The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine)

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720

This is a very good survey of new cosmological thinking.

I have been very suspicious of the anthropic principle for a long time; I have mostly rejected it. The finely-tuned universe has been equally suspect, to me. Now I have hope that these ideas are unnecessary. Any number of other universes probably are most probably not properly tuned to support life as we know it. I also find that the "final goal" of science to be possibly illusory to be quite amusing and satisfying.

Sunset and Ladron Peak

Testing out my new Canon EOS Rebel T2i. Photo is unprocessed by any photo editting program.

IC 342

10x5 minute exposure.

IC 1727 and NGC 642

I almost randomly chose this field. The star chart showed the two overlapping. There are at least four other galaxies in the field of view. 10x2 minute exposures on my C14 Hyperstar system (F1.9).

M81 and M82

M81 and M82 taken last Friday night.

M33

M33 taken the night as NGC 891

Asteroid data reduction

The photo above was taken on 11/2/08. The target object was Comet 44P. I took two sets of 10 2 minute exposures about 36 minutes apart. The initial processing (alignment, stacking) was done using AstroArt 4.0. The initial astrometry was done using AstroArt against 5 UCAC2 stars. The final astrometry was done using Astrometrica against several thousand USNO B.0 stars. Astrometrica can also overlay the calculated positions of all known asteroids and comets in the field of view. 44P is in the middle of the field almost exactly as plotted. I found 7 others. Could be more.

Left of 58416 there are two list so that you cannot read either; they are in the photo. 43620, 08184 and 30967 were found. Two were found near 08107.