There seems to be a bit of media hype about Mars these days. Sure and its a remarkable event. I was chatting with a techno/geek friend who happens to among other things sell telescopes and he commented that he really hated it all, hated, hated, hated. I was rather surprised as he seemed to be moving a lot of stock. "Sure, and its all going to be returned because its broken". "Broken?" "Yep" Now I am a bit confused as he sells a range from 100$US to 2500$US scopes of various models (some even with USB interface) so they can't all be "broken". He explained that he's been selling a lot to folk that are going to go out in the backyard and look at mars with their kids. "IF they can find the bloddy thing in the first place they ain't exactly going to be impressed with spending 150$US to see something the size of a pencil viewed on end (he does sell at a discount) and they are gonna be really pissed to spend 2500$US to see somthing the size of the tip of their little finger"16 responses total.
Interesting consequence - what other commodities have created a similar flood of returns?
At one point several years ago in the PDA business (I think it was right after the second generation WinCE devices came out (the generation before Microsoft introduced the "PocketPC" hardware standards..)) the return rate on a number of the best-selling WinCE handhelds was reported to be in the 60-70% range. With their color screens and windows-like GUI widgets the WinCE devices looked sexier in the stores than the competing devices from Palm and apparently quite a few of them were sold. Interface problems, lackluster software, and really poor battery life were blamed for the surprisingly high return rates. (For what it's worth, in my opinion Microsoft's and their licensees' offerings have improved considerably since that time, while Palm's development has lagged. The balance has undoubtedly changed. At the time, though, the state of the competition was considerably different.) It wouldn't surprise me to find that a lot of products have >70% return rates. For most such products I would imagine this is expected and built into the retail price, but I'd assume that every now and then retailers get blindsided..
Hype always does some good and some bad. IMHO, this one's good. I hope it will draw a lot of people to buy telescope's and view the sky above. After the hype's gone, the number of amateur astronomers would've gone up. Also, webcam and digital cameras have brought astrophotography within the reach of almost every amateur astronomer. No longer do you need to be a pro at using a SLR and developing films. To me, that means more eyes will be focussed on the sky and more pictures will be taken and if we are lucky, more stuff will be discovered.
I think the "pencil" view thing is exaggerated. I bought a 114mm dia / 1000mm FL Skywatcher telescope for about $160 after discounts. I got a 2x magnification barlow lens free with it. With a 4mm eyepiece, I can view the craters on the moon, the polar ice caps of the mars and a few other geographical features of mars!!! And I just started 4 days back. Experienced amateurs say that as you look at the same object, day after day, you learn to see more features. So unless the moms and dads buy mickey-mouse telescopes, I expect lots of kids to get attracted to this hobby.
(That's how Lowell "discovered" the Martian canals - by looking at it day after day.)
There probably *would* have been a massive return of portable generators after January 1, 2000, but it's been said that most were sold under the condition of "no return" after 12/31/99.
Not all of them were. I bought one beforehand, from a large national chain with a liberal return policy, and returned it unused afterwards.
Re #5: It appears that he was actually "staring" at the blood vessels in his own retina (ultra-small aperture, relatively bright light source; same basic scheme as an opthomologist uses).
His drawings don't look much like the retinal rete I see at the opthomologist - and what should have been a known quantity to Lowell. I don't know what he was actually seeing, but he came to the conclusion patterns were consistent and changed with the Martian rotation. He was probably just making too much out of the vague patterns that re visible on Mars from here.
Probably. The human brain's visual centers are sort of optimized to pick out and enhance patterns and edges. If you look long enough at something essentially random it's easy to see patterns that aren't there.
So when did someone come up with the idea of *taking photographs* through the scope? Before or after Lowell's "discovery"?
I think it took a while for photography to get good enough. Telescope mounts had to be good, too, since to get a clear picture with the long exposures that are necessary you have to keep the object stationary in the field of view.
Here's a short piece from http://users.ce.net/users/alemos/html/lowell.htm: "Lowell: No other recent scientist and researcher has had an effect on the minds and hopes of mankind to find life on another planetary body other than on earth more than Percivel Lowell. A businessman and traveler in the Far East before becoming obsessed with Schiaparelli's canals (canali or channels) on Mars, Lowell founded an observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona which bears his name. Particularly suited to study the heavens, this location at a higher altitude, took advantage of a thinner atmosphere, undisturbed by lights and clouds and thus produced clearer images. For more than a decade he charted what he perceived as the crisscross markings of Mars. Lowell maintained that these markings were canals that had been constructed by intelligent beings. His claims were vehemently denied by other astronomers and the eventual interpretation of the photographic images gathered by the Mariner probes which imaged Mars in the 60s seemed to disprove his assumptions. It is strange, though, that his assistant Mr. C. O. Lampland was able to capture 38 of these canals on a single photographic plate (1905). The images seemed to be of such quality as to precipitate an award for the effort by the British Royal Photographic Society. Lowell did contribute information that was acceptable to the scientific community however. He correctly predicted the position of a perturbing planet beyond Neptune which was later discovered by Clyde Tombaugh and named Pluto. The first two letters in the name for this new planet (PL) were in honor of Percival Lowell."
Re #12: It took much longer for photography to get *fast* enough. The atmosphere doesn't stand still for very long in most places, and bad "seeing" is a big issue to this day. No matter how sharp your image is in each split second, if it keeps moving during your exposure it averages to a blur.
Just as important is the chaotic distribution of refractive indices in the turbulent atmosphere. Images are blurred if even they could be taken instantaneously.
Closest in a lifetime is quite the euphamism.
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