http://dorkmission.blogspot.com/

I always keep a colander handy for just such occasions. I wonder: Would it work better if I covered it in Reynolds Wrap? Of course that would make it useless for draining spaghetti, but I suppose we all have to make sacrifices in the interest of safety.

I find that Ian P. has more reasonable shows that George or Art.

For those who want to hear it, or to hear it again, the web site for C2CAM has archives, for people. Look under Phil Plait’s name, in the archives.

- A. Elk (Miss)

And no, the Hubble is *not* too powerful and if it were pointed at the moon, everything wouldn’t be just a blur. The Moon is a 1/4 million miles away. It is a thousand times as far away as a satellite in low earth orbit is from the earth. Contrary to popular belief, a satellite can’t see people’s faces from orbit but it can see people and cars and trees and buildings and roads and small boats. But the Hubble, which has an optical system very similar in size and resolution to many spy satellites (in fact the design was based on a spy satellite design and it was manufactured by a company that builds the optical systems for spy satellites), is in low earth orbit, essentially at the same distance from the Moon as the surface of the Earth is (what’s a couple of hundred miles one way or the other when looking at something 240,000 miles away?) So the smallest thing it could see on the Moon is
a 1000 times bigger than the smallest thing it could see on the Earth, or 500 ft vs. 6 inches! It can see the same angular size, no matter what distance. If you want to see something smaller, you either need a bigger telescope or get much closer. To improve the resolution from 500 ft to 5 ft,
you would need a telescope 100 times as big, or 240 meters (750 feet!) in diameter. Or you could just get a lot closer. In low orbit around the Moon about 100 miles up, your telescope would be 240,000/100 or 2,400 times closer to the Moon, and could resolve objects 1/2400 as large or about 2 1/2 inches across. So we obviously don’t need a telescope the size of Hubble orbiting the Moon. A much smaller one will do. One 1/10 the size (and because of scaling, about 1/1000th the mass) of Hubble would do nicely. Please wait until next March 2, 2009, when the LRO is scheduled to launch. It has a camera about this size (the same design as the camera in the MRO which takes those amazing pictures of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the Phoenix lander descending under its parachute. Or do a Google search

“We have to act now, to avoid this catastrophy. An even if it doesn’t collide with earth, there will be others in the future that will… I’m hear to tell you, you’d better start listening to me.”

Have you tried going to your local university, to the Physics&Astronomy department, and talking with one or more of the professors there? I’m sure that IF you have the calculations and data to back up your claim, they would probably be interested. All you have to say is, “Please, give me 5 minutes of your time” and show them what you have. Go to every professor there. If they don’t have time for you, then ask for some of the graduate students to take a look at your data. Those are the people most likely to help you, not radio talk show hosts or dumb bloggers, like us.