conditional_soup

I know we did Fridays last time. The weather was bad, so I kinda forgot about it. The transparency tonight is looking suboptimal, and, given my options, I might just settle for hitting some binary stars. My best view is of the eastern sky, and most everything there right now is faint fuzzies, so I don't have especially high hopes.

Tonight's itenerary:

• Going to hit the Leo triplet again
• Going to hit Bode's Galaxy again
• M94 -M48 -M44 -M67
• M3 if it's high enough
• Gamma Leo
• Zeta Ursa Majoris

Probably off itenerary:

• Going to save the owl nebula and cigar Galaxy for a night with better transparency.
• I'm considering M84, M86, and M87 if they're high enough, but given the conditions and relatively low altitude, probably not.

Anyone else getting their scopes out? What are you going to look at?

I've got clear skies where I'm at, and I'm ready to try and cross some things off my observation list.

Some targets I'm planning on trying to hit:

• M79 (this one's been a real PITA, tried about five times and finally just saw a fuzzy little cloud last time I looked)
• NGC 2419: I think this one's also going to be a huge PITA to starhop to, but I'm up to the challenge.
• Rosette Nebula
• M108
• M97: M108 and M97 seem like they shouldn't be too hard to starhop to, I guess we'll find out.
• M105: tried to find the Leo triplet once or twice before and got nowhere, but I was on more of a time crunch. I'm hoping with a slower pace and Leo being higher in the sky, I'll be able to pin it down.
• I always like to peek at Jupiter, and I'll probably snag a look at Trapezium while I can.

Known Conditions:

• 12" 1520mm f/5 manual dob
• low mag wide aperture binoculars
• predicted clear skies
• ClearDarkSky says Bortle 6 but I think it's closer to 5. In either case, not great, but I've still managed to catch some faint fuzzies from here.
• I'm going to be using a combination of prepping with Stellarium and a star chart to try and augment my star-hopping. I'll be using an 8x50 RACI to jump from bright naked-eye targets to less visible ones, and then a 2x Barlow/30mm wide field eyepiece to nudge onto target.

Anybody else planning any observing? What's your list look like?

Not smugposting. Shit sucks. :(

I'm just wrapping up my last shift in fifteen years on the job. What I'm about to say is coming from the perspective of someone who operated almost entirely within private ems. I've moved on outside the healthcare sector completely because:

• Medics in decades two and three of experience get their asses kicked just as hard as medics in decade zero of experience. I've seen too many medics that were in their fifties and just miserable because the job never really gets any easier. If you get injured such that the doctor tells you you can't do the work anymore, there's precious little else you can pivot to; seems like you usually either get a TYFYS on the way out the door or everyone collectively turns a blind eye to the fact that you really shouldn't still be on the ambulance.

• It feels like there are few options for naturally growing your career in EMS with your experience. In law enforcement, fire, and healthcare, there are more opportunities to naturally pivot out of the front lines and into roles that both make use of your experience and offer more rewarding pay and challenging or interesting work. For example, moving from a firefighter to inspector or investigator, moving from being a patrol officer to a detective, or moving from a nurse to charge nurse. With EMS, your options are basically flight medic or supervisor, and there's really not that many positions available for either. Kinda related, but going lateral into other roles like RN didn't always exactly feel natural. I tried to go to nursing school three or four times, and each time I did, my schedule got jerked around and I had to drop the classes; every paramedic to RN bridge program I heard about had just finished getting shut down (likely because it limited the college's ability to milk the students by playing RN program fuck fuck games, and that made the admins sad).

• Seems like EMS as a whole still has the mindset of a job, and not a career. You can stay and flip burgers for as long as you like, basically. There's little institutional support within agencies to help people advance within either healthcare or emergency services. There's also not much support to help people be the best they can be at their job, you've really got to self motivate and care about being as good as you can. Agencies themselves often feel uninterested and disengaged in trying to make even incremental improvements to the way things are done, and seem to insist on only changing when acted on by outside forces.

Anyway, it's a well known fact that EMS struggles with long term worker retention, and we're all worse off for a lack of institutional knowledge and experience. What can be done to change it, though? As far as things go on the private side, I have no idea; the money has to be there, and the only thing that makes money is running calls. I've become increasingly convinced that the private model has largely reached the end of its life and needs to be replaced wholesale by fire and third service providers that don't depend on a private healthcare style pay-for-service model.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-gsa-terminate-office-leases-f8faac5e2038722f705587c8dd21ab26

Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee.

The order seems to contradict Trump’s own return-to-office mandate for federal employees, adding confusion to what was already a scramble by the GSA to find workspace, internet connections and office building security credentials for employees who had been working remotely for years.

But it may reflect the Trump administration’s belief that it won’t need as many offices due to its efforts to fire employees or encourage them to resign.

Does anyone have any experience home brewing a radio telescope? I'd really like to make one myself, both because it seems fun and challenging, and because it would probably be cheaper than buying one of there are any consumer grade radio scopes. I'm aware of some tutorials online, and one concern that I have is that many of them are intended to output data to software. I'd like to convert the signal into something audible, so that people can actually hear the emissions. The three targets I have in mind are: the sun, Jupiter (like the JOVE project), and hydrogen emission frequencies from nebulae. Ultimately, my goal is public outreach and education rather than amateur research.

I have next to no experience working with radio anything except old AM/FM receivers and walkies. I also know next to nothing about how radio telescopes work, so if you have a particularly good resource besides googling it, I'd be greatly obliged. My questions are: did you find building/using the telescope difficult or expensive? Did you find that it was worthwhile / would you do it again? And what advice do you have for someone looking at it for public outreach?

Hey everyone! I'm putting on stargazing classes in my city with the help of the city parks dept. It involves lugging out 12" dob (we mostly hang out ~120x mag, but I have plans to really juice the magnification if we get small classes and good seeing), some binoculars, and a green laser pointer. I just did the first one last night, and I found it to be a hugely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the class was a bit on the smaller side and not asking too many questions (I think because it was cold AF for California), and I found the energy kind of flagging halfway through. My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc. and follow the Astronomical League's Urban Stargazing program (I want to help folks get certified if they're interested). I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope. In case you might be wondering, it's not a GOTO or PUSH TO scope, I personally find that there's a bit of magic in manually slewing the scope, but it does unfortunately mean that I spend extra time bringing the scope back on target between students using it.

We ended up with probably a dozen participants, with most coming and going within about 20 mins out of the hour. Again, I think the weather was a big part of it, but I was really hoping they would find it worth it to stay. We started the night off viewing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, (not part of the urban stargazing program, but I wanted to include them), and moved on to showing the Pleiades and Hyades through low mag binoculars, and then on to the Orion Nebula and Theta Orionis, and finally Gamma Andromedae. Then, most people started to dip and we just kind of did requests until the end of class. Maybe I'm just enough of a dork that it would have kept me around in spite of the weather, but I worry that it wasn't interesting enough. Any advice would be appreciated.

Every time I get in the trash, my human finds me, tells me to leave it, and puts the trash back in the garbage can. It's really bizarre, I don't understand why they insist on throwing all this stuff out that they can just have for a little snack. Can someone explain this behavior?

My local EMSA has approved IV Tylenol for pre hospital pain management in trauma patients. Supposedly, studies show that there's little clinical difference in the efficacy of acetaminophen and opioids in acute pain management. I've attempted to find this alleged research, and the link above is what I found. I can't quote it exactly because I'm on mobile and it's being weird, but the relevant section is towards the end and compares the efficacy of IV Tylenol to IV opiates. It leads with saying that the relevant evidence is considered low quality before indicating that (this is a VERY rough summary) IV tylenol seems to have a very similar though slightly less effective/durable analgesic effect. I recommend you read it for yourself. The study also doesn't seem to be limited to trauma patients, and seems to make no distinction between visceral and somatic pain, both things I was hoping to see.

Overall, I can see the benefits: it's cheaper, not addictive, less strictly regulated, doesn't alter consciousness or respiratory drive, and doesn't induce a bunch of histamine to tank a patient's blood pressure. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with it, and if it works as well as advertised.

If you're like me, you've probably been bombarded with ads about how awful AB 886 is. You should know that AB 886 is an attempt to support local journalism by forcing large, for-profit platforms that share links to online local news articles, like Reddit, Xitter, Facebook, and Google, to pay money to those local news agencies for access to their work. The group behind the ads against AB886 is the CCIA, or the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which is a lobbying group whose membership includes such small, local journalism organizations as:

• Google
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Twitter
• And many more

Here's their Wikipedia page if you're interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_%26_Communications_Industry_Association

So, predictably, this is down to huge for profit companies wanting to continue getting access to other people's work for free. If you're feeling like taking memes seriously and getting into fights with strangers, you might think about calling your assembly member and letting them know that the CCIA can go fuck themselves and to support AB886.

Not my work, found it on YouTube and enjoyed this artist's work, so I thought I'd show my appreciation by sharing. Reminds me of the old school country vibes before it got taken over by make believe patriots.