Re: New scope with 3.2 giga pixel camera

Llanzlan Klazmon wrote:

No it's not mine drat!.

http://www.lsst.org/lsst_home.shtml

With more of these sorts of survey scopes coming on line, the days of amateur
comet discovery are rapidly drawing to a close.

Not at all. They can't possibly build enough such telescopes to cover
the amount of sky covered by amateur comet hunters. That 'scope will be
sitting inactive in daylight one day while an amateur on the other side
of the world is discovering a comet with a somewhat more modest
instrument.

On the plus side if I read
their site info correctly their raw data will be publically available.

Decent of them and all, but /their/ raw data is not /my/ raw data. /My/
raw data comes from /my/ /own/ humble little 'scopes. It may be out of
focus, under/over exposed, poorly guided, what-have-you, but it is my
data and I learn from it and try to do improve.

My view of amateur astronomy, and perhaps especially astrophotography,
is that it is a difficult undertaking with a significant learning
curve. I count myself as being pretty low on the curve. The thing I
enjoy most about the hobby is learning new things, both technical and
about the objects I see. When I "discover" a new NGC object in an image
of mine I make it a point to learn as much about it as I can from my
books and Internet sources. And if the image is poor, that's OK, too,
because that gives me something else to learn.

I very much hope that it will be quite a few years before I am reduced
to doing astronomy vicariously!

Didn't mean for this to be a rant, and I'm certainly not flaming
Llanzlan Klazmon for posting that interesting link -- just an
observation!

Davoud

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt com
.

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