New Forest Observatory ®

The Sadr Region of Cygnus

Posted on September 10, 2023 by Greg Parker

I had my first imaging session of the new season on the array last night using the 200mm lenses and the ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras.

The bright star Sadr sits in the centre and it also sits with the Butterfly nebula. Bottom right is the crescent nebula, and above Sadr, the blue region, is NGC6914 a reflection nebula (the only patch of blue in a sea of red as I call it). And that reflection nebula caused some issues.

Last night’s data was 12 x 20-minute subs (4-hours) with the ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras and an Optolong L-Enhance filter. The Optolong filter is a superb addition to a one-shot colour (OSC) camera as it provides narrowband H-alpha AND OIII filtration. However, with this image this comes at a cost, as a reflection nebula is broadband blue, so the filter effectively removes the nebula from the image. What to do?

Fortunately I had previously taken unfiltered data of the region using an SX M26C OSC CCD, and in that image the blue reflection nebula was clearly seen. So I added the 3 hours and 20-minutes of earlier unfiltered data to last night’s 4 hours of filtered data, to get the result in the image.

I hope you like it.

The Transitory Nature of “Race”

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Greg Parker

I am currently reading Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” and it brought to my attention something I had completely missed when I wrote about the fallacy of “Race”.

As I said in an earlier post, if we were to exist 30,000 years into the future (yes I know we’re not likely to make the next 50, but keep with it) then when we are all brown-skinned with Oriental features, what “Race” are we? Well just the one, whatever you want to call it – the Human Race? And if “Race” is some time-dependent quantity, does “Race” have any real meaning at all?

I thought this was pretty clever thinking until a couple of days ago (with Hitchens’ book) when I realised, I had completely missed the whole point.

Instead of going 30,000 years into the future, what about simply going back to our “Out of Africa” excursion? What “Races” were about then? Well, just the one of course, the one that ended up colonising the whole planet.

I find it extremely interesting that we started life as just one “Race”, and if we last any great length of time, we will end life as just one “Race” as well. It is only in this difficult intermediate period that intellectually challenged Homo Sapiens can point to other Homo Sapiens with environmentally-changed features and claim they are of a different “Race”.

I have always felt that there is only one “Race” the Human Race, and those that differ from us feature-wise because that is where that particular pocket of Homo Sapiens settled and formed a local community, are of no real consequence. Which of course is not the same thing at all as zero importance, when it comes to the genocidal tendencies of Homo Sapiens.

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A Super-Universe?

Posted on August 8, 2023 by Greg Parker

Webb results imply to me that there is an overall “Super-Universe” of infinite size and infinite lifetime – and our particular Universe is just one of many (infinite maybe?) sitting within it. Little Universes (like our own) are popping up all the time within the infinite Super-Universe. So the question of what came before the Big Bang is not an unanswerable question – it is the Super-Universe. And the answer as to what lies beyond the boundary of our Universe is not nothing, once again it is the Super-Universe. Our Universe is not creating spacetime at its boundary as it expands, it is flowing into an already existing spacetime, the spacetime of the Super-Universe. I’m pretty sure this theory does not go against any cosmological observations. If it does – please let me know. The Super-Universe would therefore also be the Absolute Infinite or Ein Sof as discussed by Rudy Rucker in “Infinity and the Mind”.

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Webb Telescope and Halton Arp

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Greg Parker

Here’s a BIG prediction for you. Remember you saw it here first. The way things are developing with the Webb telescope observations – I predict that Halton Arp’s theories (re quasars) are going to be confirmed sometime soon.

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From 7 years ago.

Posted on July 1, 2023 by Greg Parker

More than 100 Nobel laureates tell Greenpeace International: Stop opposing genetically modified foods that could improve nutrition around the world.

As a “scientist” I have a real problem with this – the problem being that I agree with Greenpeace and I completely disagree with the Nobel laureates. Here’s the issue. If a mutant organism comes into the world (naturally), first off it only comes along as one. Then it has to pass the survival test to see if it can get along with the rest of the environment, then it needs to reproduce and the offspring need to go through the same process. Taking a considerable length of time for a new organism to get established is a big safety valve for the rest of the environment.

Now you decide to plonk down a WHOLE FIELD of genetically modified crop. It hasn’t had to run the survival gauntlet where it is tested by Nature to see if it is o.k. to be let loose or not – and instead of just one mutant let loose, you are letting loose millions of mutants, and doing so in an incredibly short length of time.

The (Darwinian) evolutionary experiment has been running on this planet for billions of years, and it seems to be a pretty good way to test out any new organisms. Do these 100 Nobel laureates really have the gall to say that there will not be ANY way there can be ANY serious repercussions from letting loose a man-made mutation into the environment? Do they really know every possible permutation and combination of the ways the newly (man-made) mutated organism can interact with the WHOLE of the environment? Personally I don’t think they have a clue – clever as they are. If it has taken Nature billions of years to get into the present day state I think it is rather arrogant in the extreme to say that letting loose a huge number of mutated organisms overnight CANNOT have ANY possible (serious) consequences. That simply isn’t a very scientific comment to make.

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