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Do you place your telescope at the top of the mountain with boulders falling away from it in all directions or at the bottom of a crater with boulders falling t
by jakear 5y ago
Do you place your telescope at the top of the mountain with boulders falling away from it in all directions or at the bottom of a crater with boulders falling towards it from all directions?
- burnished 5y agoThe latter. Adversity encourages strength.
- tux3 5y agoOne statement often applied to others, seldom for oneself. People don't choose adversity, they only like to dispense it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoPositioning of telescopes is about "how good is the view from here?" it favours hills, but that is not driven by the hazards. However the hazards up on hills are more typically those of exposure, altitude and isolation, not incoming gravitationally-propelled objects.
- ncmncm 5y ago"How do you keep warm, up on a mountain top all night?" "We don't."
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoI learned that at University; the students who were doing Astronomy / Astrophysics would make pilgrimages to the Big Telescope, which was located over 200 miles away, in a remote and sparsely populated area on a high plateau, known for clear skies, low rainfall and cold nights. Cold cold nights. Not much for students to do outside of work either; the nearest town had 3K people, whose interests included farming and churchgoing.
- WithinReason 5y agoL2 is neither a mountain or a crater, it's more like a saddle point
- jakear 5y agoThanks, didn’t know that. Turns out there are no “crater” Lagrange points, so the analogy doesn’t really hold. But that also means there are no stable Lagrange points, so the question doesn’t hold either!
- WithinReason 5y agoIf by crater you mean having a "local minimum", then the L4 and L5 points are actually like that and can even capture asteroids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body)
- jakear 5y agoHm, I cannot unify that claim with this diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#/media/File:Lagrange_points2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#/media/File:Lag...
- harpersealtako 5y agoFrom that wiki page: >Although the L4 and L5 points are found at the top of a "hill", as in the effective potential contour plot above, they are nonetheless stable. The reason for the stability is a second-order effect: as a body moves away from the exact Lagrange position, Coriolis acceleration (which depends on the velocity of an orbiting object and cannot be modeled as a contour map)[20] curves the trajectory into a path around (rather than away from) the point.[20][22] Because the source of stability is the Coriolis force, the resulting orbits can be stable, but generally are not planar, but "three-dimensional": they lie on a warped surface intersecting the ecliptic plane. The kidney-shaped orbits typically shown nested around L4 and L5 are the projections of the orbits on a plane (e.g. the ecliptic) and not the full 3-D orbits.