Will A Naked-Eye Moon Object End Conspiracy Theories? | Q&A 436

Could we put something on the Moon that we could see with the unaided eye? Which telescope to get under $200? Which telescope should get a priority? And in Q&A+, exactly where are we in the Milky Way? All this and more in this week's question show. It's time for the question show, your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are across my channel, a question pops in your brains, write it down, we'll gather them up, and I will answer them here. All right, let's get to the questions. Jeff Hans, if you could choose what space telescope gets priority, what would you choose? Well, I would choose the space telescope that has priority, which is the Habitable Worlds Observatory. So back in 2020, the astronomical community got together, and they made a bunch of recommendations to the National Science Foundation, to the various funding agencies to NASA and so on and said, like, these are our priorities. These are the these are the places inside the solar system, as well as the missions, the you know, the concepts that we want to understand. And there was a bunch of them, you know, we want to see a mission to Enceladus, we want to see a sample return mission from Mars, and we would love to see a mission to Uranus or Neptune. And then on the astronomy on the telescope side, they said we would like to have a telescope that has the resolution, the capability of observing directly observing Earth size world orbiting around sun like stars. There's a couple of previous ideas about this telescope, one was called LUVOIR, the Large Ultraviolet Infrared Telescope. And then the other one was called HABEX, which was an infrared telescope and have a free floating star shape that would allow it to block the light from the star so you can see the planets that were beside it. And then in the 2020 decadal survey, they decided to mash those ideas together. So they said, let's build something that is about the same size as James Webb, so about a 6.5 meter mirror. But let's also maybe have it fly with a star shade. And let's build a coronagraph on board that has the capability of blocking the light from the star allowing you to see the exoplanets that are beside it. And that was the priority. I am reading through the papers that are being released every day in the various journals. And I see papers pop up all the time where people are sort of still in the process of calculating how good the coronagraph is going to have to be how big will the starsheet have to be? What is the capabilities? What are some good? What are some options on how we can arrange the mirror? Do we make a regular mirror? Do we do an off axis mirror? So there's like a bunch of these ideas. And that is the priority. And that is my priority. You know, if I had to pick, that is the thing that I want the most, which is that can you imagine how amazing it would be if we first like just detected the Earth size world orbiting around a sun like star within that star's habitable zone. That is it, that feels like it's a low bar, we know of 6000 plus confirmed exoplanets, we know of 12-15,000 exoplanetary candidates. And yet, we don't know of a single Earth size world orbiting around a sun like star in that star's habitable zone. And so the Habitable Worlds Observatory will not only be able to find those worlds, it'll look at a star, keep watching it until it can rule out whether or not there are planets. And remember, like, all the methods for finding planets used so far really depend on the orientation of the star and its planets. With the transit system, you want the planet to go in front of the star. With the radial velocity method, pretty much you want the planet to be going around the star. With the astrometry method, it's now you want it to be face on and you want the planet to be going around the star face on. But with the direct observing, you just block the light from the star and then wherever the planet is, you should be able to see it. And so Habitable Worlds Observatory should be able to just find those worlds, oh, there's one at Alpha Centauri, oh, there's one at right. And so we'll suddenly know where all these planets are. And then the next question is going to be, can we study their atmospheres and this telescope will do both the find the planets, and then it will analyze the atmospheres of those planets to characterize them so we can understand, are they kind of similar to the Earth? Right? Have they got large amounts of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and methane and all these various trace gases? Are they totally different? Are they more like Venus? Do they have high amounts of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but, but don't have the water vapor and don't have, you know, whatever. So that is the dream. And that is sort of the next step for us trying to be able to understand and answer that question, right? That most important, what I consider to be the most important question that humanity has ever asked. Are we alone in the universe? We don't know the answer right now. And hopefully, that telescope will give us that answer, or at least will move us towards an answer. Clive Warren, when we finally get to the Moon, what can we put on the Moon that could be seen from Earth with the naked eye, so we don't get a new conspiracy theory about not going to the Moon? Well, I think it's really important to say that there's like literally nothing you could put on the Moon that people would wouldn't be able to come up with some kind of conspiracy theory about it. I mean, there are people who don't believe that the Moon exists, that people don't believe that satellites exist, that you can go outside, you have an app that tells you when the International Space Station is going to fly overhead. And then you go outside at the right time, you look up and boom, there it is, there is the International Space Station. If you have a powerful telescope, or even like a good pair of binoculars, you can look through them, and you can see the little TIE fighter shape of the space station as it's flying overhead. And the people with the best telescopes have taken images of the International Space Station and seen people doing spacewalks on the station, or various spacecraft that have recently docked with the station. And so no amount of evidence is going to convince people who, I guess, didn't use evidence to get to what they believe in the first place. But what could you when you put a laser on the Moon, right, you put a really powerful light or laser on the Moon, and you shine it towards the Earth. And if you make it powerful enough, I like I don't know the math, but it would have to be, you know, very powerful. But there would be this light shining on the Moon all the time. And it would be exactly where the Moon base was right where the people landed on the Moon. But you know, it'd be expensive and require a lot of hardware setup and require battery systems to keep it going during the time when it's in the dark. You can probably put up something up there for a few billion dollars that would tell us that humans landed on the Moon. Or you could go the kind of the chair face Chippendale route from the tick. And you could just gouge out a big word on the Moon, we use nuclear weapons to, to bomb big, a big sign on the Moon that says like we landed here or something. But it's probably not worth the money. It's time to shout out our new patrons at the $5 level and above. Bill Munn, Glenn Wilson, Alex, Paul Lewis, David Roth, Buzz Parsek, Ryan Caslin, Joshua DeRoss, Stephen Brahm, and Jim W. Join our community at patreon.com Unlimited mind, can you send us a good telescope model under 200 US dollars, please, please? Can I send you a telescope? Are you asking me if I can like send everybody who watches this channel a $200 telescope? No, I don't have that kind of money. But if you're like one wanting suggestions on how to get a telescope that is sort of under the $200 price, there are some options, but you're probably looking at used at this point. Well, the first thing that I would always recommend is that you go binoculars. If you get a pair of good astronomical binoculars, like a pair of Celestron Skymasters, they're in the $100 range. And they're like two telescopes that you put to your eyeballs. They're 15 by 70s. So you've got two like the like my telescope is a 70 millimeter lens telescope. With a Celestron Skymaster, you've got two 70 millimeter telescopes side by side. And so the 15 is the magnification power, the 70 is the the size of the aperture, the size of the glass on the other side of the binoculars. And 15 by 70 by 70s are quite amazing. Or 15 by 75s. Yeah, just amazing. You see a huge chunk of the sky, you can see the Milky Way, you can see star clusters, you can see the star clusters in Hercules, you can see nebulae, you can see the planets, you can look and see the rings on Saturn, the moon looks amazing. So there's a lot that you can do with a pair of binoculars. So if you've only got $200, that's my recommendation, get a good pair of astronomical binoculars. And there are many people that that's where they stop that a good pair of astronomical binoculars is the beginning and the end of their journey into picking up astronomy gear. And then if you actually do want a telescope, you want to be able to look with sort of higher magnification at the planets or the moon or and you feel like you've got good enough dark sky that you can go and see stuff, then your best bet is Facebook, look on Facebook marketplace, and you will absolutely be able to get a telescope for under $200. They have to be careful because a lot of people will buy really crappy telescopes and put them on Facebook. And the ones that you really want to avoid are the ones that look like kind of your classic what we used to call the department store telescope. So it has this really long spindly mount. And then it has this really long kind of refractor like a like a lens telescope. Usually the eyepiece is sort of at an angle. And you know, we always call those crappy department store telescopes. Those will only drive you crazy forever. But you'll see people posting, uh, you know, Celestron telescopes, I guess like an easy scope or EQ scope, you know, like 130 millimeter telescope, so be like a like a four inch telescope, it'll be on a pretty good little squat mount. And then often it'll have it'll be on what's called an equatorial mount. So it'll be allow you to tilt against the plane of the ecliptic of the earth and you can turn a little knob and the telescope will track objects that are in the night sky. The other thing you want to keep your eyes peeled for is a Dobsonian telescope. And so often people will sell say a four inch Dobsonian telescope. Now I bought an eight inch Dobsonian telescope off of Facebook marketplace and I paid 500 Canadian which is I guess like 400 us and it is a monster it is like the best telescope I've I've ever used for observing. You can get those kinds of deals all day every day on Facebook marketplace. So I would recommend that you go to Facebook, you know, just watch it every day. See as telescopes are popping up. And my guess is you should be able to get a good telescope or pair of binoculars in the $100 range. Good luck. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on We call it q&a plus this week's bonus question. Just where are we in the Milky Way? I'll put a link in the show notes. Alright, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you, everyone who asked your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show. We're doing our live show hiatus. Now we just did the last live show of the season. And so we'll be back with new live shows in September. But we've got lots of shows coming over the course of this summer. And I'm going to do a lot of other live streams that are sort of different, but you'll have to see what that is. Now I'm going to talk about nostalgia and I am verifying and double checking my best space movies list. First, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Brian Bode, Kerwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bela, Darkfinger, David Gilton, and David Matz. And for all the reading and math for toddlers, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jerry Mattern, Jim Berg, Jordan Young, Marcel Switz, Michael Purcell, NasaOceanGuy, Nordspace, OneSuperAnimals.org. Please follow my nephew at vbrick6994, Rayne Caillou, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Featherman, Team 49, Telescopes Canada, Vlad Sheplin, Wolfgang Klotz, Zelda, oh my god, we have Proof of Aliens, who support us at the master of the universe level. And all our patrons, all your support means the universe to us. So a couple of months back, I put together what I consider to be the top 100 space, science-y, fantasy, nerdy movies. Like, I know there's like a lot of overlap there, but like, First Man, Apollo 13, like those belong, but also traditional science fiction movies. Anyway, it's a list. It ended up being about 106, but I will trim it down and get it sort of finalized. But I am serious about my recommending movies. And so I was sort of going off memory of what I thought were good and bad movies. And I'm going back through every movie in that list and rewatching it to make sure that it still holds up and still deserves a place on that list. So I want to give you just like an update on a bunch of them, because a bunch, I feel totally held up, like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and The Terminator, but some others, I'm not sure they still get to be on that list. And the one that was like most heartbreaking to me recently was watching Contact. And you know, I loved reading Contact by Carl Sagan. I loved Cosmos by Carl Sagan, although that also doesn't hold up as well as it once did. But the movie with Jodie Foster, where is sort of like Carl Sagan dipping his toes into science fiction. I remembered it, really loving it. And I rewatched it. And now sort of there was a bunch of stuff that I consider to be wrong, you know, like scientifically wrong, and a little cringy, and a little off the kind of balance that I think Carl Sagan himself would have preferred in the movie itself. And so it's like still hanging on with its fingernails, but I'm not sure. And then the other one, which really disappointed me was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, rewatch that, didn't love it. And I recall really enjoying it. And I like I can't even bring myself to watch ET because I know that's not going to hold up. And I hear Disclosure isn't that great. So this whole trilogy actually is kind of weak, which is too bad. Now, Close Encounters is still fine. Still on the list. But, but yeah, and then I watched Pacific Rim, and that was still solid. Didn't quite hold up as much as I remembered, but I remember like watching the movie, big screen, totally grinning the entire movie. This time around, there was a bunch of stuff where I was to kind of wonder, is this true? But the one that sort of surprised me that I really enjoyed, and this wasn't on my list, and probably won't make it on my list was Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. There is a song in The Meaning of Life, where talking about the universe, and it is the most accurate piece of, I don't know, astronomy related knowledge in almost any movie that I have ever seen. It is dead accurate, talking about the size of the, of the galaxy, of the speed that the Earth is moving and rotating and the numbers of stars there are. Absolutely incredible. So go back and watch The Meaning of Life and you'll know the part that I'm talking about. And yeah, it's, it's solid. Very incredible. So I would love to hear from you. What are the movies that you recently watched again? And you know, what holds up what is actually better than you remember and what maybe doesn't need to be in your top list anymore? Let me know. Alright, we'll see you next time.