people that come from all over the world and pay for an area months or a year in advance are the ones that might get screwed. I know on the astronomy forums there's a number of people that fly all over the world and book their shit forever in advance. Stuff like take a cruise to be in totality, or take a private plane junket so they can get as much of it as they can. Crazy big money spenders on that shit. Especially when you are off 1/4 or 1/2 a mile and there's no place to move to since it's mega booked and traffic at a standstill.

I'm still torn on where i am going to view the eclipse

My two main choices are:
1) Convenient spot that has less than 2 minutes of totality
2) Less convenient area that might not get tons of people since there are more built up options kind of close, but it doesnt have anywhere good to eat/things to do and will be a nightmare traffic wise when I try to leave in all probability since I'll get caught behind higher population spots all leaving and snarling up the roads, but it gets 1 minute more of totality than option#1

1 minute doesn't seem like much, but having more than 2.5 minutes of totality is better than only like 1.5 or whatever. But being trapped in 10 hour traffic jam nightmares sucks

Fuuuccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

In Indianapolis. Fucking airline moved my return flight up two hours so now I have to watch the eclipse from the rental car return lot. Only 30% chance of clouds with current forecast, so at least that.

You'd burn out the cellphone camera doing that unless you had a special filter on it

Kharzette said:

I doubt I've made a coherent post about it all (and this won't be one, I just woke up), but I think all of modern cosmology is deeply flawed. The big bang is what 2 for 13 on predictions? Untold billions wasted over 50 years looking for particles that aren't there, and even if they were, do you then look for little creatures holding them in the perfect halo shape for the math to work?

Red shift is quantized with us at the center. High red shift galaxies are sometimes connected to low red shift galaxies that are right next to them. Do wide binaries have some kind of magical perfectly shaped halo to explain their goofy orbits?

It's all a huge waste of resources. Almost as bad as string theory. And the worst part about it is that any work looking for alternatives gets no funding because of the dogmatic garbage that is academia.

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I see - I join you on a few points; although I'm absolutely not equipped to understand the cosmologic equations and what they imply, I still haven't found a good explanation why redshift isn't a doppler effect but something else.

Got my Canon Rebel 5 ready on tripod and 104mp phone as backup but I took images in 2017 when we had full eclipse and well, it looks like a water spot on a dark sky. Very unphotogenetic if I must say so. This one we will have 97% from Bowling Green KY at 204pm CST. Other than some digital photos for archive and local planetarium at WKU my event calls for me to drink my 24oz twisted tea and 2 mini moonpies which I had to go to 3 stores to get due to being sold out. Out side of this 10 minute event, I will remain on the patio and fix a leak in my bird bath and cut some marine plywood for my outdoor cat shelter with deck I am building. It's going to be a VERY eventful day folks. I'm so excited. Yaaa.

And yes I have UV polarized blue blocking filter screw on( best for fishing but it'll work just fine along with the mylar white light solar film on top of it used to make viewing glasses) for the rebel 5 and a piece of welders glass for phone. I cut mine which is 1/4 inch thick to fit in the soft case behind phone and honestly made it for taking photos/videos on the lake but hey, it'll work for eclipses too.

For those who are not sure what to use, it must be a white light solar blocker, UV lens alone is not enough or it will damage/destroy the camera be it in a phone, camera, cam whatever. You can also use welders glass like used in welding helmets which you can buy ( too late now! ) from Amazon or other places for 5 bucks.

Tholan said:

I see - I join you on a few points; although I'm absolutely not equipped to understand the cosmologic equations and what they imply, I still haven't found a good explanation why redshift isn't a doppler effect but something else.

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I think the most widely accepted guesses are that it is a doppler like effect. The idea being that the space between galaxies is expanding like a balloon and this stretches the light waves down towards the red side of the spectrum as they move apart.

There's also tired light which guesses that maybe light loses energy over time or distance. This is possible but there's a few observational knocks against it. Photons should experience a small amount of time as they travel slightly slower than the speed of causality through space's almost-vacuum, but I could be way off.

My guess is that magnetic and gravitational forces can also stretch light waves.

There's alot of hand wavey fudge factors to explain away what they are seeing with the new webb telescope, like "Far away galaxies appear really huge but actually that's an optical illusion!" etc, but even lots of nearby common stuff isn't well explained by any theory right now.

LPP Fusion has some really badly made videos that go into detail about the huge flaws in cosmology, but they are hard to watch. Their own theories are not without holes but at least they are doing real experimental science.

I have a wild guess about galaxy motion but I haven't worked out the math yet. I'm thinking that black holes might stretch space in a linear way far outside the event horizon. Like frame dragging does for rotation. This flattens out the falloff curve for gravity from the square of distance proportional to the mass of the central black hole.

The math involves infinities, and some masses and rotations could even wrap around and push instead of pull for some parts of the curve.

All set for totality - just need to waste a few hours. Should get about 2.5 minutes. Not very crowded at the moment so was easy to get some parking near some shops/restaurants. I was afraid it would be a shitshow early on, thank goodness plebs don’t care about eclipses lol

Light but thin clouds in Indianapolis; everything should be visible.

Clouds over north Texas are moving east and a line of clear sky looks like it has a chance to open up before totality. The hill country looks like it's clearing up as well, so it might beat the forecast, but Austin, Waco, and the north side of SA looks fucked.

First contact at Indy. Great conditions.

Was perfectly clear where I am viewing, then some asshole clouds moved in. They are high altitude ones, so hopefully it doesn’t obscure too much

Fucking awesome. So worth it.

Long way from totality. I didn't even go look. Been through a total one before.

Not sure what it means but the photo came out good

This was hella gay, and the only thing faker and gayer was all the reaction to it.