Minuet

Intelligent Design vs. Theistic Evolution

chun — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:28:26 +0000

Recently I am thinking about the issues related to “Intelligent Design” (ID) and “Theistic Evolution” (TV). In the US and perhaps around the world, there is a general atmosphere of contempt towards ID and its proponents among the academics. Whoever adovcates, supports or even is willing to consider ID as a scientific theory will risk being isolated or “kicked” out by his/her colleagues. The theory of “evolution” has become one of the central dogmas of biology today considered by many, including some Christian scientists, as an irrevocable fact. On the other hand, a large part of Evangelical Christians consider the theory of evolution a major “heresy” of today. Many prominent atheists are using Darwinian evolution as the basis of their atheistic world view. There comes a group of Christian scientists who embrace the theory of evolution. They are trying to “bridge” the gap between the Christian faith and the theory of evolution by proposing so called “Theistic Evolution”. A prominent representative of this group is Francis Colins and Darrel Falk with their Biologos institution. The ID camp is represented by the Discovery Institute with a strong, though small, group of scientists and philosphers. There has been a “civil” dialogue between the two group in the beginning. But the atmosphere has become more and more tense. Since this is one of the very important issues for Christians toady, I am very much interested to know more about ID/TV.

Jupiter

chun — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:48:57 +0000

Jupiter on 9/26/2009

The CPC 800 was repaired and shipped back to me. It took 30+ days including the shipping to and fro. They said that they had readjusted the altitude and azimuth motors and did some cleaning. According to the customer service, all warranty repair will take 30 business days no matter what. I thought this is just one of the tactics to shorten the warranty period. I cannot perceive why it takes them so long to do some simple readjustments.

This is my first attempt using the NexImager to capture an image of Jupiter. Chin Wan’s 3x barlow lens (Meade) was used to increase the focal length so that the image will be triple in size. A 60 sec 5 fps video was taken and later stacked using the software RegiStax5. With this technique, the final image actually incorporates the details from more than 300 pictures. There was a lot of air current interference causing loss of details. I will try again when weather conditions are better.

The “Red Spot” is at the lower left just below the second band of clouds. A vague “bluish” spot on the upper rim of the lower band may be the shadow of one of Jupiter’s moons. The scars of the Wesley Impact in July should be in the upper part seen as several shadowy spots.

Telescope refused to turn

admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:12:04 +0000

The new CPC80oXLT does not turn on the azimuth axis! It occured suddenly while I was using it last night. I can hear the motor swirling when I press the direction buttons on the hand control. Altitude movement is not affected. I finally contacted Celestron and obtained a RMA number. I will ship it back through UPS tomorrow. This is one of the most frustrating thing. Sigh….