Re: Planet X: the UNWISE Astronomer

Jeff Root (jeff2@freemars.org) wrote: 
> Nancy Lieder asked:
>> My question is, is a scope adjust for NEAR or FAR?  
>> The astronomer lost it when he tweaked the nobs!  
>> He wasn't told this was NEAR, a 9 Sun-Pluto distances, 
>> etc.  So .. did he adjust for a better look, looking FAR 
>> and thus lose it?
>
> Any object more than 1000 feet away is at infinity, for
> the purpose of focusing, so astronomical telescopes 
> have no need of or provision for focusing at different 
> distances.
 
David Tholen wrote: 
> Light from objects at astronomical distances is all 
> essentially parallel rays, and hence focus at the same 
> place by the telescope.  That is to say, everything 
> except very nearby things such as the Moon will 
> require the same focus setting, essentially at infinity.

Tnank you both.  So I have NO explanation for the operator being
surprised enough to, as reported:
    "blurted out a loud "WOAH!"  He then got really excited and 
    said he saw SOMETHING but it just dissapeared, like he 
    lost sight of it as he was adjusting and that it was very 
    strange that he couldn't find it again.  He wrote some 
    stuff down and mumbled something about "must have 
    been a reflection" but still sounded very surprised.  He 
    indicated that there was definitely something there and
    waived on one of the backyard astronomers to take a 
    look (there were three others beside me, the operator, 
    and two backyard observers).  While the backyard 
    observer was looking, the operator referred to his star 
    chart and was thoroughly perplexed that there wasn't 
    any comet or large object listed."

Except that he was scanning the area at first, not looking DIRECTLY at
it, and saw it, but when he focused, he lost it, or so he thought.
Here's what Kahuna (no dummy) said about viewing from the Side of the
Eye, (now on the Troubled Times web site:
http://www.zetatalk.com/theword/tword03s.htm)

    This is not so much a "trick", it is a fact of how your 
    eyeball is physically constructed. What should be patently 
    obvious is that your vision is not the same in your entire 
    field of view, all you need to do is look out of your 
    eyeballs and notice that you cannot see something clearly 
    at the side, but you can when you look directly at it. The 
    most important thing to remember is that your eyes are 
    not TV cameras and the operation principals are 
    different in meaningfull ways. Much of what you attribute
    to the eye actually occurs in the brain, and in reality, 
    distinguishing between the two is an arbitrary thing 
    driven more by anatomy. The outermost peripheral 
    vision is almost exclusively rods, with just enough 
    cones to notice that there is some color there. The rods 
    are ganged together with the circuitry in the retina 
    which does three things. 

     1. the aggregate sensivivity is improved because you 
        are adding the response together 
     2. there is a trememdous loss of detail 
     3. you optic nerve is smaller than your arm because 
        not all points connect to your brain via a separate 
        channel. 

    As you get closer to the center the ganging stops and 
    the number of cone cells increases (color sensitive cells). 
    In the most central region, called the fovea, where you 
    have the greatest sensitivity to detail, there are almost 
    no rods at all, only color sensors. At the very center of 
    the fovea, there is a surprising lack of blue cones, so at
    the very center all you can see is red, yellow, orange, 
    green (which "just happens" to be spectrally matched 
    to the predominate color of the sun).
         The Small Kahuna