There are two main objectives that lead me to the creation of this site. Personally it will be a mean of documenting all my activity related to discovering astronomy in its amateur side. Register each step, each reaction, each experiment of a process that after starting and creating deep roots, very hardly will leave whoever gets involved with it...
The sky were and always will be a source of fascination of any human being. With more or less interest, very few remain indifferent to its mysteries... I always found hard to believe that there may be people out there capable of spending a whole life without looking up, even for few seconds, and thinking about their own existence and the existence of other worlds. I believe though that most that do it, soon return to their daily life, and as quick as they looked up, they apply all the abilities of the machine that distinguishes them from the other animals, to the tasks and earthly problems...
There isn't enough cosmic consciousness in society, in any society worldwide. This isn't only about knowing what's up there, but also knowing where we are in universal terms, what's our true dimension... I must recommend a visit to this small animation that represent in a fabulous and at the same time a frightening way how little we are... This is dedicated to those who think that are more important than the other beings and live their lives without ever understanding what they really are...
Driving at 200 Km/hour (124Mph) may be considered by most as excessive speed. When we think for instance that we must travel 200 km to get to a given destination, we think that's too far and want to get there as fast as we can... When we think in intercontinental trips or 8 hours of flight we then are sure that our planet is big and seems to have no end...
The Sun is 150.000.000 Km (93.205.680 miles) away from Earth. Traveling at the same 200 Km (excessive in our high ways) it would take about 750.000 hours to arrive to our destiny... The same as 31.250 days or 85 years! Most people wouldn't live enough to make this hypothetical trip...
But this is only the Sun...The nearest star from Earth besides the Sun is Alpha Centauri. It's 4,2 light years away...
Light travels at 300.000 Km per second (186.111 miles)... The light we get from our Sun takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth, but to get to Alpha Centauri it would take us 4,2 years, if of course, traveling at that speed was technically possible... It wouldn't be a bad journey across de universe discovering new worlds...
The Andromeda Galaxy, considered to be a twin of our Milky Way, is 2.200.000 light years away... This means that even being able to travel to the greatest velocity known by men, it would be necessary more than 73.000 generations to get there, considering a gap of 30 years between generations...
The farthest objects known in deep space are the Quasars. The closest one is 500.000.000 light years away... While the most distant at about 12.000.000.000 light years...
................M31 Galáxia de Andrómeda - Foto Nasa
It isn't possible to imagine or have notion of the real meaning of these distances, and every time that one starts making calculations with figures this big, inevitably you'll reach to impossible values... After all the 200 Km hard to travel in Earth, and even the 8 hour flight aren't distances that big... It's all relative...
There's only one truth. We are privileged for being able to live in a given space and time, even meaningless in universal measures. By the fact of being something so unique we shouldn't be indifferent.. This is the starting point that makes me look up and wondering...
The most important when you take your first steps in amateur astronomy is undoubtly, having references, knowing how others do, what others see and read, what equipment they use... This is the second reason that makes this site exist. Share.
I don't know what can be learned here, once I'm a starter myself, though these things were around for a while already. I'm doing this in a more serious way only for one year. Everything was so progressive. It was fundamental the books I've read then and now, but most of all what I've found in the internet. For this same reason I share what I see, do and think. Good or bad, the most important is being here...
Clear skies!rimart, 10 September 2003