There's a nonzero chance I'll check out that book, astrogeek, thanks!

Excellent!

For those interested, another very accessible book on the subject that you may want to add to your reading list: The Music of the Big Bang, Amadeo Balbi, Springer 2007. It covers the topic with a tighter focus on the CMB itself, and the meaning of the anisotropy power spectrum, using music as an analogy - a very effective introduction. It was based mostly on the WMAP data and predates the Planck data, which it looks forward to with some excitement. As such it gives a glimpse of the "historical" development of our understanding from an important milepost. Well worth the reading!

Just one of the breakthrough features of the Vera Rubin telescope is it's combination of resolution and speed. Because of it's speed it effectively can make a sort of time-lapse animation of an incredibly wide and deep swatch of sky in just days. This is expected to produce an awareness of millions of actively changing features as opposed to a static snapshot every few days. There are a wide array of advantages to motion pictures anyone should be able to imagine from the mundane to the abstract.

This is responsible immediately for important issues like asteroid discovery, especially those that can threaten us, as literally the first line of defense. Everyone on Earth would be devastated by an asteroid impact the size of Mt. Everest like Chicxulub that killed off large dinosaurs and made way for mammals including us but even ones way less than 1/100th that size could wipe out massive areas of our planet and cause even wider ranging post impact effects. Until Vera Rubin telescope, obviously those smaller but still devastating ones were unknown. Now having this capability reminds me of Carl Sagan's remarks about prudent planetary hygiene.

Such immediately practical concerns are obviously improved but that is just the tip of the iceberg. With Rubin collecting PETABYTES of data, this will be studied "with a fine toothed comb" by thousands for decades no doubt substantially expanding Humanity's understanding of the Reality of the Universe of which we are a recent part.

I ordered both and they should come in a week or so.

A number of browser apps are now available to the public such as Orbitviewer and Explorer-Skyviewer that can display and exhibit considerable interactivity regardless of platform - phone, tablets and laptops, ordinary PCs, high end PCs and at thge top of the list, high end gaming PCs. The reason gaming PCs are the highest resolution and have the most interactive zoom features is the combination of high end GPUs complemented by high resolution Monitors. One can choose from various types and switch up or down to reach the best experience, or all of them.

I don't yet know if these direct links will work for everyone but it could be a start

Orbitviewer - https://orbitviewer.app/en/

Skyviewer - https://skyviewer.app/explorer

Update: Well the links work for me. Anyone having difficulty please post here as I'm confidant quick assistance is at hand.

Glad to hear it! I trust you will be delighted, and enlightened, by both of them!

I think i'll pull my own down from the shelf and give them a refresher read through!

That would be ideal, downside of not liking reading books off screen is ...well, hard to pirate :P

But yeah, perhaps I will be enlightened, although in this case, being skeptical of dark matter...maybe I need to endarkened, hehe.
Anyway, arrival is in 10 days, I guess Bezos really does not appreciate me not going for Prime...

If you don't like Amazon and/or Jeff Bezos, stop giving him money!

I have no argument to counter that because I agree with you and I just do it cause amazon allows bank transfers, no pay pal or anything silly like that.
My gripe is a conspiracy theory of mine that involves amazon withholding shipping on purpose for those who don't bend the knee to prime.

Reason for that is that I live really close to a logistics backbone kinda thing, and usually get items really quickly from various outlets, then one day, it changed.
Specifically, when Amazon started using its own couriers... so yeah. I agree but I don't follow the credo and instead I just whinge.

Er, that's not a conspiracy theory, it's openly what they do.

(It's also far from their worst practices, but that would be taking this thread of topic.)

Thanks.

The skyviewer is usable, but not fully functional on my bandwidth limited setup. Long load times when the view requires pulling in more sky, but surprisingly responsive after load. Some features unresponsive, I'll try to be more specific later.

The orbitviewer is not usable here, again due to bandwidth limits more than anything I suspect, but the animations are clunky and... too many, I never got to the end of the skip/next options.

Yea, until you have touched the paper and turned the pages you haven't read it. And if it is worth reading it is worth sharing, now and into the future, and paper and ink are the only media that guarantee ability to do that.

Forum rules and respect for others here prohibit me from commenting on the bald... guy...

Interesting thread. Yes, nothing can clear enorbet of the 'grevious' crime of verbosity, but he's not the only one with that problem

The 'works here, doesn't work there' problem is down to routing. I once (and only once) subscribed to historyhit.com(?) or something like that, and couldn't watch anything. Routing checks found the signal was going out to the US (fast from here), through the US, through as restriction, and came crawling back through Ireland to the UK. Fortunately one of their servers had a more direct route and I could get 576p through that.

Man... I never had the highest opinion of Amazon and its daddy but after scrolling for 30 seconds, looking at the sidebar and noticing that I was barely down three topics of the TOC made me laugh and close the tab.
Whewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Yeah. I wish I had easier alternatives... but again, it's an outlet that just lets me do bank transfer, no CC, no Paypal, no skrill, moneybookers or whatever.


CCs and PP ...my bane of online payment. What do we have banks for if we then need to use a superbank to bank bankings to other banking banks?
I really wish it weren't so.

I'd like to comment about Dark Matter and Dark Energy here since gathering data on those mysteries is one of the Vera Rubin telescope. There is nothing to be skeptical about since no conclusions yet exist. That's why their current labels include "Dark". FWIW Dark Energy is vastly less understood and much harder to gather reliable data on but Dark Matter expresses the awareness as simple and complete as humans first recognizing that our invisible atmosphere wasn't nothingness but something tangible. In that distant Past such things, invisible things that had presence were thought to be supernatural, literally Spirits. This was nearly universal when all humans had to analyze the world around us was our unaided 5 senses. That all began to change with the invention of optical lenses. Discovering that our senses can be extended with technology was the quantum leap that began to delineate and define what became The Scientific Method.

In the case of Air it was completely obvious to our earliest ancestors that air is real. We need it to have breath and without it we die. Finding a solution to how we discover it's nature took us out of the prison of mere speculation and started the systematic road map for the most productive ways to discover Objective Truth. It starts with a problem or question and usually develops a checklist of possibilities, some of which are quickly falsified and dismissed, and others that take very long times and many attempts at inquiry to arrive at firm probabilities of accuracy.

Dark Matter, whatever that will turn out to be, firmly exists. The phenomena has been attacked from numerous angles from a wide variety of disciplines with wide variety of technologies and the results all agree with each other so far that something exists that has extreme gravitational effects everywhere we look.

Fritz Zwicke saw vague clues in his time and Vera Rubin saw that as a relatively unexplored phenomena and ripe for her inquiry. At first, naturally she received strong skepticism but as the data mounted and other experts in the fields saw that her methods were accurate, thorough and exacting, the weight of the data became compelling and progressed to overwhelming... overwhelming that something universal exists that literally holds galaxies together everywhere and contributes to, if not the cause of, Gravitational Lensing.

We don't yet know what Dark Matter is but we have accumulated a list of what it isn't, which is the common first steps in solving mysteries. Personally I doubt that the Vera Rubin telescope alone will solve the mystery but it will "kick the ball down the field" toward that goal. That's how Science works. Small steps by teams to reach a goal... on the shoulders of giants.