And in the Big News today from a Faith Perspective, there’s a Big Jewish Festival underway. Happy Hanukkah everybody!
Here we celebrate the defeat of the extremist Greeks, who wanted to introduce other Invisible Magic Friends and ways of thinking. Say no to such extremism.
Then there are the dangers of conspiracy theories. Apparently, one third of adults think the world is controlled by an unseen, inscrutable entity. Phew, what a bunch of loonies!
The solution is education. Teaching people that the world is really controlled by the one, true, Invisible Magic Friend.
And in the Big News today from a Faith Perspective, volunteers. Some volunteers, the ones that matter, are inspired by Faith. If it wasn’t for their Faith they’d just sit eating crisps in front of the TV all day.
The Temporarily Visible Third of the Invisible Magic Friend volunteered to save us from what he was going to do to us. Wasn’t he great.
I normally stack lots of short exposures. Due to the limitations of my telescope, I need to spend a lot of time re-centering whatever I’m taking pictures of. This is OK for star clusters or galaxies or nebulae. I can spend hours collecting as many frames as I like. These objects barely change over a period of hundreds of years. So I did the same with Jupiter.
This picture was taken on 21 Dec at about 2 am. It’s a stack of about ten frames. It’s OK, but I thought I could improve it by stacking more exposures. But it seemed that the more frames I tried to stack, the worse the result became. What’s going wrong?
It took me ages to figure out the reason: Jupiter has changed! It may seem obvious, but the planet Jupiter rotates. In fact it rotates fast. Despite being large enough to swallow 1,000 earths, it’s day only lasts 10 hours.
This adds another complication when you’re trying to photograph it. For a planet that’s rotating fast it means I don’t have much time. Here’s the same picture on the right. This time contrasted with another, taken 20 mins earlier.
The planet does a full rotation of 360 degrees in 10 hours. 36 degrees in an hour. 12 degrees in 20 mins. 12 degrees is a huge amount.
Even in these low resolution, blurry images you can see that cloud features have moved significantly in 20 mins. Here’s the same comparison again. This time there’s a yellow rectangle highlighting a small collection of three greyish clouds against a brown background. The same three clouds are visible on the right hand image too but have clearly moved.
If only the planet would just stay still while I photograph it!
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, by coincidence on Christmas Day. Forced there by the evil Romans, who did absolutely nothing for them. They were then forced to become refugees. It says it all, without contradiction, in the Big Book of Magic Stuff.
Even today, a small Catholic community persists in a region taken over by the wrong religion.
And there has been peace on Earth ever since. Especially in Bethlehem and the surrounding regions.
Even unbelievers give gifts at Christmas. But we Christians give to the poor. And we never tell anybody about it. We give to the homeless, the orphans, the elderly and bereaved. We never tell anyone about this either.
We do this because one third of the Invisible Magic Friend was born in a stable near the Winter Solstice. If he hadn’t been then we just wouldn’t bother with all that useless lot of hangers on.
Platitude of the Day 