For those interested in astrophotography, when asked how to get into the hobby, most astrophotographers will tell you, "don't".
The setup that he's got in the picture is very conservatively $10,000 worth of equipment. Not to mention the time spent in setup, planning, extensive postprocessing, etc. Personally, with a day job and living in a city (light pollution), I find it difficult to get time for visual astronomy, and astrophotography takes a lot more time and dedication. All that for something that the big scopes are going to do a lot better.
Not trying to dissuade anyone who's passionate about it. If you're up for the fun and challenge of it, you'll get some nice results for the rest of us to enjoy. :)
As a person who has spent well more than $10,000 on his equipment and software setup for astrophotography, I disagree with the blanket "don't" statement. I think the biggest cause of frustration is amateurs starting out with something like an AP1100 and a Takahashi FSQ, along with some ridiculous overpriced CCD camera they bought because it was listed as having "the most megapixels" in order to try and avoid the pains of a "substandard" setup. Ironically, however, this usually causes more pain than if the setup had been simpler in the first place. Additionally, it harbors resentment towards the hobby from the person who just dumped 15k on their bulky imaging system only to find they can't even get it to guide correctly. I operate my primary scope in a large personal observatory, but I can't rave _more_ about the amazing pictures I've taken with my cheap ZEQ25, Explore Scientific ED80, ASI 1600MM-C, and cheap set of narrow-band filters. Setup is fast, the focal length is short, the speed is (fairly) fast, and the results can be seen in just a single night of test imaging[1] for less than $2200. Additionally, new devices[2] are coming out that will make imaging even simpler!
Regarding your second link: great, just what we need, astronomy run by locked-down proprietary hardware and software. If anything should be hackable, it's your telescope. After reading through their FAQ, I'm ready to bet that it won't be possible to, for example, write a script on your Linux laptop to have the telescope track some arbitrary celestial target over several weeks. Proprietary firmware/protocols/apps for controlling hardware products should be illegal.
Funny you should mention this. The astronomy community actually suffers from "proprietary bloat" in terms of astronomy software and mount firmware. I used to own a certain red-colored high-end mount from a well-known astronomy software and mount vendor. This mount had a completely closed-source control protocol, and had to be used with buggy software that was only available for Windows and MacOS at the time (a big problem since I used FreeBSD and Linux), so I went to the liberty of installing a filter driver above their USB drivers on a Windows box to reverse engineer the protocol and develop an INDIlib (an open telescope control standard) driver to bypass the need of their bloated software suite. When I posted about my project, I received a rather nasty cease-and-desist letter from them threatening legal action if I discussed it any further despite the fact that I was well within the bounds of the exceptions allotted by the DMCA. Being a young lad of 16 at the time, I had no resources to fight back against them and as such never got the driver into INDI mainline.
Illegal? You wish to use the power of the legal system to prohibit a closed protocol for telescope control? I think there are more serious problems in the world that deserve the attention of courts/police and prosecutors, but whatever.
Let me propose a compromise in the spirit of YCombinator's startup-focus: As you feel so strongly about this, and AFAIK such an open-protocol system does not exist, that tells me you have a perfect opportunity for you to invent this stuff, market it and sell it. Why not go tackle this gaping hole in the marketplace?
>Illegal? You wish to use the power of the legal system to prohibit a closed protocol for telescope control?
Of course not. I wish to use the power the legal system to establish broader laws prohibiting the distribution of proprietary firmwares. Think farmers unable to repair their tractors without spending thousands of dollars bringing them to the manufacturer. Same umbrella of problems.
>Let me propose a compromise in the spirit of YCombinator's startup-focus: As you feel so strongly about this, and AFAIK such an open-protocol system does not exist, that tells me you have a perfect opportunity for you to invent this stuff, market it and sell it. Why not go tackle this gaping hole in the marketplace?
Capitalist incentives don't work here, which is why I suggest a legislative approach.
$10k is too much of a barrier for a hobby? I know amateur musicians who spend more on guitars than that.
Other examples:
* Photographers and youtubers with a Canon 5D Mark3 DSLR with decent set of lens will cost thousands, and I wish I could afford a Red cameras that cost $10k-$50k, not including lens.
* I had few car enthusiast friends who spent thousands, more than what they paid on their cars, so they could drag race or so they could race on SCCA tracks.
* My die-hard NFL fan friend, who spends $20k on the season ticket, jerseys, merchandises, and collectibles EVERY year
* my frends who is an audio enthusiast, dropping $50k on home speakers and amps. He's not that wealthy, but that's his priority, I guess.
* My animator friend who spends $10k+ on his PC render farm.
Of course, I don't think you need to spend that much money to enjoy astrophotography. But it takes a little bit of effort and time, which is the fun part in a hobby. In high school (in pre-internet days), I built a Dobsonian telescope from scratch for my science project, except for the mirror, since I didn't have the skill to grind my own mirror. I still remember pestering my mom to drive me around the town, looking for a 7 foot long Sono tube, which looks like a giant cardboard toilet paper roll. We went to every single Home Depot/hardware stores/construction supply stores within 30 mile radius of my home, and eventually found one after months of searching.
If you put $20 into your hobby weekly on average, you'll have invested $10k in a decade. Sounds obvious but I know people who put that much into coffee.
I still remember pestering my mom to drive me around the town, looking for a 7 foot long Sono tube, which looks like a giant cardboard toilet paper roll.
Best part of those is that when you get tired of astronomy, you can take up Tesla coiling! Then you get to explain to your mom/wife why you need your own power pole transformer.
You really don't have to be obscenely wealthy to have that kind of money invested into a hobby over time, just a decade or three into a white collar career (or decent paying trade) is plenty.
As someone interested in photography and who bought a 10-inch Dobsonian telescope that barely gets used, I'll have to echo your sentiment with some modifications.
I say this as someone who has only dabbled, but astrophotography, even at the bottom end of things, takes quite a bit of work to get a mediocre image. You can get decent images from a cheap webcam attached to a big scope if you capture lots of images (or video in this case) and use focus stacking and noise reduction techniques using programs such as Registax.
It's one of those hobbies that promises improvements along the way the more money you spend, but it also rewards knowledge.
Definitely. I photographed the lunar eclipse a couple years ago with my 10-inch dob, an afocal eyepiece adapter and a DSLR. None of my images were any good.
Astronomy is as expensive as you want to make it, and the knowledge and enjoyment is worth more than the equipment, but the equipment gives you the knowledge and enjoyment, so it's a catch-22. The key is figuring out what you can afford and what you want to see and choosing your equipment accordingly.
There are many types of astrophotography. You don't need $10,000 worth of equipment to get into it. An inexpensive DSLR with a relatively inexpensive wide angle lens will get you some very impressive shots when starting out. Something like a Canon Rebel [0] with a Tokina 11-16mm[1], for example, or the Nikon equivalent can be had for under $1,000. You can do landscape astrophotography with that setup and capture plenty of stars (assuming you're someplace where stars are visible).
Actually, its probably at least double or triple that. The twin Takahasi scopes retail for more than $5000 each. The mount is $3000 to $5000. The SBIG camera is $10000 (can't tell if he has one or two). Throw in a guide scope for $2000, batteries around $1000, software at $500, eyepieces $300 to $600 each, and cables and other accessories of $500 to $1000.
A beginner doesn't need to spend that much but a good 100mm refractor scope, camera, and mount are still going to run you $5000. That'll get you great images of solar system objects and some nearer, bright deep sky objects but not much in faint, deep sky. Also factor the cost of travel to dark sky locations if you don't already live nearby to one. It's a big investment.
Two cameras and two telescopes. Plus the third camera/scope for tracking.
"I have a dual telescope system: two identical telescopes and cameras in parallel, shooting simultaneously at the very same area of the sky - same FOV, save a few pixels. The telescopes are Takahashi FSQ106EDX. Their aperture is 106mm (about 4") and they give you a native 530mm focal length at f/5. The cameras are SBIG STL11k monochrome CCD cameras..."
I've heard good things about online telescope rental [0] - sure you don't have the pleasure of seeing through the eyepiece, but for expensive imaging equipment it makes sense.
people do all sorts of silly things with $10k or way more than $10k as a hobby... look at the folks with quarter mile drag strip cars you can see on the youtube "tesla racing channel" (high octane gasoline fueled highly modified cars) racing against the stripped down P100D. Any of those are easily $40-50k and run a huge risk of catastrophic expensive engine failure at any given time.
Or the people who are now importing right-hand-drive JDM 25 year old Nissan GTR from Japan. Easily $22k each and then they put another $20-30k modification into them.
You need compensation against seeing for very, very big space telescopes, the kind that can resolve a moon in orbit of an expoplanet. IIRC there are reasons against using adaptive optics there, so you might need speckle interferometry there.
Parallax error prevented him from finding it at first! Didn't know this was a thing in astronomy.
> "Since the Roadster is still fairly close to us, parallax is significant, meaning, different locations on Earth will see Starman at slightly different coordinates," Andreo said. "I quickly recalculate, get the new coordinates, go to my images, and thanks to the wide field captured by my telescopes... boom! There it was! Impossible to miss! It had been right there all along; I just never noticed!"
Not accounting for position on the surface of the earth could introduce as much as 0.45 degrees of error in the apparent position for an object 500000 miles away. This is same as the apparent diameter of the moon for a reference.
It all depends on whether the software defaults to some observing location on the Earth's surface (eg the Royal Observatory), or to the center of the Earth. I was making a conservative assumption that it could do either one (having seen both behaviors in different astronomical software), but your argument is only correct if it's the latter.
It does default to center of Earth. However even if the default wasn't center of the Earth, that couldn't alter the apparent size of the Earth from the perspective of the Roadster. It would've altered the parallax.
Thank you! This is the first I've heard either way.
I do hope you can overcome the curse of knowledge[1] to see how the original post was ambiguous without that information. I simply had to know a-posteriori that the software worked like that (I didn't, the manual[2] offered no clues, and I hadn't yet re-done the calculation).
>However even if the default wasn't center of the Earth, that couldn't alter the apparent size of the Earth from the perspective of the Roadster.
I know the software doesn't rearrange the sky, but my hope is that you can understand how I arrived at that particular off-by-a-factor-of-two error[3] (oddly, by assuming less than I should have).
Given its elliptical orbit, when is the next time the vehicle will be close enough to earth so that it can be observed with hobby telescopes etc.? I can imagine in the years/decades to come, this will become as significant as seeing Halley's comet returning etc.? It will also be interesting to see how the car holds up to the rigours of space (effect of sunlight and the extreme cold on the paintwork, rubber tyres etc.)
Halley's comet is ~11 km in diameter, which makes it visible to the naked eye when it's close enough. Potentially astronomers will be able to spot this car at some point in the future, but I doubt that will give the same wow factor to the average joe.
I looked through this site, and I wanted to note (so that others don't make the same quick mistake that I made) that his online gallery is visible after clicking on "Buy Prints" (and not by clicking on "The Gallery", which is about his physical gallery). His photos are very impressive.
It’s a very popular observation spot and permits try to manage its overuse. Errant car headlights can spoil an observation, the area caters to enthusiasts that follow a slew of best practices (only using red flashlights in the dark to preserve night vision, etc).
Reducing blowout by 2/3rds of the spectrum (or more) seems like a good thing. I don't get the "myth" people. Maybe they just prefer blue or green dim lights?
Historically it's got some influence from black and white photography, where black and white film was typically least sensitive to the red spectrum and sometimes not sensitive at all, giving a small frequency window where one could operate in a "dark" room without exposing the film the photographer was working with, because the human sensitivity to red is many times better than the film's sensitivity to red.
With digital it seems almost the opposite way. When you lightpaint with red even barely perceptible light has a huge effect compared to other colors. Blue for example doesn't register much in comparison.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, especially not flamebait. Turning a thread about astrophotography into a garden-variety political flamewar, as you do here and downthread, is vandalism on this site.
We ban accounts that break the site guidelines, and have already had to warn you again recently, so would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide more scrupulously by the rules from now on?
Meanwhile the conservative politicians keep talking incessantly about deregulation, but it seems like it only applies to specific regulations that are inconvenient to friends of their, instead of actually attacking the deep cultural problem American society has with bureaucratic overreach. For goodness sake, a lot of actual dictatorships will meddle less in your personal business than the United States.
The US has also a problem with private overreach as in rich property owners closing off huge areas of land completely. This is a huge problem in the west if you do any hiking. In Germany or Britain there usually is a path through but in the US they just close it off.
Sorry for the stupid question (I wasn't following this event): so it's a _real_ car? inside an aircraft (which i imagine the inside is like military cargo ship as seen in movies)?
The first few launches of a new vehicle are risky. Even some of the most mature launch platforms still fail 2-10% of the time after hundreds of launches, but a new platform needs a period to discover all the failure modes that they didn't hypothesize. Usually for the very first proving launch, commercial customers don't want to send anything, and insurers refuse to touch them.
So launch providers typically send a block of concrete, or something similar, and call it a 'Mass Simulator', to prove that the launch vehicle can function with a load that heavy.
Elon Musk literally thought 'Hey, the Tesla Roadster I've been driving would be a cool thing to send into space as a mass simulator.' And so he did. With a mannequin inside a production Tesla spacesuit. Blaring David Bowie the whole way. Aiming roughly at Mars and burning until the propellant runs out.
Starman will be in heliocentric orbit indefinitely.
Musk offered NASA the opportunity to put something meaningful on the test launch. They declined because they view the Falcon Heavy as a competitor.
According to the former Deputy Administrator of NASA, Lori Garver.
"SpaceX offered NASA the opportunity to get a free ride on this first launch. But the space agency viewed commercial development of this rocket as "competition" and refused their offer. Instead, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk put his own Tesla Roadster onboard, turning the event into a brilliant cross-marketing event."
I’m on the same page as Garver on space policy, but I suspect she is wrong about NASA’s (and the Air Force’s) motivation for declining.
Anything that NASA wants to launch into space is an extremely expensive, one-of-a-kind science instrument that a team has spent years of their time on. It would be highly imprudent to launch something like that on a test mission. No one does that. The usual payload for a first flight is a concrete block or other mass simulator.
NASA and the Air Force made the right call in saying no. And Elon made the right call in turning this into a phenomenally inspiring event instead of a boring launch of a concrete block.
You've got to think there are plenty of scientists at NASA who would jump at an offer like "you have two weeks to put an experiment together for this launch, it can't cost more than $50k and you have to be ok with losing it". Just because NASA normally optimizes for expensive projects with years of design time doesn't mean those are the only possible space projects with scientific value. If NASA declined the spot, it's a failure of bureaucracy, not of scientific imagination.
Launching a car is still great though. Scientific data isn't the only possible benefit from a space mission.
I would expect that the former Deputy Administrator of NASA would know people all up and down the current chain of command at NASA. Garver appears to still be active in that world. It makes sense as well, considering NASA's massive investment in the SLS program; they've put billions of dollars into it so far.
She has pretty serious credentials to be saying it:
Hopefully they took the opportunity to put some sensors in the space suit also. I'm not sure what data they could provide without there being a real person[0] in there, but surely something.
Specifically, although it was one of the vacuum-qualified test items, to be a useful flight test they'd have had to set the car up with life support piping into the suit. That's outside the scope of a mass simulator.
- the proving launch mass is only the mass of a Tesla? i mean thats great but i would have expected a much bigger mass for a fully functional satellite. but then again I dont know anything about satellites. how big are those? its definitely not space shuttle big. is the Falcon Heavy able to carry something as big as the space shuttle?
- i thought starman was orbiting mars. how does orbital decay look for something small like starman since it really can just get pulled in or out by basically any nearby planet?
The Space Shuttle had a low earth orbit payload capacity of 27,500 kg. Falcon Heavy can launch 63,800 kg to orbit (in fully expendable mode, where they don't recover the stages).
The Shuttle could have carried more payload if it hadn't had to dedicate a lot of capacity to supporting the human being on board.
With rockets, the further you push something, the more energy it takes. Pushing something the size of a car past the orbit of Mars takes a lot more energy than putting a larger satellite in a lower orbit.
- According to wikipedia, the launch mass of the Falcon Heavy is about 26 tons for a geostationnary launch, which is quite a lot and definitely enough for ISS like launches. I guess either the launch mass is way lower for leaving earth's orbit, or either they just wanted to prove they could ship in something of significant mass without having to pay for all the required fuel.
- For Roadster's orbit, most of the time it will be fine, however some have predicted that it will end up crashing on Venus in a few million years [0]. And that makes me wonder whether the Roadster has been properly disinfected (I very much doubt so).
Also, for one of your original questions, the car is completely alone on its orbit, not enclosed in anything. From what I understand [1] the last booster separated itself from the car before burning during re-entry. You can see clear and beautiful pictures of the car around Earth [2]. Edit : I was wrong, the car is still attached to the last booster. See [3]
Orbit is an eccentric one around the Sun. Perigee (innermost point of orbit) is about Earth's orbit, apogee (outermost point) was hoped for at least Mars' orbit, ended up out in the asteroid belt well past Mars.
> Elon Musk literally thought 'Hey, the Tesla Roadster I've been driving would be a cool thing to send into space as a mass simulator.'
No, the PR team that he hires to make everyone think that he's so cool and with it thought "Hey wouldn't this be a great opportunity for synergy between two distinct brands that are owned by the same guy that's paying us to make him look cool?"
"It doesn't matter. I won't be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them - Franklin, Washington, and the horse - conducted the entire revolution by themselves."
It doesn't have enough mass to do anything like that. It'll burn up in the atmosphere if it does come back to Earth. Currently projections of it coming back to Earth in the next million years are at 6%.[1]
Starman has no more kinetic energy than was put into it by the rockets, so it crashing back on to earth would cause a smaller explosion than what would have happened if the rocket just blew up on the launch pad.
What about gravity assists, harvesting kinetic energy from other planets?
It would make for a good supervillain story, intentionally ramming the Earth with a gravity assisted projectile, but a terrible weapon system. Any conflict likely being already over by the time it does its tour of the solar system and arrives back, so it's probably better to just use the rocket fuel to build a conventional bomb. Or better yet, use nukes.
At launch the car was inside an aircraft, but once in space the aircraft ("fairing") was separated from the rocket, leaving the "car" in space. And by "car" I mean a rocket engine, thrusters, control unit, fuel, payload adapter, and oh yes, a car, all connected and hurtling through space.
I'd guess that technically Elon still owns it. The same could be said for anything fired off into space (e.g. satellites in orbit, landers, etc), that the ownership is maintained until it (or the owner) is destroyed, or the owner says "this isn't mine anymore".
You ask an important question, and if it has no clear internationally agreed upon answer then it'll probably need one as nations and companies fire stuff off into space.
How though? Don't marine salvage rules depend on the original owner no longer being in control of the object (i.e. it's in 'peril')? If that's not the case, then it seems like anyone with the resources could go pick up the Curosity rover, or snatch up the Hubble.
Sending a Roadster past Mars is very cool. But I wonder how the interior trim will stand up to prolonged vacuum, solar heating, etc. Probably not so well, right?
Seems such a waste. Launches are expensive. There isn't something useful to put into heliocentric orbit for which the higher risk of a new rocket is worth the tradeoff for a free launch?
Honestly? Probably not... You're also overlooking the very real utility of PR. Launching a car excites people and makes future "useful" missions more likely.
The images of the roadster in space are historic, those images alone could inspire thousands of young people to explore rocket science or physics as a career who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have. That I think is worth more than just another satellite in space or a science project, they also had to test that it could actually lift heavy objects. This was the perfect item to launch to space.
I upvoted you because it's a good point, but consider it was the first launch ever of this rocket so presumably people were reluctant to put important and expensive payloads on it.
Wouldn't that be heavier by volume, have less mechanical resiliency by volume (no internal rigidity), and have more complicated physics (free flowing, capable of convection/rotation)? Maybe a big block of water ice... but honesty, seems to to have pretty limited utility. If long distance space exploration relies on lifting water vs harvesting it, then it's kind of a nonstarter?
Even cheap satellites are tens of millions of dollars. You can't load it up with cube sats like you might for a LEO launch with extra payload capacity because these would have no way to communicate with us - they'd just be floating out there forever.
Since this is a better source than the space.com article, I'll repeat this here:
For those interested in astrophotography, when asked how to get into the hobby, most astrophotographers will tell you, "don't".
The setup that he's got in the picture is very conservatively $10,000 worth of equipment. Not to mention the time spent in setup, planning, extensive postprocessing, etc. Personally, with a day job and living in a city (light pollution), I find it difficult enough to get time for visual astronomy, and astrophotography takes a lot more time and dedication. All that for something that the big scopes are going to do a lot better.
Not trying to dissuade anyone who's passionate about it. If you're up for the fun and challenge of it, you'll get some nice results for the rest of us to enjoy. :)
Please don't do that. It makes merging threads a real pain because then we have to worry about duplicate comments and who replied to which. For example, I've moved the replies to this one to the other one.
Also, HN is not a place for copy-pasting. On a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity, repetition is the enemy.
