[Q&A+] Why Keep Voyagers Alive, Life with No DNA, Confidence in the Distant Ladder | Q&A 320

I have a tiny bone to pick with your method of demonstrating parallax using your thumb. One of the reasons the image of your thumb has nothing to do with parallax, it is eye dominance. The jump is more about eye dominance than parallax. Every baseball coach uses this same technique to determine which eye is dominant because it can make a baseball pitch seem to jump if your nose blocks one eye. If you use the same eye and move your head so your right eye is now where your left eye was (easy to say, hard to do), THAT would be true parallax. Some people have little eye dominance, but many have stronger vision in one eye than the other. This is where "lazy eye" comes in, the cure for which is putting a patch over the dominant eye and forcing the lazy eye to strengthen. Incidentally, there is also hand or foot dominance. If you are right-eye dominant but left-hand (or foot) dominant, it can affect hand-eye coordination. Your point stands, but how you demonstrate it introduces another factor that makes it somewhat misleading because the amount of movement may not be just the parallax but eye dominance.

As my first question was incorrectly worded the answer would be First the Sun and then Alpha Centauri

Actually I meant the furthest one you can see

What is the closest star you can see with the unaided eye Is it V762 Cassiopeia which isn't really 16,000 LY away and is really only 2,764, or is it eata Carinae at 7,500 LY away or is it RHO Cassiopeia at either 3,262 LY or 8,,200 LY or is it another star?

We have all seen YouTube deciding for us (Often sponsored) content that it will “push” to us. The tactics that YouTube uses are not consistent with following anything consistently. Look how often there are no alerts, content that you subscribe to is buried. ANY way that YouTube can distract you is their business model. To YouTube we are the a part of the product not an audience. I don’t like using the Patreon client, however it has become a decent way to stay connected to the content that means something to me. I am sure the content delivery will continue to evolve.

Thinking some more about this, I think you should consider joining Nebula. You could post your extended videos there like Joe Scott does and I would watch there since I subscribe to Nebula and they DO have an app for TVs that let you watch them on large screens. Just a thought.

I almost never watch the videos here on Patreon and I understand your reasoning to push people here but I feel you may be forgetting the one reason some people (like me) stick to Youtube. I watch all Youtube videos on a large TV. I also subscribe to Youtube so ads are not an issue. If Patreon offered some kind of app that could be viewed on TV's I would definitely use it but without such an app it is difficult to get Patreon videos on to a TV. I'm aware there are some hacks like screen mirroring to an AppleTV but those are hacks. Please push Patreon if you can to develop an app and I will happily switch.

If you had two solar gravitational lens telescopes in place, is there any reason you couldn't also point them away from the sun at the same astronomical object, to measure the distance to it with the parallax method? That would go from the 2 AU base of the triangle the GAIA mission did, to a 1084 AU base of the triangle in the best case of two diametrically opposed solar gravitational lens telescopes, which seems like it would imply the ability to measure distance by parallax to a much longer distance, though I don't know the math well enough to know by exactly how much. The catch is that my understanding is that the camera on the SGL satellites is likely quite small to allow them to reach the right distance at all, so they could probably only look at very bright objects without the assistance of the magnification factor provided by the sun. However, supernovas are, to my lay understanding, pretty dang bright. Are they bright enough that there's a realistic chance for the satellites to see one and measure the distance to it by parallax, or is there some other measurement they could provide to either reinforce or adjust the distance ladder?

Voyagers are NOT a waste of money.