An obvious agenda at work here. As an amateur astronomer, the biggest problem I have is light pollution.

Posted by: jd watson at March 2, 2006 1:07 PM

Not an issue if you build orbiting space stations that can take the pictures and beam them back to earth.

Dumbest. Scientific. Fear-mongering. Nonsense. Ever.

The current trend in computer controlled amateur telescopes using CCDs for photography points the way. Someone will put together an orbital telescope package that costs only a million dollars or so (launch costs extra). The first customers will be universities, but by 2050 no one who is serious about ther observing will be without one. Time-share arrangements would bring the price to everyone. Yep, we'll lose the ability to look through the eyepiece, but no serious science is done by eye, and those eyepiece views are always a disappointment to those who've grown up expecting the colorful stuff seen in Sky & Telescope.

(If I ever win one of those huge lottery jackpots, instead of giving a chunk to charity, I'd rather fund starting something like an off-the shelf Hubble Jr. business)

And wouldn't the increased cloudiness increase the albedo and result in cooling? Is this the first step in a new round of "Coming Ice Age" talk?

The obvious solution is to restrict air travel to the wealthy, and to Cambridge dons with travel grants.

OTOH, I read somewhere (worthy, I hope, but I can't remember at the moment) that air quality and clarity in the few days after 9/11 and again after the Northeast blackout was significantly improved over the "baseline", so there might be something to this after all.

Does anybody know the effect of killer trees on astronomy? All that pollen, you know, not to mention the wood smoke.

Jim: I have no doubt that he's right. I just think that it's odd that he thinks balancing air travel against Earth-surphace optical telescopy is going to be a close call.

Move all the telescopes up to the moon. No problems with contrails, or air for that matter, and you can have the telescopes see in the full spectrum. A little better then orbiting ones because you have a nice, stable platform, with gravity going the right way.

I would love to see that Euro 'OWL' 100 meter telescope built up there. If you think Hubble is good then this thing would be great.

Even if he is 100% right about the global warming-cloud cover connection (a quick google search will show that there's nothing conclusive as of yet), the fact is that within a decade 95%+ of astronomical research will be able to be done by looking up the data you want in archives that are about to be produced by projects such as Pan-STARRS that will map the entire sky to incredibly faint magnitudes.

rps: OWL in space would be utterly inappropriate. As for comparisons with HST, segmented mirrors are not for imaging, they're for spectroscopy, and no one wants a postcard or T-shirt of the latest neat spectrum.

I'm also an amateur astronomer...I even gave a small scope to the Judd Children to get them started in the hobby. I know that the trend is toward digital imaging (with the backyard astronomer sitting inside, operating the scope remately and looking at objects on a computer screen), but there is no thrill in nature like seeing Saturn, Jupiter, the Moon or a gorgeous star cluster through a scope with your own eyes.