Hobby Thread - August 9, 2025 [Galileo Rex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. Good news! The Ace of Spades Wheel of HobbiesTM) is back in service. We gave the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies(TM) a spin and it landed on telescopes and astronomy photography.

I have faith that you can either find something in the content that resonates or contribute your own hobbying interests.

You might be tempted to say "I have no hobbies or interests." Bah. Dig around in the content and soak in the comments. Be curious. Glad you're here.

What are you hobbying?

As per usual Hobby Thread etiquette, keep this thread limited to hobbying. All (legal) hobbying is welcome. However, politics, current events and religious debates can live in threads elsewhere. Pants are optional. Puns are welcome and encouraged.

TRex has been detailed elsewhere for a super secret special assignment, so the hobbying Horde is its own tonight. Thanks to scampydog for getting this posted. Play nice. Don't be a troll and do not feed the trolls.

TRex does not own a telescope and has only made modest efforts at photographing the night sky. The night sky, however, has always held interest. As a youngster, I remember visiting the Planetarium and watching the projections on the ceiling. It looked mysterious but was abstract. I also couldn't wrap my small dino-brain around things like billions and trillions of stars and galaxies. Still can't. Looking through a telescope and seeing the rings of Saturn somehow was completely different. Likewise for seeing the details and shadows of craters on the moon.

What is really out there? I mean, other than aliens.

Perhaps at some point, my hobbying will involve a real telescope and a real effort at taking pictures of the night sky and its celestial residents. For now, we take inspiration from polynikes on last week's Hobby Thread:

Looking to the Horde to help polynikes spend his money. Also looking to the Horde in general to help with the hobbying theme this week. Are you wise in the ways of telescopes? Are you wise in the ways of where to go for truly dark skies? Are you wise in the ways of pointing cameras to the night skies? Does your hobbying otherwise involve the stars and planets in some way?

As said above, TRex is not wise in the ways of telescope acquisition. These links seems reasonable and lower on the clickbait scale, but think of them as samples.

The 13 Best Telescopes: 300+ Owned, Tested and Compared

If you're going to get serious, you need a backyard observatory. There are many backyard observatory videos on the interweb, so this is more of a sample than an endorsement:

How to photograph the Milky Way:

How about further away... Andromeda Galaxy! (Fwiw, I thought this video was well done.)

NASA's Lunar Photography Guide has a lot of helpful tips for taking photos of the moon.

Destin has a crazy story about shooting photos of an eclipse:

Not sure why, but I've always found lunar reflectors fascinating.

There are five reflecting panels on the Moon. Two were delivered by Apollo 11 and 14 crews in 1969 and 1971, respectively. They are each made of 100 mirrors that scientists call "corner cubes," as they are corners of a glass cube; the benefit of these mirrors is that they can reflect light back to any direction it comes from. Another panel with 300 corner cubes was dropped off by Apollo 15 astronauts in 1971. Soviet robotic rovers called Lunokhod 1 and 2, which landed in 1970 and 1973, carry two additional reflectors, with 14 mirrors each. Collectively, these reflectors comprise the last working science experiment from the Apollo era.

Scientists have been using reflectors on the Moon since the Apollo era to learn more about our nearest neighbor. It's a fairly straightforward experiment: Aim a beam of light at the reflector and clock the amount of time it takes for the light to come back. Decades of making this one measurement has led to major discoveries.

One of the biggest revelations is that the Earth and Moon are slowly drifting apart at the rate that fingernails grow, or 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) per year. This widening gap is the result of gravitational interactions between the two bodies.

What is your light pollution situation? Are you familiar with the Bortle scale?

What is the Borlte scale?

Apparently this is a popular book for finding things in the night sky:

Any other recommendations?

I know what you're thinking. "I'm into all of this, but it would be great if there was some kind of local gathering of like-minded enthusiasts that I could learn from and share stories with..." How about a local astronomy club?

Here you go: ASTRONOMY CLUB DIRECTORY

If you're in the Columbia, South Carolina neighborhood, stop by the South Carolina State Museum and check out the world-class collection of antique telescopes and astronomical instruments. The telescopes and instruments total more than 200 objects dating back to 1730. Of the more than 60 telescopes in the group, 23 are fine examples of 19th and early 20th century American-made telescopes.

If we didn't have a polynikes painting, this photo would have been at the top of this post.

When 42-year-old Valerio Minato woke up on December 15, 2023, he said he felt "agitated." For six years he had been trying to capture a photo showing the perfect alignment of the Monviso, a mountain in the Alps in Northern Italy, the Basilica of Superga, near Turin, and the moon. Having very few opportunities throughout the year where these three elements line up, Minato had just a small chance of getting the perfect shot.

Minato's research, patience, and dedication throughout the years paid off. He has been photographing Turin and its fascinating skyline and monuments for 12 years now and started trying to get this shot in 2017.

"I started going around this area of hills northeast of Turin where you could see Monviso and Superga [a hill that hosts the Basilica of the same name on top]. After finding the three or four points where these two are perfectly aligned, I started to evaluate - let's say complicate my life - to try and take a very different picture from the ones I had already shot," Minato said, smiling.

Other than researching the perfect locations, Minato had to study carefully the lunar phases that would allow for this alignment. He explained there were only around two days a year when he could attempt the photo and in some years the alignment didn't occur at all.

This is the opposite of amateur astronomy, but seems like it needs to be in here somewhere.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.

Webb's image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies, including some seen when the universe was less than a billion years old. This deep field, taken by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours - achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope's deepest fields, which took weeks.

This image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster.

Light from these galaxies took billions of years to reach us. We are looking back in time to within a billion years after the big bang when viewing the youngest galaxies in this field. The light was stretched by the expansion of the universe to infrared wavelengths that Webb was designed to observe.

Speaking of NASA and this topic, seems like we should acknowledge the passing of Jim Lovell:

Did you know the Vatican has a telescope in Arizona? Me neither.

The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) is an astronomical research complex operated by the Vatican Observatory Research Group (VORG) in collaboration with the University of Arizona.

The telescope is located in southeastern Arizona (roughly a three hour drive north east of Tuscon) where sky conditions are among the best in the world for astronomical observations. It was dedicated in 1987 and opened in 1993.

Photo credits: The Vatican Observatory.

Apparently private donations and a foundation provide the bulk of the funding. I'm guessing they'd say they're doing serious science stuff. They're probably looking for aliens just like everyone else in the southwest with an observatory or satellite dishes pointed at the sky.

Did you miss the Hobby Thread last week? We did a fishing theme. The comments may be closed, but you can re-live the content.

Notable comments from last week:

Words of wisdom:

"Because despite all our troubles, when things are grim out in that wide round world of ours, that's when it's really important to have a good hobby." Posted by: tankascribe at June 22, 2024 07:41 PM (HWxAD).

Would TRex include a mystery click behind the top photo in a Hobby Thread? Maybe... If you have trouble finding something in the content or comments that resonates with you, hijack the thread for your hobbying as you see fit. We will feature a different theme next time. What are you hobbying? We love showing off Horde hobbying. Send thoughts, suggestions and photos of your hobbying to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Do mighty things.

posted by Open Blogger at 05:30 PM

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