I feel like this is, in part, similar to strategies for software companies have always used. Offer free software tools to students (some CAD, GIS, Math, general office suites) and the students learns as much/more about which icons to click on than the underlying subject. All these things are valuable tools. I learned drafting in the days of pencil and paper but cannot imagine a world that without CAD. AI is on a different plane but it is interesting (I think also good) to see such public push back now.
My family was on a party line in the late 1970s and I remember picking up the phone as a kid and being surprised that someone was already talking on the phone. My grandparents were on a party line and I remember going to pick up the phone when it rang and being told not to. The phone rang in a pattern of long and short rings to tell who the call was for.
Things have certainly changed since then. Just about every call was long distance as we lived on the wrong side of some line. We only had about 6 television stations to watch. Just a generation or two before there was no electricity in the area. I will not say I miss "the olden days" but I do miss that variety in life.
https://www.nand2tetris.org/ has been my favorite "computers are not magic" course for a long time. It is a much more hardware oriented program than this post though.
A very peaceful reaction, I believe, would likely be a better reaction. An aggressive or violent reaction will only bring on more violence and even support for more repression. It is not ideal but in the long run it is really the only answer.
This administration is dying for an excuse to go full martial law.
They specifically chose a blue state to carry these attacks out in so they don’t risk their political capital in states like Texas, which has 4x the immigrant population of MN.
They’re hoping people get mad and react so they can come in and clamp down.
you are free to create your own as NASA observatories release their imagery free to the public as they were paid for with the public's money from taxes. the problem with creating timelapse videos would be if the platform viewed the same object at least annually to see the changes.
I have often thought about looking through archives but has not been easy for me (don' know how to) search though years of data for multiple views (years apart) of the same objects.
I have been wondering about binary star systems. I think some of them are human scale orbital periods.
I did this for SOHO to create timelapse footage of a specific filter. It was the first time I weaponized the use of cUrl (I guess officaly making me a hacker at the same time). The SOHO archive is very easy to parse as it has a very structured folder layout. I would hope that the other platform archives are similar.
Part of the reason you don't see them more is because commercial satellite mega-constellations (like Starlink) work against long exposure times by literally clouding and brightening our view of space. (1)
Not really sure how this has anything to do with space based platforms like Chandra (which is x-ray) and Hubble which is well above Starlink. Also, Starlink is only a couple of years old to be problematic, but the ground based observatories have had clean skies for decades before.
This just really feels like someone trying to interject a pet peeve. Whether the peeve is valid or not, it's not the problem here.
It's relevant because ground based satellites add observational capacity. If a ground based telescope can't get a good view, that's when you queue up Chandra or James Webb (Hubble is not the same type of telescope, and it's workload is not interchangeable).
Astronomers have thousands of interesting things they would like to point their telescopes at. There are thousands of capable ground stations that could take the easy targets, and only 2 x-ray satellites which should be used only for the highest value targets where absolute clarity and resolution is required. But if you start obstructing those ground stations, the workload must be taken over by just 2 satellites.
Ground stations are valued because they help solve the capacity planning problem. More usable telescopes === more observation time. Having more ground stations frees up the 2 satellite telescopes for truly stunning shots.
Hubble is actually the same altitude as Starlink, 340 mi. There have been proposals to boost Hubble to higher altitude so it doesn't reenter next decade.
But since Hubble doesn't look towards the Earth, it won't see as many as from Earth.
Astronomical objects that visibly change in human timescales are pretty rare. A naked-eye visible supernova remnant was one of the first clues that challenged the idea that the heavens were static, permanently set by God.
One of my favorite examples of astronomical timelapse is the motion of objects around SagA*. That I think might be the first example I saw. I'm not sure if they set out to make multiple observations specifically to map this motion or if it was something saw they could do from existing data. S
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