19 thoughts on “Are Wonkville Astronomers Sufficently Cool?

  1. Two mirrors, an eyepiece and into my eyeball, it doesn't get any cooler than that.

    TRUE STORY- I was coming back on BART with the missus and a friend after seeing the Blue Angles on Sunday in SF from the 40th floor- I had brought my smallest scope, an 11.3 cm f/4.5. A guy on the BART train asked "how far can you see with that thing?", a common question. I told him, "if you have a dark sky in the spring, you can see a quasar 2 billion light years away with this thing". He said "I'll have to google that, I don't know WTF a quasar is!"

    The funniest thing about it? I saw him pull out his phone to google it, and the wallpaper on his phone was a shot of his dick.

      1. Also, that great ad campaign Nikon had in the late 80s-90s? Show a bunch of great shots with "Pulitizer Prize, etc etc"… on each one, then the last frame, in silence: Nikon: we take the worlds greatest pictures.

        Not that Hasselblad, Bronica, Mamiya , Canon and Leica didn't either…

  2. I remember in an old Astronomy magazine a story about a setup that used freon cooled in an external box to cool down the camera. And weren't people doping up the 'film' they still used?

    1. yep, "forming gas". I believe a hydrogen/nitrogen blend. Then there was always dry ice to cool a camera for a long exposure. I did that a few times. Slows down the ionic step of latent image formation to the speed of the photons coming in. It's all covered in the Gurney-Mott theory of latent image reciprocity failure. I guess my one failed year at RIT in Imaging and Photographic Science stuck a few things in my head (even though the folks running that major sucked, I was unprepared for college, and the chemistry folks were cooler).

      man I miss chemical based photography

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