astroalysa.bsky.social
Queer & disabled astronomer formerly at UofT & CITA. Dynamics, planets, & ballet. Posts reflect opinions of Sailor Galaxia, not my employer. She/her š©āš¬š
228 posts
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How did I beat this game on survivor+??????
(I died a lot - often intentionally)
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As a warm-up
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I should just do this in random spots in downtown Toronto
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I need to get back into this stuff because it brought me so much joy and Iām feeling a bit envious right now!
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Omg I miss going to cons (went to so many in my teens). I wouldāve been so happy if I saw a rad astronomer at one!!! I hope you have a blast :)
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āI understand there is a riskā
Do you?
āBut the potential rewardā
What reward? Subjecting marginalized mathematicians to a session of gross ādebateā so that someone maybe sees that itās not the end of the world if they get an email (which they can delete) about Black mathematicians in February?
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I picked a great year to cut back on my alcohol consumption (turns out itās not good for you) because every time I check the news I want to pound back some shots and pretend this isnāt happening.
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Oh nevermind, it's just junk that a tabloid made up and other tabloids are running with.
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Wait what?
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I think I just need to own being evil and killing everyone. Maybe?
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:(
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What movement? Iām confused. Iām asking about the altitude of the NCP for a local observer. It should be L, but this figure depicts it as 90-L. Itās just geometry of triangles. Thereās no motion involved.
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I actually remember our final exam had a question about when/where something was up in the sky, but it explicitly said we could use reasoning to provide a general explanation (so I said something along the lines of, āsince the Sun sets in the south west during winter, which Iāve verified by eyeā)
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Yeah, we touched on this in my observational astronomy exam. The textbook (which I still have) doesnāt cover it in great detail, though. It gives some coordinate conversion formulae, and basically just says āhow you get this should be immediately obvious from these 2 diagrams, go!ā
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Non-linear dynamics and chaos theory? Cool. Super fun. Love it.
Basic geometry? Screaming and crying and throwing up.
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Itās the angle (altitude) between the NCP and the local horizon. So it should be L. If youāre at the equator, the NCP is at the horizon whereas itās at zenith for someone at the north pole
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Youād need to worry about it e.g. for determining if/when an objectās visible at a site, but I imagine most people just use pre-existing calculators for that.
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I suspect more people arenāt familiar with the error because working with alt-az coordinates isnāt really a big thing in astronomy education?
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Someone else pointed out that replacing L with 90-L is indeed correct (since itās then 90-(90-L)=L). Just seems an odd way of phrasing the correction and leaves room for ambiguity about whether youāre seeing a corrected version or not
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I can tell you that Iāve spent a grand total of maybe 5 hours of my entire astronomy education and career thinking about alt-az coordinates, so I hadnāt paid any attention to it until I was teaching it š
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Iām not even sure if digital copies of textbooks have corrections applied to them or not. So perhaps my concern about the ambiguity is irrelevant.
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Ha, that is indeed correct! It just seems like an odd way of phrasing it. Iād have written, āreplace ā90-Lā with Lā because thatās a bit more clear (or at least I think so)
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I looked up the errata to see if this is a known error. It says there's an error in the figure, except that the error is L and that the correct version is 90 - L. So it would seem that my copy of BOB has been "corrected".
Is there a different convention for latitude that I'm unaware of?
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youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio
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I feel like modern astronomy is sometimes just āidk itās how my supervisor did itā going back for 2000 years
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Of course that makes so much sense now that youāve said it haha
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Bread, cheese, and wine are all nice things :)
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Seething with envy looking at radio astronomers just out there living their best lives with Janskys
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Haha I don't recommend this seriously because of this!
(but also because I don't actually recommend drinking while teaching)
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"Yeah, and they're backwards, too!"
(dying inside)