Space and The wonders/mysteries of The Universe

For anything technological you just have to get into it. Reading about it doesn't help until your butting your head against it. I'm not really a technology person - I prefer things nice and clear and universal rather than changing on you every year.

My very first attempt at deep sky astrophotography. It needs a LOT of work but gotta start somewhere!

The actual, non-compressed photo looks a little better than this one but was too big to host.

Those are nice and sharp!

{{ Cracking first go Lance. Nice one. If this is your starting point I look forward to seeing more. }}

Link to full image uploaded on my Flickr site (not sure how to embed the image from Flickr directly)

https://flic.kr/p/2ifJurJ

There is a bit of star trailing going on if you look close. Once I get my head around a piece of software I should be able to eliminate that and get some nice, long exposures!

trying to get my head round Entanglement.... nope... not happening.

You mean quantum entanglement?

{{ I got some hairs entangled in my sporran once, didn't half make the eyes water }}

halfwise wrote:You mean quantum entanglement?

yep, there was a TV show about quantum entanglement and Einstein, something about spooky stuff at a distance and space not being there when it should.   no idea what it means. oh and guys measuring the light of two quasars and Chinese building a quantum computer.

I'll take a stab at it again. Einstein's original thought experiment (known as the "EPR paradox") was more philosophical than smack-you-in-the-face with weirdness, so I'll do a variation introduced I think by David Bohm.

Start with the idea of conservation of angular momentum: if you swish an oar through the water, one eddy will rotate one way, the other the other way, sort of cancelling out. This rotation can have numbers stuck to it called angular momentum; and if a field of water can have angular momentum, an electro-magnetic field can have it too. So photons have angular momentum. Yes, those little buggers can somewhat be thought of as travelling whirlpools of light.

Note that the angular momentum you see depends on the direction you are looking: if you look at the eddies from the side you can't see the rotation. So the amount of angular momentum you see varies with the angle of observation. If you use a camera as a measurement device, if it is tilted you measure something different.

If an electron meets an anti-electron (anti matter) they both disappear in a flash of light. But this flash of light has to be in pairs of photons travelling in opposite directions to conserve regular momentum (we assume the electron pair just languidly bumped into each other so the momentum added up to zero), but they also have to be spinning in opposite directions to conserve angular momentum: just like the two eddies off an oar in the water spin in opposite directions.

So if a long way away you measure the spin direction of one photon, you know the other one must be spinning in the opposite direction. They are entangled.

So far, so classical. Nothing should be mysterious here (except perhaps that photons are light eddies with spin).

The strange thing about quantum measurements is they only measure discrete values. I can only measure spin in units of 1,2,3 etc. And if one photon has one spin, the other has the opposite. Even stranger, if I rotate the apparatus, I can still only measure integer values of spin. The photons seem to re-align themselves with the measurement apparatus. If the photon only has a spin of 1, no matter which way I measure, I see a spin of 1; though it may flip negative on me. It's really strange (I could go into vector components and cones to make it a bit less strange, but it's still strange).

So here's the kicker: I move the apparatus to measure one photon, and this one photon sort of readjusts to match the orientation of the apparatus. But we know the other photon in the pair must always be the opposite, so IT is always readjusting the match our apparatus, even if it is light years away! That other damn photon seems to know what way we are looking at it's mate.

Don't worry if this is spooky to you: I assure you it's spooky to everyone.

Einstein's original complaint was that in quantum mechanics physical values only have meaning when being measured, and he looked at the momentum of the other photon as pre-existing the measurement. He could say it was nothing different from having red and blue socks in pairs, and once you put them on your feet there was no need to use spooky action at a distance to explain why when one sock was found to be be blue the other must be red (this is John Bell's example known as "Bertelman's socks"). It's only the later iteration with spin when this argument couldn't be used anymore.

John Bell sided with Einstein, and came up with a statistical test of the above experiment to show if there were hidden connections between photons, and what the limits on these connections could be. The experiments were eventually done, and found that any connections between photons would have to travel faster than the speed of light. So either physicists had to give up relativity theory, or accept that physical values only appeared during the process of measurement. In either case, Einstein comes off losing.

"so IT is always readjusting the match our apparatus, even if it is light years away! That other damn photon seems to know what way we are looking at it's mate."

That's a wee bit mind blowing. so are they connected by spookyness?

yep, it's spookiness.

{{ I take it there is not a comprehensible answer to the seemingly simple question- "How does it know what the other one is doing?" }}

Not a fully accepted one.  I guy called Bohm has come up with what is called the pilot wave model.  The idea is that the experimental situation sets up a wave pattern which the photons respond to.  These wave patterns are allowed to change faster than light.  There's some subtlety about transfer of information not being possible via these wave patterns which prevents breaking rules of relativity, though Einstein never formulated relativity in terms of information exchange.

It's sort of like you can shine a spotlight on the moon (when we are looking at the shadow side) and by rotating the spotlight half a degree the light itself will jump clear across the moon faster than light; but it's not the photons themselves that are going faster than light, just the pattern they make.

It's not quite this simple and I'm not gonna claim to understand it completely.  But it's along the lines of if we had the measurement devices set up a certain way we can predict what would be measured, but we have no way of communicating that information about how to set it up faster than light.

DSLR and 300mm telephoto lens. Single exposure of about 20 seconds.

I pretty much have my telescope rig up and running now so when I get a clear night and a few hours we should be able to see far more than in this picture!

Hope this comes out ok in compressed format (ignoring the tree branch in the way!)

definitely more than is seen by the naked eye.

they are all blurred towards about 10 degrees. More adjustments to be made?

That was actually a quick photo with just my camera, not my scope set up.

When I get some clear skies and the time to set up properly I will try to get both the Pleiades and Orion to show the difference.

{{ Nice one Lance, look forward to seeing those nebula }}

The Inoue Solar Telescope on Hawaii presented it's first light images today of the Sun's "surface" at high resolution. (put that in quotes because where really is the surface of a ball of gas?)

https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-full-field-movie/

Looks like a vat of caramel corn to me.

It does look like it shouldn't be real! Also hard to contextualize the size of all the little details you can see

I read in a related article that each cell there is about the size of Texas/France.

{{ Even weirder when you consider that for millions of humans over probably millions of years worshipping the Sun, thats what the face of God really looked like! }}

Worshipping the great bubbling vat of Cracker Jacks in the sky!

NGC224 aka M31 aka the Andromeda galaxy.



Lots still went wrong but getting used to it.

wow! that's stunning.