Too cool, part 12: Won’t fit in the bag

Al Denelsbeck

LRG 3-757
Courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, I present one of the most interesting examples of unintuitive physics: the curvature of spacetime to produce a gravitational lens. The ring that you see here is not the shock wave from a supernova affecting the surrounding gases, as I first thought, but actually a blue galaxy far beyond the yellow one in the center, whose image has been distorted into a surrounding ring because of the dense gravity of the central galaxy.

Here’s how it works. A normal lens, as almost anyone can tell you, “bends light,” but what this actually means is not as well understood, and often poorly illustrated. Let’s say you have a star, which only looks like a point of light from our distance (I added the twinkle for artistic statement.) It’s emitting light in all directions, so we can take a few paces to the left and still see it, or across the continent, or (should we be able to travel that far) all the way on the other side of it. The light from it is actually a spreading globe of photons, and we see just the one stream that meets our eyes (yes, that’s an eye in the upper part of the illustration.) A lens, however, catches all of the streams that meet its surface, essentially a cone, and bends the light to make all of these streams converge back down into the ‘dot’ of the star – provided that you’re the right distance for that particular lens, called the focal length.

Gravity can be strong enough to bend light. This is not entirely true, since what it does is curve spacetime, which is what the light travels through – you can draw a straight line on a piece of paper and then curl the paper, curving the line. Close enough. With very large galaxies, or more often a whole cluster of tightly-packed galaxies, the gravity can be dense enough that the light from a distant star or another galaxy, out of our sight behind the first, is bent away from its original path that would normally have not even come near us, going instead to Proxima Centauri or someplace. If the alignment is just right, we can see multiple distant objects in several mirror positions around the lensing galaxy, as the light path is bent according to the strength of the gravity at certain points around the lensing galaxy. Placed exactly right, and with fairly high uniformity in gravity around the galaxy, and the distant hidden subject gets distorted into a surrounding ring, which is what we see here with yellow galaxy LRG 3-757. It obscures our direct line of sight to the distant blue galaxy, but we get a nearly spherical path from around the edges, as it were.

What’s interesting about gravitational lensing is, if we were along the line of one of those original paths from the distant star or galaxy, continuing an imaginary path unbent past the gravitational lens (see point A in the illustration,) we would have a perfectly clear line of sight to the distant subject and never see it, since the light was redirected. And in fact, we can only speculate how often this actually happens, since we have no way of knowing. Gravity distorts the path of all light, but usually in such small increments that it doesn’t matter much.

When Einstein proposed General Relativity, which indicated that gravity wasn’t an attractive property but rather an effect of spacetime itself, we didn’t have the ability to test it out in any way, but plenty of astrophysicists hashed out the details looking for errors or implications. One Fritz Zwicky extrapolated it to mean that areas of very high gravity, such as close-packed galaxy clusters, could bend the light paths from more distant objects. It’s simply fascinating to see theories of such a bizarre nature be proven with remarkable images such as this. Another curious implication of General Relativity is the collapsed neutron star usually called a black hole, which would also lens light that passed a certain distance away, but completely capture light that passed too close. We should be able to see lensing from such as well, except that, to our knowledge, black holes have only occurred in the centers of galaxies, and might even be necessary for galaxy formation. Thus it is entirely possible that the lensing galaxy you see in this image is home to a black hole deep in the center, but we do not see a ‘hole’ because it is surrounded by stars well outside of its event horizon, the imaginary sphere around it where light cannot escape. There is even a very very faint chance that some of the light in that central smudge is from stars on the opposite side of a central black hole, bent towards us by the gravity.

As lenses go, by the way, LRG 3-757 is a whopper. About 4.6 billion light years away at the time the light left, it’s one hell of a focal length. It’s also a tad heavy to carry around, as you might imagine, so not really useful to look at anything else. And as seen, its field curvature is kind of egregious.

Here’s another cool thing. The universe is expanding, and the light reaching us now is from objects that have long since left those positions. The distances between LRG 3-757 and the warped galaxy forming the ring are changing, and this curious optical affect will vanish after a while – probably well outside of our lifetimes. At the same time, others that we cannot see now may appear later on as the cosmic focal length changes.

Be sure to check the original APOD page and click on the image to see the high resolution version, which shows much more surrounding detail and is a nice starfield image on its own. And reduces the resemblance to HAL 9000. Once again, we have these images thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is Photographer of the Decade (twice in a row) as far as I’m concerned. I’m gonna be frustrated when it’s decommissioned…

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My thanks to Chris L. Peterson at Cloudbait Observatory for supplying a pertinent detail regarding LRG 3-757 on the Starship Asterisk forums, a great place to ask questions.

Counting down

Al Denelsbeck

All right, gang, the clock has started. Exactly one year from now, the ancient alien Mayans will return to Earth on their doomsday asteroid and wipe us all out, unless we steal their reverse-engineered technology from the secret government organizations that have hidden it to prevent panic, and escape to the dark side moonbase. Once there, we will only have to overpower the Illuminati and Bilderberg to blow up the water fluoridation plant, but this shouldn’t be a problem, because we’ll no longer be brainwashed by chemtrails. Freed from imprisonment, JFK will lead us to a glorious new world order, and there will no longer be spider eggs in our Bubble Yum.

Let’s roll.

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Oh, shit. I just noticed that my calendar ends in ten days. What does Hallmark know that we don’t?!

On composition, part 11: Nullhue

Al Denelsbeck


Or, if you’re less hip, you might know this as black & white, or monochrome, or greyscale (grayscale, what-evah,) or einfarbig. There are a lot of ways to accomplish it, but the first thing to consider is what you’re after. In times past, all photography courses required not only shooting in B&W, but developing it as well. I won’t knock this in the slightest – there’s something very cool about developing and printing your own images, and darkrooms are easier to set up than you might think – but it isn’t really a staple of either mastering photography, or of doing it ‘artistically.’ Yet, there are circumstances where it works very well, and knowing how to use it is another aspect of composition.

I am not a master of monochrome by any stretch, so this won’t be a definitive guide, but I can still provide some pointers. The first is that, more than with other approaches, your key factor is contrast. Actually, contrasting light levels, since colors can provide contrast too. Note that it doesn’t have to be high contrast, and in some cases, the gradual shading from light to dark, otherwise known as gradient tones, can look pretty good in monochrome.

This means that you’re on the lookout for two conditions: first, where the light is harsh, most especially from one direction, and producing distinct highlight and shadow areas. Bright lights at night are a favorite, if a bit overdone. Second, conditions where the shadows drop off gradually, sometimes where the light fades around a curved or textured surface, or changing tones in the sky. In some cases contrasting colors will actually work, but this is tricky, because when the color hues are removed, the contrast is reduced and sometimes eliminated completely. While blue and yellow contrast wonderfully, when converted to greyscale they might even match in brightness and lose much of their distinction. However, a little further on I’ll talk about some tricks to use for color contrast.

By the way, there are multiple reasons why B&W is used for night scenes. Mostly it’s because that’s what we expect to see, since our color vision disappears in low-light conditions, so much of our night vision is in grey tones anyway. Another reason is that the film noir style of photography and cinematography exploited these traits of monochrome films, so we’re culturally conditioned to see such as art. There’s even an evolutionary aspect, believe it or not, in that we see shadows as hiding something, perhaps dangerous, so dark patches are viewed as mysterious and spooky, and thus this mood becomes an integral part of such images.

Achieving monochromatic shots is easy, even digitally, but making them look good requires a little more attention. While not every image needs hard contrast with distinct areas that are completely black, and completely white, there are plenty of times when you want to accomplish this, more than the conditions warrant. Simply converting to greyscale, or shooting on B&W film, often isn’t enough – you’ll need to help things out a bit. In the film world, this may be choosing certain films, pushing film (shooting and developing at a higher ISO than rated, which increases contrast,) printing with filters, and even tweaking both chemicals and developing temperatures. Digitally, this could mean increasing the contrast settings of the camera, which I don’t recommend because you have little control over what details may be cut off. The better way is in digital editing, and my preferred technique is by using the ‘curves’ function.


With curves, you are provided with an X-Y graph that plots all of the brightness tones in the image from full black (bottom left) to full white (top right,) and can change these tones as you see fit. Sliding a corner point in either direction controls where the detail drops into pure black (or white,) while changing the line in the middle controls the brightness of any particular tone in between. Shown here, I made the overall image darker – notice how the line departs from the diagonal that would cut straight across the middle – but made the darkest tones even darker (lowest dot on the curve) while bringing the brightest points back up a little from the initial curve (higher dot, creating a slight S-curve.) This increased the contrast a bit as well, but allowed the shaded eye of the cat to remain faintly visible, my primary goal. In some cases, you may not have your shadows dropping all the way into blackness, so you would slide the lower left corner point more towards the right side, causing the darker portions to drop off faster and produce those nice black areas you’re after. It takes some practice, but this gives the most control as far as I’m concerned.

A quick side note: You can adjust curves in color images too, for the whole image (in which case it adjusts the brightness levels like we’ve just done) or for each individual channel, which renders that color with different brightness and contrast as desired. When your image has a distinct color cast to it, this is the best way to correct it. I do this very frequently with digital images, because no camera that I’ve ever handled renders accurate colors every time, and white-balance functions are fairly haphazard as well. But, adjust your monitor to get accurate color first!

Another fun trick is channel clipping. Any digital color image is rendered into a channel for each color, in most cases Red, Green, and Blue (where those “RGB” references keep coming from) – or maybe even Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK – “B” was already taken by Blue who got there first.) You can open the Channels window in your editing program and click on each channel to see what the contrast levels are in that color register alone – sometimes this produces a much more interesting tonal shift than simply converting the image to greyscale. If you find one that you like, simply delete the other channels and keep the one, though you might have to convert this single channel alone into greyscale depending on your program. The right side of this image is each channel rendered into monochrome, illustrating how different each appears for the same photo. It might even help to convert into CMYK (if the original is RGB of course) and try channel clipping there to see if the effect is more to your liking. And of course, you can adjust the curves in the remaining channel as well.

When using monochromatic film, there’s a ‘curves’ style trick too. Many people are confused to know that there are color lens filters specifically for black and white film – what possible use would these be? But as that image illustrates to some extent, when you use a green filter, everything green remains pretty bright, while other colors get darker because they’re largely filtered out. In this way, you can enhance the contrast between colors. A blue filter on a blue sky will make the sky lightest while darkening the clouds slightly, and may cause the clouds to just about disappear against the blue sky, while using a yellow filter will make the blue sky very dark (there is little yellow to let through) while keeping the clouds pretty bright, and really makes the clouds stand out.

When doing your own lighting, like in studio work, you can control the rendition of highlights and shadows as you see fit, at least to some extent – it helps to do a few test shots to see what kind of tonal range you’re capturing from your film or digital settings (and by no means trust that damn LCD on the back of the camera.) This way, like in the image at top, you can set the light angles and intensity to achieve the shadows and tones desired. Most people would say that the light is coming solely from the right of the image, but this isn’t entirely true; a fill flash was used off to the left to control the details in the shadows. Note the details and even highlights visible on the “shadowed” side of the camera. Without the fill lighting, the contrast would actually have been too high and produced a much different effect.

That image, by the way, was something I did as an illustrated photography term. In days of photojournalistic yore, there was a bit of advice on getting results: “F8 and be there.” What it meant was, don’t worry a hell of a lot about camera settings; it’s more important to be ready for the action. Using what I had on hand at the time, I tried to illustrate this with an old classic camera and a globetrotter’s pocket contents – and yes, the camera is set at f8, even if it is a little hard to see. I also feel the need to point out that one of those foreign coins in the top image is actually a game token – look for the face of Sylvester the cat ;-)

But it’s not art…

Bankrupt an atheist!

Al Denelsbeck

How often would you get this kind of opportunity?

A year ago, I reposted a comic from Calamities of Nature, created by Tony Piro, one that achieved a certain amount of notoriety (not due to my efforts by any stretch.) This wasn’t a humorous comic, nor did it involve exaggeration, misstatement, caricaturization, or many of the other things that people could take offense at if they, you know, had too many hangups to take humor as humor. Instead, it was an observation listing simple facts that was satirical in the usage of a pious scene from a well-known christmas special. Bringing facts into the matter always pisses off a lot of people – something to remember, by the way.

Anyway, the comic went around a lot, without proper attribution, with changes to the words, and so on. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, copyright violation, and intentional too – the proper attributions are embedded in the image, so they would have to be removed willingly for it to appear without them, not to mention that changing the words is simply stealing the artwork. As Tony points out:

My use of the Peanuts characters, in a comic that I drew and wrote myself, is allowed as a parody. But when people grab my art, change a few words, and label it as their own, it amounts to theft.

Quite simply, if anyone wanted to do their own parody, they could draw their own artwork. I’ll leave it to you to contemplate how many good religious folk were the ones stealing the image for other purposes. I’m sure it wasn’t many…

This year, in response to the various uses of the comic, Tony has a simple deal: Link to the original comic directly on his site, and he’ll donate $1 for every 500 page views to Doctors Without Borders.

So here’s the original, which is still quite appropriate and will remain so indefinitely.

If you’re one of them good christians, this is also my gift to you. Get enough of your friends together, and you can drive Tony into the poorhouse! It’s really okay, since it’s not about you being nasty, it’s god acting through you, and giving that heretic exactly what he deserves! [Did I nail those internal rationalizations down? Should I have used a different term than “nail”?]

Or draw your own comic, and give $2 per page view to Whining About Respect or some other. I’m sure there’s some organization that helps support the self-righteous when the real world intrudes into their fantasy. I mean, besides churches.

Otherwise, celebrate the holidays as you see fit, and have fun!

A reminder

Al Denelsbeck

As we approach an arbitrary dividing line that we call the end of the year, and I face the fact that I should have updated the calendar long ago, I offer a reminder to all of those reading who have digital images on their computer – and for that matter, even those that don’t: back up your system! Digital information is easy to damage, and every storage option available to us is failure prone. The only way to avoid losing stuff is to rotate backups and trust none of them. It’s the price we pay for resorting to this method of storing information.

If you don’t have an external drive, get one. If you haven’t fired it up in months, that’s too long. If at any point you have just one working copy of your information, you have a weak point. I lost an unknown number of images from Florida when an archive hard drive failed at a crucial point, while I was rebuilding my computer system and had just wiped the main drive. And I can’t tell you how many CDs and DVDs that I’ve had simply give up the ghost. If you need it or want it, copy it several times over.

And while I’m at it, here’s another item for those with digital images, especially those that edit them. Your images are going to look the best if you can see them accurately on your computer monitor, and I’ve now made a page to help you optimize this. Check it out, most especially the example images that I’ve linked to there, and ensure that you’re seeing the best images that you can from your monitor – it’ll help a lot, and some of your images may suddenly look much better. This is another thing that should be done routinely.

Of course, you should be taking plenty of pics too, so after you’ve done all this, go out and add some more to the drive ;-)

Is this supposed to be a eulogy?

Al Denelsbeck

As I was writing another post and remaining, surprisingly to some I think, unconnected from the world at large, I was notified that Christopher Hitchens died last night of his esophageal cancer, at the age of 62.

Now, I clarify things a little. Despite the strong sentiments expressed in his book God Is Not Great, Hitchens was not a high priest of atheism, even when ignoring the fact that we simply don’t have those. I personally identified with less than half of what he said at any given time, and was polarly opposed to his feelings on the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and George W. Bush – not to mention alcohol.

And that is, in part, what makes his death regrettable, to me and others. One of his defining traits was in speaking his mind, in open disregard for how this might be perceived. In this way, he trashed the sneaky tactics of political correctness and the Overton Window, blasting through a veneer of ‘proper’ discourse to state what was really on his mind. Another, perhaps his most defining, trait was his remarkable ability with words, an old-school British skill that allowed him to combine a classical education and manner with a gangsta’s attitude, demonstrating that speech can serve as a better weapon than most allow themselves to recognize. No one could match this ability, and being cut down by Hitchens still commanded the respect that he did it so gracefully and precisely, a gifted surgeon of conviction.

I also have to appreciate his approach to impending death, where he foiled the hopes of the pious that he would waver in his atheism while still being remarkably genial in his responses to them. Death was only a deadline, and he kept on with his pursuits as long as his physical ability allowed, at times appearing to actually defy such.

He wasn’t an idol, in some cases he was a twit, but he had some appreciable traits too, many more so than Steve Jobs. If there’s a legacy left at all, I hope that it’s the knowledge that being forthright and outspoken has much more merit than being agreeable, but maybe we can foster a little more ability to eloquently lambaste something, too.

The new lights keep buzzing

Al Denelsbeck

The weather got nice today and I was doing some other photos outside, when the persistent buzzing finally got me to look up and see what was going on. It seems this European honeybee (Apis mellifera) thought our holiday lights looked rather appealing, and checked out numerous bulbs along the string before flying off.

Knowing that bees are often guided by how much ultraviolet is reflected by flowers, I have to wonder if the bulbs somehow bounced back more UV than normal, whatever ‘normal’ is. The string was off for the day, so it has nothing to do with the LED output. I don’t think I’m likely to find out anytime soon, because while shooting in infrared isn’t too difficult, ultraviolet is another matter entirely, and pretty expensive to tackle.

Or perhaps the manufacturer just washed the ‘gems’ in pheromones. You never know…

So, why do people believe?

Al Denelsbeck

While I take pains not to let it come through in posts, overall, I’m a fairly cranky person, and I know at least a few other skeptics are as well. It would be easy to take this and extrapolate that being skeptical makes you cranky, which some people really do believe and which is an excellent example of failing to understand correlation and causation. For my part, I know where it comes from, and can only say that the same may be true for others as well. Basically, I find far too many people to be irrational and even fatuous, and when you’re immersed in such a culture, it’s hard to be upbeat, you know? Especially as election season comes around.

Which is, naturally, why so much of this blog deals with critical thinking; it is (part of) my own contribution towards correcting this, and an exercise in reaching people. Not to mention that critical thinking has also been remarkably informative, about nature, about behavior, and about how things work overall, so I find it pretty cool, actually. The crankiness is what led to skepticism, as I struggle to understand why people are so spastic sometimes. Belief in things without firm evidence is rampant in our society, and it does make you wonder why. Herewith, some of my musings on why this is so often seen, and how it works out that way.

Lend some character

Al Denelsbeck

A few months back, I shot this Tolkienesque scene on the side of the river nearby, actually on the same outing that I chased down this special assignment. To get this angle, I was flat on my belly on a rock at the edge of the river, with my legs extending behind me into the water, far enough that my shorts were getting wet. That’s the kind of extremes I go to in pursuit of my interests.

Okay, granted, it’s not exactly National Geographic caliber hardships, but I’m not getting paid what those photographers are, either, so there! In fact, now that it’s online this pic will probably get ripped off.

Anyway, aside from simply showing it off, the point I’m making is that interesting compositions sometimes require a vantage that many people don’t consider. Looking down on these roots at your feet wouldn’t be half as compelling, and have none of the depth that this shows. While a lot of nature photography (and many other genres) require finding a good subject to begin with, it’s also important to try and render it in a captivating or dramatic way. This does sometimes mean getting wet or dirty, or doing something awkward or uncomfortable, but a wet crotch until I got home was worth the resulting images. I tend to think people are way too neurotic about getting dirty anyway – we’ve gotten far too soft. Flop down and get the shot. As Calvin’s dad says, it builds character.

Still won’t make it art, though.

The exception proves to rule

Al Denelsbeck

This is another post inspired by Demon Haunted World, and if I find out that you haven’t read this book yet, I’m going to come to your house and smack you in the back of the head with a rolled up e-magazine…

Yet despite my promotion of this book, I’m going to highlight something that I find misleading within it. Sagan lists a quote from Ethan Allen, who said:

Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), then they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

This is something that I suspect everyone runs into from time to time, but of course it is especially known among skeptics. Or at least, we think we run into it; in truth, there’s often something else entirely at work, and it bears recognition because it seriously affects our approach.

When it comes right down to it, very few people argue against reason itself, at least as a principle, which is how Allen was referring to it. Virtually no one actually finds reason or rationality to be a bad thing, nor do they ever consider themselves to display irrational behavior at any time – the same may be said for ‘evil’. The conflict invariably comes in because different people have different standards of reason and rationality, and to argue that someone is being irrational will almost certainly be ineffective – it becomes nothing but an ad hominem attack and is quickly dismissed.

Let’s take, for example, those that believe many UFO reports are indications of visiting alien life forms. They did not pick this subject to champion at random, or because it seemed silly; they are convinced because of such factors as the large number of reports, the detailed descriptions, and even the likelihood of life having arisen on other planets, among perhaps many others. These are not irrational reasons in the slightest, and nothing to be dismissive of, if we’re being honest with ourselves. Using myself as an example, I fail to be convinced of alien visitations because of factors that counter those, such as the huge market for visitation stories, the complete lack of corroboration, the ability for people to drastically misjudge what they see, and the wanton disregard for physical laws. I might be considered irrational for placing more weight on these, but this is only because the standards of reasonable evidence are different from person to person.

For those who want to advocate critical thinking, this is important to recognize. We can’t arbitrarily decide who is rational and who isn’t, and the criteria should not include such concepts in the slightest. Instead, we have to make a case for the alternatives, and be able to demonstrate that such alternatives carry greater weight, or at the very least, throw some doubt into the mix. Eyewitness testimony is often considered highly reliable in regards to witnessing UFO activity, but not when it comes to fishing stories – why the double-standard? Our goal is to raise such questions and compare the evidence for popular or favored phenomena against the evidence for mundane explanations. It’s a little like a court case: if reasonable doubt exists, no firm conclusion can or should be reached, but reasonable doubt is not self-evident – it must be enumerated, patiently and without antagonism.

This is, most likely, what Phil Plait was trying to communicate with his infamous Don’t Be A Dick speech (it was the follow-through that sucked.) Active skeptics sometimes take for granted the mental process of comparing exceptions and alternative explanations, but too few people have even been exposed to such things, much less have adopted them as routine. While most disciplines of science require the examination, and ruling out, of alternative explanations before some new discovery can be considered valid, such rigor isn’t common in humanity overall. People tend to rely more on personal accounts and their instincts for what ‘feels right.’

One of the most difficult of factors to deal with in such claims is the emotional one. For whatever reason, any individual may find the idea of extraterrestrial life to be a fascinating concept, and it is this fascination which can, very often, affect just how much weight is given to any particular piece of evidence. The same might be said for government conspiracies, alternative medicine, religion, and so on. Emotionally favored ideas mean that once some factor in support of this favor is found, the individual generally stops looking, and certainly doesn’t consider if counter-evidence exists. We actually do this constantly throughout our lives – think of your favorite food. Is it rational to like it? Does it really do something good for you, or fulfill needs better than alternatives – or do you just like it for the taste? Is that really a good reason? Or, for that matter, a bad reason? That’s an example of emotional versus rational commitment. Countering this is sometimes pretty hard, and we should never expect it to happen quickly.

What we can do, however, is to offer the alternatives, the explanations, and the exceptions, to provide at the least the myriad reasons why some particular kind of evidence can be called into question. We can demonstrate what it is that makes us pause and question some conclusion, especially if we can provide counter examples (like the fishing story above.) Most especially, we need to detach from the idea of either emotional commitment, or the relative comparisons of intellect, if we want to have any affect at all. We shouldn’t look down in the slightest on those that don’t see things as we do, but only make the effort to explain why we see it differently.

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t easy, and that I’m guilty of not heeding my own advice on numerous occasions. We tend to see things as personal conflicts, especially when faced with arrogant or dismissive attitudes towards ourselves, but that’s a trap, a way of driving us away from our goals. We need to view our activities, despite provocation, as efforts to improve the standards, to critically examine the evidence, to catch the flaws before someone else does. Most especially, we need to demonstrate that questioning doesn’t stop at a preferred answer, and/or that preferred answers don’t actually exist – facts are facts regardless of our preference for them.

That raises another issue, again seen far too often, which is the arbitrary interpretation of facts. What someone sees or hears is generally simple stimuli of sensory organs, interpreted by the brain into an idea of something known and, usually, expected. They may then communicate their interpretations, and not the stimuli itself, when describing the event. But like the meanings behind literature, interpretations do not necessarily indicate accuracy, and may reflect either preconceptions of the interpreter or even suggestions from others. UFO enthusiasts absolutely hate birds, military flares, and the planet Venus, because they keep blocking witness’ views of alien spacecraft. But like it or not, if someone was looking at a clear sky in that specific direction and could not place the spaceship in relation to the highly-visible planet nearby, they probably didn’t see a spaceship. As for movement, the moon really rips across the sky on the nights that a stiff wind is blowing high thin clouds…

The point is, in order for something to be a compelling explanation, there must be no exceptions, no possibility of mistake, no way of misinterpreting it. And the skeptic’s job is to present this concept in a useful manner. There will naturally be resistance, so our goal should never be to win, but only to raise that niggling little question and let it grow on its own. Doubt is a very hardy weed, and once started, requires some very firm evidence to kill off.

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