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No amount of measurements will ever give you the ability to look at the night sky and visualize your place in the cosmos. The phase of the moon shows you where the sun is, the planets glide along the ecliptic through their seasons, and if it is dark enough and the sky clear enough you can see the Coal Sack Nebula in our own galaxy the Milky Way. Something hardly anyone ever gets to see any more, thanks to air and light pollution, but if you ever do it sure sticks with you.
Trying to live pretending you get this because you looked up some numbers in a book is like pretending you have good sound because your mic and DSP tells you so.
I was pals with Al George back when he was building his observatory in the 1970's. https://www.tas-online.org/about.php All gone now I guess, along with Al, but what a time we had!
millercarbon you really nailed this comment well.To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“What happened was we stopped listening and started measuring“
I have the exact problem dealing with this in the telescope industry. What happened is they stopped observing and started measuring.
Now we have amateur astronomers who think they know more than they really do.
No amount of measurements will ever give you the ability to look at the night sky and visualize your place in the cosmos. The phase of the moon shows you where the sun is, the planets glide along the ecliptic through their seasons, and if it is dark enough and the sky clear enough you can see the Coal Sack Nebula in our own galaxy the Milky Way. Something hardly anyone ever gets to see any more, thanks to air and light pollution, but if you ever do it sure sticks with you.
Trying to live pretending you get this because you looked up some numbers in a book is like pretending you have good sound because your mic and DSP tells you so.
I was pals with Al George back when he was building his observatory in the 1970's. https://www.tas-online.org/about.php All gone now I guess, along with Al, but what a time we had!