Technology is taking romance out of astronomy

I saw this on cnn.com and just had to share!

Geoff Marcy has looked at 85 different stars this evening, but he has yet to actually see a single one of them.

The giant Keck telescope he is using, on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, is sending images straight to a digital camera, to be analyzed by a computer.

"There are no eyepieces anywhere. In fact, we don't have an eyepiece for the Keck telescope," Marcy, an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a telephone interview as he finished up a night of planet-hunting.

"Some of the romance of astronomy is gone."

Centuries ago, Galileo Galilei peered through a small, simple telescope to draw his pictures of four of Jupiters' moons: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, as did Giovanni Schiaparelli, who spotted the "canali" (channels) on Mars.

The rest can be read here .

Imagine the eyepiece required :shock:

What was the romance anyway? Freezing your butt off looking through the bottom of a milk bottle lens with objects smeared all over the place? I don;t think the advent of X-Ray machines has dulled the romance of medicine...

Personally speaking, I've no eyepieces for my setup either but guess what - I've a 3 inch refractor I can whip out at the slightest whim and gaze lovingly at the heavens. Perhaps this guy should do the same. Oh wait, he'd freeze his butt off on top of Mauna Kea if the wind or altitude sickness didn't get him first. I bet he's more than happy in his sea-level research facility just yards from the beach. Yes, life's a beach...

Guys,

Something I personally would never do is set-up a robotic system ... I would rather be under the sky with all the humidity and/or winds and/or cold and/or mosquitoes etc capturing my ancient photons. I think this is part of the overall experience that makes astronomy what it really is ... you and the sky and under unfavourable conditions at times.

I agree with the professional astronomer that part of the romance is not there. Locally, we have professionals sending a set of coordinates to staff employees asking them to shoot a set of images for photometry without a clue about reduction etc.

In one case, one of these professionals had requested an image of Mars from me ... when I sent him my hires version, his response was "Great image, please send me the hires version". When I mentioned that Mars is usually around 20" at opposition and gets down to as small as 5" and, therefore, he already had received the hires image, he blushed and started to fumble his words.

Technology has put us in a position to appreciate and enjoy this hobby even more (ex. driven telescopes, GOTO telescopes etc). However, when things get "too easy", the fun and excitement is gone. We may just as well rent time on some remote telescope over the internet and "pretend" we are doing amateur astronomy and astrophotography.

I'm doing some work with pulsars at the moment. Anyone know how to put an eyepiece into the Parkes telescope ?

Our eyes are "technology".They are little machines which permit our brains to create a tiny narrow version of the cosmos inside in our heads.

(We are oblivious to gamma rays or radio waves.)

Ask any blind person.

Peter.

Ask any blind person.

What, precisely?