Over at a discussion board about religion and cosmology, I helped make a discussion concrete by asking whether the participants often gaze at the stars through a telescope. And what this does to them.
The discussion delved into a debate about the fact that the African Dogon tribe was already capable of distinguishing between Sirius A and Sirius B, long before telescopes were invented.
Lots of poetic comments about star-gazing too.
Then someone popped up and said looking through a telescope is a brilliant past-time, but that he always gets hungry when doing so. The discussion suddenly took a hugely materialistic turn:
-Which types of food go best with the spiritual feelings that often accompany star-gazing?
We decided on fatty fast-food and easy snacks.
So here, today, I present the mobile snack-bar with attached big telescope. The lights of the snack bar can be dimmed, it operates in full silence (apart from the occasional hiss when a saucage gets grilled) and which can be taken to a patch of land where the skies are dark enough to engage in star-gazing and pop cosmology.
There is no proof that God disapproves of eating hot dogs while investigating Sagittarius.-- django, May 03 2008 Dogon and Sirius http://skepdic.com/dogon.htmlin the Skeptic's Dictionary [baconbrain, May 03 2008] Bad idea, unless you can pipe the distorting warm air from the grills away from the telescope-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, May 03 2008 Keep the crumbs out of the controls and the grease vapors off the glass.
That Dogon business is not a fact--see link.-- baconbrain, May 03 2008 Location, location, location.
A friend of mine is the IT guy at the Mount Palomar observatory. He says the operating temperature of the place is ambient - when it's hot, it's hot, and when it's cold, it's cold. Something about not messing up the equipment with differing temperatures.
So choose a temperate location for this venture.-- normzone, May 03 2008 As a Sagittarius, I would disapprove.-- mylodon, May 04 2008 As a Scorpio, I don't believe in that zodiac/horoscope stuff. None of us Scorpios do.-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, May 04 2008 As a Scorpio I don't mind hotdogs. None of us Scorpios seem to. Of course the brand we buy are nothing but lips...-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 04 2008 We don't believe in this horoscope crap at all, as we are hard-bitten sceptics. But then, Cancers are all like that.-- 8th of 7, May 04 2008 Are there Jaffa Cakes?-- wagster, May 04 2008 Any of that high-fiber Cassie's Grains here? Or is it just Dobson's Grill? Could we serve up some Fig Newtons with a Maksutov Cocktail?-- lurch, May 04 2008 As an Aquarian, I would rather grill some minced, seasoned and packed-into-a-cone-shaped Capricorn. Then eat it with salad, pitta bread and lashings of chilli sauce.-- gnomethang, May 04 2008 as a Capricorn, I object to that!-- po, May 05 2008 Has anyone done the Uranus gag yet?-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, May 05 2008 No, we have to do the one about loosening Orion's belt first. Then comes the one about milky way goodness. Then you can do the Uranus gag.-- not_only_but_also, May 05 2008 ... and the deep-fried Mars bar...-- po, May 05 2008 ..as a Martian, I object to people frying in our bars!-- xandram, May 06 2008 Coincidentally, there is currently (this very day) a transit of the Sun by Mercury. If you project from a telescope (or even a very good pair of very- firmly-held binoculars) onto white paper, you can see Mercury as a tiny, tiny dot creeping across. There's also one large sunspot, more or less on the line of the transit.
(Despite myself, I will issue the obvious warning - don't look through the bloody eyepiece or you will burn a hole right through the back of your retina, you really will. Project from the eyepiece onto a piece of white card.)-- MaxwellBuchanan, May 09 2016 At the moment it's in the quadrant where the sun is soon to set. Earlier today it was in the quadrant where the sun was visible. No bloody wonder Galileo decided to be Italian.-- MaxwellBuchanan, May 09 2016 Sorry to take away your triumph, but it would be hard to find anything I wouldn't bun in this category.-- Voice, May 09 2016 " As a Scorpio I don't mind hotdogs. None of us Scorpios seem to. Of course the brand we buy are nothing but lips... — 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 04 2008 "
Is this true, or merely lip service ?-- normzone, May 11 2016 random, halfbakery