[APML] Astro Kung Fu was [Foveon Chip]

[Aplanatic@aol.com]

>> and a big dose of "ass kung fu" 

> Can you explain for the uninitiated <g>
> Bobby Middleton

Hi Bobby,

What is Ass Kung Fu?

In short, a mixture of patience, stamina and desire,
often exhibited in tedious or physically demanding 
situations.

In college I knew a graduate student who worked
on a difficult thesis having to do with the coupling
between phonons and electrons.  The outline of his 
work could be described in an hour or less, but the
actual calculations involved a huge number of path
integrals, each of which had to be analytically worked
out, checked and re-checked.  This was before the
days of Matlab and Mathematica.  His graduate study
took about six years and each day he sat at his
desk from morning to evening doing those integrals.

We would comment on how sore his ass must get, sitting
there all day long at this tedious task.  One day
someone asked him how he managed it and he said, "I
have a lot of ass kung fu because I want to know the
answer.  It's important to me."  So, whenever someone
showed great diligence at a complex and difficult task,
they were known to have a lot of ass kung fu.

To me, many astrophotographers exhibit a lot of ass
kung fu, even in the days of autoguiders and 
out-of-the-box equipment.

Ass Kung Fu is:

Driving hours to a dark site, setting up a scope, 
polar aligning, focusing, imaging until dawn and
then driving home to go to work.

Sitting for hours (or days) with an image in Photoshop 
trying to get as much out of it as possible.

Doing a large mossaic of the Rosette, Orion Nebula or
the Milky Way.

Putting together hundreds of individual CCD exposures
to ring out the last bit of SNR.

Spending hundreds of hours polishing and figuring a
mirror in the hope of achieving a decent imaging
instrument.

The list goes on....

Ass Kung Fu is also something more than this.  It
requires a touch of humility, the quite appreciation 
of the mystery and grandeur of the universe, and the
desire to know more about it.

Dave Rowe



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