Shpaget

Sounds like a very bad idea.

I have a question I have never been able to find a good answer to. Using our current or near future (50-ish years) technological capabilities, what is the maximum distance at which Earth clone (exact replica with all the radio emission exactly the same) would be detectable using broad search methods (wide enough field one would use to search for something when not knowing where to search) and what is the maximum distance of a tightly focused and pointed antenna (something one would use if he knew exactly where and what to look for)? Almost all the radio emissions we make are directional and pointed at Earth, not sky. Even the omni directional antennas don't radiate up - they emit in a torus like pattern parallel to Earth surface. Those few exceptions that do point up, such as uplinks for communication satellites and coms with interplanetary probes are not only very focused and not particularly high intensity (only strong enough for the probe inside our solar system to receive the signal), but are also tracking the probe across the sky. Even if an alien searching for radio emissions happens to have an antenna pointed at Earth at the exact time the signal arrives and has it dialed to the exact frequency we are emitting our instructions to a probe, the signal received would last for only a fraction of a second before our transmitting antenna pans away from our alien to keep up with our own probe. On the receiving end, that very short spike in signal strength would be unrepeatable, too short to decode and possibly too degraded to even make out the ones and zeros. That being said, http://www.setileague.org/askdr/howmuch.htm As for the existence of intelligent and technologically capable alien life, I have no problem accepting that it is exceedingly rare. It might be as common as millions of civilizations in each galaxy, but I see no problem in it being so rare that only one in a million galaxies have only one planet with Earth-like life on it. To me, exoplanet search using transition method leaves out too many star systems that may not have planets orbiting in the plane that would bring them between their star and Earth, therefore undetectable.

"King Tut was buried with a dagger made of an iron that literally came from space" All the iron came from space. It just a matter of when.

My apologies. I don't own a 1200D, so I'm talking from my experience with other Canon cameras. Apparently 1200D doesn't have manual setting for mirror lock up, so it's not likely you'll find it in the user manual. It does have it as an automated function, though, when using Live View and, according to this forum thread, when you set it to 2 second delay.

Great! Yes, DSLR require some learning. Next little tip I have for you is unless you have a really sturdy tripod, when you take a shot, the mirror flaps, claps and bounces around introducing some shake. In most circumstances it really makes no impact, but when shooting at high magnification (if a penny coin doesn't fit entirely in the frame and higher magnifications) it becomes noticable. In those cases using mirror lock-up feature makes a difference. You might find that usefull if you take macro shots of small leaves.

Can you post one of the pictures you took for your blog, along with the settings you used? It may help us figuring out the problem. In aperture priority you have no control over the shutter speed, except through exposure compensation. The camera will find a suitable setting for whatever f stop you choose. It may also be useful if we could see the wide angle of the setup you use for indoor blog pics.

Oh, i could show you plenty of examples of editing ruining a decent photos. Yeah sure, it could be adjusted a bit, but I liked the reddish tint. In my opinion it goes well with the low light and long shadows, making it look like the picture was taken during a sun set.

I'll just have to do some ballpark math to satisfy my curiosity. Correct me if you notice anything wrong with my calculation. If we take a "standard" neutron star with the mass of 2 solar masses (10^30 kg) and slam it at Sun's escape velocity (620 km/s) into another stationary neutron star we have the kinetic energy of 1/2 (mv^2) = 3,844 * 10^41. Compared to a hypernova energy release of 1* 10^46, it looks like we lack some energy. Fusion of heavy elements take some energy as well, so the collision would be even less energetic.

I use it primarily on 40D, but haven't noticed it being really bad on 5D MkII. Haven't used that combination too much, though. In any case, not a great lens on full frame body is still better than no lens on full frame body (18-55 is EF-S, so it won't fit on full frame at all), furthermore T5/1200D is crop body, so corner and edge issues it might have are cut out anyway. What Elias says is true. A DSLR won't give a drastic improvement, it just gives a much better control over the settings. Using it in Auto is wasting that capability. If you have a static setup and have time, it can easily take a few minutes to set up for that one photo. For example, to make this photo it took me about 10-15 minutes to set it all up (move the trains to where I wanted them, figuring out where to put the light, placing and setting up the tripod, fiddling with the camera settings...). I had a picture in my head how I wanted it to look and then it was a matter of playing with the stuff I had at my disposal until I got the result I wanted. In the end, the final product was what you see. I did not edit the photo at all (well, except resizing it for the web). When I have the time, I always try to get the image in the camera as close to the final product as I can get it, and make a point not to rely on post production for fixing it. Sometimes it's necessary, but if I can, I try to get it right in the camera.

Great! A few more things... When you mount the camera on the tripod, turn off the image stabilization. More often than not, when on tripod it introduces blur. New and more expensive lenses have tripod detection system to turn it off automatically, but not the ones you have, so if you get less than sharp images, that might be your problem. 75-300 should serve you well for birds. It's a decently long lens. 50mm 1,8 is not only brighter than either of your current ones, but it is optically very good (much better than 18-55), it is also very small and light, so caring it around is less of a problem. It does have its own issues like the housing and mount being made out of plastic, so it's less durable should it sturdy on the ground, but I've had mine for a while and it's seen its share of abuse. It's still going strong. Read a few reviews and decide for yourself. Cable release from T80 will not work (at least not without an adapter) on modern EOS cameras. But a cable release really is not expensive, anyway. It's not a mandatory piece of equipments, you can use timer, it's just that I find it sometimes easier to use cable release when shooting macro. You say washed out pictures and earlier you said you got the pictures way too bright. Try using exposure compensation. Put the camera in aperture priority mode, set the aperture to something like 5,6 or 6,3 (it doesn't really matter), crank the ISO to 800 or 1600 and while looking through the viewfinder press the shutter button halfway. The camera should focus, but also on the bottom of the viewfinder a scale will appear (-3..2..1..0..1..2..+3 with a small indicator marker somewhere on the scale). Every camera has somewhat different controls, for your specific take a look at this video For uniformly lit scenes, the marker should be at 0 for optimal brightness. Modern cameras have quite decent light meters, but they only consider the entire scene and take average value. If you have a brightly lit portion and a darker portion of scene, you may need to help the camera out in deciding what to meter for. If your images are coming out too bright or too dark, play around with that setting. Start with zero, if the images are too bright move a bit towards the -, if they are too dark, move towards the +.

The yellowness comes from the wrong white balance setting. The light bulb is the setting to use if you use incandescent lights to light your scene. Other settings include a sun, clouds, little fluorescent tube, flash, shade and the "K" (it may also look like two triangles pointing at each other and a blob between and slightly above them). Use the K, which is a manual setting for the color temperature. Specifically, if the lights you are using, and you should use one type of lights, is more yellowish as with tungsten bulbs, then a low number (roughly 3000 K) is what you need. If you use a more bluish lights such as halogens, you need a higher number (4000 - 5500 K). The K stands for Kelvin and represents the temperature an ideal black body would need to have to glow with that color. It's not something you need to worry about, though, it's just good to know. So, practical advice: Set the white balance to K and a number that gives you OK-ish color with the light you use, don't worry if it's not perfect, we'll fix that. Next place a white paper in the frame and take a shot, proceed to take a shot of your subjects. Now all your photos will have a slightly wrong white balance, but that's what the photo of a piece of paper is for. Since we know that paper is white we can use that to tell the software what should be white. In, for example Lightroom, you can take the eye dropper tool to set the white balance on the paper photo and transfer that same correction data to the entire series of photos you've taken in the same setting. If you don't have Lightroom, Photoshop or a similar software that is made specifically for photo manipulation, go get yourself GIMP or Paint.net. Both are free. In GIMP you can try the Auto white balance tool. It may work properly, depending on the picture. Go to Colors -> Levels and find the Auto button. If it doesn't work properly, pick the rightmost eye dropper tool and find something white in the scene, but not to brightly lit or in shadow. Try the missle eye dropper tool as well. There is also Color -> Auto -> White balance tool, try that too. In any case, I use Lightroom for all my image editing, it's much more powerful and better at these things, but GIMP can do a decent job as well. All that being said, try to nail the white balance setting in camera as precise as you can, using the manual setting K and picking the correct value. It will make your life a lot easier. Auto white balance may also work for you. It's the AWB setting in the camera EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot... Happy birthday! Also, I don't know what kind of lenses your wife got you, but photographing wildlife is not easy and professionals use some quite expensive gear to do it, so don't expect miracles from your setup. Well, unless she dished out some serious cash for the lenses. My advice to you is, unless you have one get yourself a tripod (don't spend less than $150-200 on it, otherwise you'll be wasting your money on anything cheaper and make sure you get one with the ball head), next on a shopping list is a 50 mm f1,8 lens. It's the cheapest Canon lens, but it's excellent. A cheap chinese cable release for under $3 with free shipping should also be on your list (don't worry about knockoffs, there is literally nothing in it except an electrical contact, you're buying the cable with a connector, so genuine Canon is not really needed). If you need macro and can't quite get the magnification you want, you may also like to get yourself extension tubes. Ebay is full of them, just make sure you get the ones with electrical contacts. They are denoted as Autofocus ones. Don't bother with the ones that don't have the contacts.

I thought that we had that question answered already - supernovae. Yes, fusion of elements heavier than iron takes more energy than it releases, but there's plenty of energy in a supernova.

Earth and Moon orbit around their barycenter which is around 4700 km from the center of the Earth. That means that the perimeter of the Earth's orbit is around 30 000 km. With Moon's orbital period of 27 days, we get Earths orbital speed (around barycenter) of around 46 km/h. Compare it to around 30 km/s of orbital speed around the Sun. There is a change, but not significant.

Is NASA still up and running? I mean, they didn't die from laughter?

I used iron ore example since it's abundant, probably among the top three most produced substances and has production data available. As for the surface gravity and density, yes, you're correct.

Are you talking about real life? Escape velocity of Deimos is 5,5 m/s, which means that if you jump, you fall down, eventually. However, don't try to run, you might not be able to get back down. Deimos is, astronomicaly speaking, miniscule. It's barely a speck of dust, but it is still ~12 km in diameter. Even if just a pile of rocks, that is still a huge pile of rocks. To put it into perspective, if all the iron ore the world produces was put on a pile, it would take more than 400 years to make a pile as large as Deimos. So no, we most certainly can not make a space object that would produce significant gravitational pull. As for moving it, we strugle with objects of few tons.

I concur that the vast majority of objects hitting earth are sand grain sized, but wouldn't go so far as to say they are the visible ones.

Sounds like a General Products hull, only not so good.

The atom page starts with If you linkify the word "unit", the Randal's Wikipedia adage returns to being true.

Dunking white hot engines into cold ocean?

Wasn't the original design proposed by Musk supposed to ride on a cushion of air? BTW, it's not hard vacuum, it was something like 1 milibar, IRC.

Also the tech that's been around for more than 150 years.

Actually, I would think that this data is significantly skewed towards large and low orbit planets. They are much easier to detect than smaller ones further out, so I would assume that the ratio of detected / existing large low orbit planets is much closer to 1 compared to detected / existing small high orbit ones. In any case, from http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=415 9 out of 1284, that's almost 1%, that's a huge number of planets.

Yeah, that's how it's gonna end up if I ever decide to go through with it.

This is the problem that's been bothering me for a few years. I always wanted to make a scale model of the solar system, but I can choose to depict either scale distances between planets and the Sun, or their relative sizes. Not both in the same model. Either the orbits would bee too big, or planets too small. I also had the idea of representing the speed of light as a series of LEDs that would progressively light up with the scale speed of light, depicting it traveling from Sun to Earth, but then who wants to sit in front of some LEDs waiting for more than 8 minutes for something to happen. The difference between the sped of light and X-43 is so huge that all I imagine possible for depiction would be a statement that the light from the Moon to Earth travels for less than 1,5 s, while it would take X-43 almost day and a half. Second and a half versus day and a half.