Shpaget

Since we're sharing... I took this one about a month ago. I used a Canon 70D with a 100-400 mm lens. This is about a 100% crop. Even at 400 mm on a 1.6 crop sensor the Moon does not occupy a lot of frame real estate. In any case, this is by far my best Moon shot. Unfortunately neither the camera, not the lens are mine, so I can't take more of them. That won't stop me from shooting it with my equipment, will it now? I take out my trusty old 40D, put a 100mm macro lens on it, and get nothing usable. Shopping time!! I bit the bullet, shell out a couple of hundred $ and get myself a Samyang 800 mm mirror lens. By the time it arrived in the post, the cloudy days have come and I have to wait a few days to try it. Then the hot weather comes and the atmosphere is boiling, making every picture ugly. Then the new Moon. UGH!! Finally, a couple of days ago, I got a chance to shoot the Moon and this is straight out of the camera (after shrinking the resolution). As you can see, I'm having quite a bit of trouble nailing the focus, or getting it anywhere near where it supposed to be. The magnification is just so large that as soon as I touch the lens to focus, the image starts jumping around. That's why I'm in the process of building some sort of electro mechanical focusing system that I will attach to the lens so I don't have to touch it to focus, and to give me a more precise control. In the meantime, I'm using the first picture as my desktop background. The Samyang also proved capable of resolving planetary disks, well Venus at least.

Just like humans are not enslaving other species for food, work or entertainment?

ido, what kind of physics? Classical (Newtonian, stuff dealing with everyday scenarios, forces, dynamics, etc) Thermodynamics (heat, temperature, volume, pressure...) Relativistic (for when dealing with significant fractions of c) Quantum? Wedge, white it's certainly true that one should be able to see cracpottery for what it is, giving money to charlatans only supports the dissemination of cracked pots.

Wow, the specs of those things!!! Anyway, with the recent development of inflatable heatshields, which I suppose would be cheap to manufacture and launch, it's reasonable to assume that in a not so distant future, it will be feasible to safely deorbit significant amounts of material. As for the ownership. Whoever does the deorbit choses where it will land and has a head start to place recovery in position. I don't see a problem with that aspect. Anyway, I'd say the iron in orbit is much more valuable metal than platinum on Earth, if you can have lots of it in orbit. The only reasonable way to construct large space stations and establish permanent space population is to have a large supply of iron already in orbit.

2015 is turning out to be quite a year for space enthusiasts. So many interesting projects going on!

The company would rip them a new one. Governments can't just go about destroying private property. Especially outside their jurisdiction. Just like they do with drug cartel money and bank accounts, right? Yeah, right. Double Irish arrangement

Tell me one thing. If a private company launches a mining rig, lands it on an asteroid, proclaims the asteroid its property and warns that they will point a couple of autocannons at anything that approaches their asteroid within less than 10 000 km, then proceed to sell the mined materials (water, LOX & LH2, to make the discussion simple) in LEO, what can any governmental organization do about it? The worst thing it can do is wave a finger at the corp and say "Bad corporation!". Then they will proceed to buy the fuel in bulk, because that's the most sensible thing to do.

Unregulated is by definition without regulation, so, quite literally, anything and everything goes. None of those have a say in the matter.

No, not without consequence. The owner has every right to defend his stuff, having signed the treaty or not. I would also like to point out that it's the countries that sign treaties, not private companies.

I'll refer you to my previous post http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129847-Private-ownership-of-mineable-asteroids-moved-into-Earth-orbit?p=2103954&viewfull=1#post2103954 A foreign company that already has space capability (SpaceX, VirginGalactic, whatever) sets up a daughter company in a country that hasn't signed the treaty.

That makes no sense. What plane with what wings, carrying how much cargo/fuel and how many passengers?

That's a treaty. It applies only to those that signed it.

That's a pretty sail, you've got there!

What laws?

Outer Space Treaty applies only to the companies registered in the countries that are part of the Outer Space Treaty. So a company registered and launching from a country which is not part of it has the freedom from the treaty. A company from Switzerland has some plans to do space stuff from Croatia (who has not signed OST). http://www.s-3.ch/en/home/2015/02/16/official-inauguration-of-swiss-space-systems-croatia That would give a Swiss company a possible loophole. I would also like to point out that since asteroids are not part of any country, no present laws apply to them. The first entity that arrives on an asteroid can claim it as property and just shoot any newcomer under the charge of piracy, just like cargo ships are protected by private security companies which shoot at Somalian pirates on sight.

Computerphile recently did a couple of videos on the matter.

The same was true when the first transistor was made. It was huge compared to a modern one and not very practical, certainly not for computation purposes. It took years to miniaturize them enough to make them a viable technology for computers. Why would you expect quantum computers to skip the initial steps?

First we need to define sentience. From Oxford dictionary: which is a rather poor definition for the purposes of this discussion. A microcontroller with a simple light dependent resistor or a pressure plate is "able to perceive or feel things". Would such a device be called sentient?

And speaking of apparent sizes and angular diameter, Pluto is about 0,09'', while Helix nebula is 22' (22' x 60 = 1320''). So, Helix nebula has about 15 000 times larger apparent diameter.

But you're not using a telescope for one specific object. New Horizons had only a few hours to take pictures of Pluto at their highest resolution, and a few weeks at the resolution higher than what we've had until then. HST has been taking pictures for more than 25 years, and will hopefully operate for some time. Imagine if we haven't had space telescopes when it was discovered that the Shoemaker - Levy was about to hit the Jupiter. There would have been no time to launch a probe to take nice pictures. Since there were telescopes around, we just pointed them and took as many pictures as we pleased. Yes, probes are awesome and they provide some otherwise unobtainable data, but a telescope is a much more versatile instrument. - - - Updated - - - Because Pluto is tiny, while DSOs are absolutely huge.

They look a bit bored.

Tuned in and the first thing the guy says is "Two minutes to launch." Timing FTW.

That's so last decade.

From the technical point of view, Minecraft is a horrible game.

And some very weird Coriolis effects when every time you sit down, stand up or make any vertical change in position. Imagine having to fix a broken flux capacitor, you lift your hand, but it moves to the side all by itself.