Re: North Pole

[Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>]

Denker is a "star hopper"  the easiest method if one knows lotsa stars (or has a
finder -- map).  Here, near El Ciudad Viejo in Salinas, that method is outa
question.  I live in a valley of trees, street lamps, and a two story house and
garage, so on even a good night I can see only about 20 stars.   True, to mount the
optical encoders, set the dec. to zero and input the constants for the algorithm, by
aligning on two of three known (to me) stars, takes ten minutes, but then it will
lead me quickly and unerringly to a few of the brighter Messier objects that are far
from any of the stars I can see.

bc who thinks Dan should not bother

I don't think even the Jamals, including Mumia, Mo, or Mohamed College, give a damn.

"John S. Denker" wrote:

> Michael Edmiston wrote:
> > Each student therefore gets a miniature earth suspended within a clear

cut

> Did I ever tell you about the time I went stargazing in
> a meadow near Aspen with a friend of mine who's a professor
> at MIT?  He got out his charts and started getting his
> telescope all set up and aligned so that he could use
> the setting-circles to find the goodies we wanted to find.
> He was about 1/4th of the way through the alignnment
> process when he realized that I had just plunked my
> telescope onto its tripod and manhandled it until
> it was pointing in the right direction.  I had no idea
> what was the Right Ascension or Declination of what I
> wanted to look at, but I knew where it was on the sky.
> My buddy was taken aback.  He was using what he thought
> was the "scientific" approach, using a telescope that
> cost about twice what mine did, and (because if its
> smaller size) should have been easier to handle -- but I
> was getting results faster, because I knew where stuff
> was on the sky.  On what I call the celestial sphere, and
> what my dictionaries call the celestial sphere.  I don't
> need coordinates to know where stuff is.

cut

> A related question:  Ask your students what happens if
> the geospin axis precesses.  Do they think the "celestial
> sphere" will follow the earth's axis, taking the fixed
> stars with it?  If they do think that, you may conclude
> that the model is allowing (maybe even causing) some
> serious misconceptions.
>
> This posting is the position of the writer, not that of Blondlot,
> Lysenko, or Schon.
>
> This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.