The Moon and Venus 9:30am Nov-5-2007

[dpab]

Took this at work this morning , had to, they think I am loosing it at work when I show them Venus and no one see's its there .
Well Im sure you can see it .
Up and to the left.
enjoy
Dave

[ozzmoziz]

i see it clearly whats wrong with them hehe

[sunofsky]

that's great, very cool window of the photo, moon gives a coolness for our eyes, and blue background also adding more comfortable look, thanks.

[Buldric]

Hehe, thanks for the photo.

However, I can see whay they might not be able to see it. We, as astrophotographers,(some of of amatures, yet nonetheless) Have learned what to be looking for, and how to pick out near invisible objects. So something like that, is easy for us to see. However, to someone who has not trained this ability, they may mistake what is actually venus, to be some sort of "hot pixel", "dust", or simply a poorly resolved picture. We must spread the word of astronomy everywhere! But, above all, we must acknowledge, that not everyone has fine tuned some abilities we have, and we must hit them in the face a few times with something in order for them to realize it.

A great example of this is a story of mine from a little while ago! I was out observing one night, and a nieghbor decided to come and see what I was doing, and what exactly I had set up. Of course, I joyously told him what I was doing, in every attempt to get him interested, as I do with everyone I come across! My attempts suceeded, and I was able to get him to look through the scope, which I had pointed at M27(Dumbell). I had a fairly low magnification in it, as I was just "surfing" around at the time, and so I went to my lense case to grab my narrow band filter and a stronger eyepiece. I turned around just in time to stop him from trying to "clean" my correcter lense, as according to him "there was some kind of large smudge over it"

So, even though any of us would have recognized it as the beautiful exploded remains of a star, known as the dumbell nebula, to someone who did not know, it was merely a smudge of the lense. We must explain with more than just pictures. For it can only be worth a thousand words, if the viewer knows what the words it represents mean. I know now to explain that what they are seeing IS the nebula. Some people expect to see hubble pictures, and some people expect to see nothing really at all. We must let them know what it actually looks like, lest they scratch our telescopes.

[ozzmoziz]

i know how u feel must folks kind of are clueless to whats really going on , and its fun too show them a few things here and there, just for example i was at work and showed a few people a star comparison video and poeple just freaked out lol its like omg i did t think the univers was that big!!!...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfs1t-2rrOM

[Blue Fire]

Yep, videos like that one on youtube can be quite humbling, ... if you just stop and think about it for while. Unfortunately, a lot of people I know just don't think about it at all. And some others would rather think how "big" they are. Perspective - it's all about perspective . . . it can be enlightening, or it can be limiting. I tend to side with those that appreciate the cosmos.