Re: [APML] more Astro Kung Fu

["Bert Katzung" <katzung1@attbi.com>]

Dave: And by the way, how is that new observatory coming along? Bet that is
consuming a lot of AKF!
Bert


> 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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