Camera Labs

Hi folks,

A few quotes from this Universe Today piece:


By the way, there's a YouTube video all about life elsewhere. Click on the picture to open the video in a new page/tab:

Nice lippy. Won't win any Grammys but it gets several facts across.

Hmm, getting any old 42 CCD detectors together and some optics to put in front of them wouldn't be too difficult but getting the quality of data needed might be a problem, especially at the bottom of a turbulent atmosphere, and somehow I don't think they'd perform quite so well as those in the picture, fabricated by e2v. Fantasy aside, five Earth sized planets in the habitable zone out of 156,000 stars may not sound like much but after just four months of observation the chances are that or own Earth would be missed and the probability that the target solar system orbits line up so that any planets actually transit the face of the star is also really small, as illustrated by even our own Mercury and Venus usually failing to do so.

Anyway, the next time you look up at a star filled sky maybe it'll feel just a little different. Some of those stars you are seeing may be just the tiniest bit dimmer than usual because an Earth sized planet in the habitable zone is passing between that star and your eye.

On a final note, this isn't entirely off-topic for the forum as the SuperWASP project is using Canon 200mm f/1.8 lenses in front of back-illuminated CCD sensors:

Bob.

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OM-D E-M5 + ED 12-50mm, H-PS14042E, H-F007014E, L-RS014150E, M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm 1:1.8.
Gitzo GT1541T, Arca-Swiss Z1 DP ball-head.
Astrophotography: TEC 140 'scope, FLI ML16803 camera, ASA DDM60 Pro mount.

Nice read, thanks for sharing.

One thing it did make me think about was if we are struggling to find earth like planets, for various factors, then we could speculate that the same is true for alien life i.e. they have missed us, so to speak......hmmmmm

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Lee Diggle
My Astronomy Blog | My Photography Gallery

Hi Lee,

We really shouldn't proceed down this line as it's way off-topic for a camera forum but I recently ran the following assumptions in this Drake Equation simulator:

Assumptions:


• Rate of formation of suitable stars in our galaxy (aggregate number) = 10 billion
• Percentage of those stars with planets = 30%
• Number of planets per star that could sustain life like earth = 0.33
• Percentage of those planets where life actually develops = 80%
• Percentage of those planets with intelligent life = 0.01%
• Percentage of planets with intelligent life where technology develop = 100%
• "Lifetime" of communicating civilizations = 100,000 years.
  
  I chose a very low "percentage of those planets with intelligent life" as it's my personal belief that a large moon is needed to stabilise a planet's axis, so enabling higher lifeforms to be able to evolve and survive.

Not a totally unreasonable set of assumptions, I hope, but I was shocked to find that they predict the number of communicative civilizations to be only 0.792. Taken simplistically that implies we could be looking for a very long time.

Update: But on the flip side it implies there's a huge amount of unclaimed real estate out there.

Bob.

_________________
OM-D E-M5 + ED 12-50mm, H-PS14042E, H-F007014E, L-RS014150E, M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm 1:1.8.
Gitzo GT1541T, Arca-Swiss Z1 DP ball-head.
Astrophotography: TEC 140 'scope, FLI ML16803 camera, ASA DDM60 Pro mount.

Wow, thats really surprising, and quite scary.

Getting back OT I would love to sling a load of high end lenses together and CCD Chips to see what I can get, lol. Not a lot I reckon.

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Lee Diggle
My Astronomy Blog | My Photography Gallery