[ATM] ATM: Astonished! (Setting Circles)

["David Harbour" <scarab2@cox.net>]

To all:

I just want to tell you folks that I am astonished at how many of you have 
requested my rough and quickly done html email article about how to 
subdivide a circle easily and very accurately down to very small 
subdivisions.

I have speculated on why this might be so. Even though we live in the 
silicon/digit world now, and no one should have to be without a digital 
readout (encoded presentation) of his or her altitude, azimuth, or 
declination, and right ascension, the plain fact is that an older and 
simpler technology has its own appeal, elegance- beauty, if you will. I 
mean, just as decoration on the structure of a large telescope, a big 
setting circle represents art: "form follows function".

There is something nostalgic, appealing in extinct technolgy, methodology. I 
suppose one could argue that that is why there are so many who collect 
things: slide rules, for instance. Or old vacuum tube radios, old airplanes, 
etc.

Anyway, I remember in the old Albert Ingalls ATM books making a fuss over 
how challenging the problem was to produce accurate setting circles. There 
is no challenge whatsoever now, to us, in a later generation of atm-ing, for 
most of the things that were represented as very challenging for atms in the 
old Albert Ingalls/Scientific American atm books are easy as pie for us 
today.

But then, think how technology marches: for instance, there were almost 
weekly crashes of the Lockheed Super Constellation airliners and the Douglas 
Super DC-7 airliners when I was a boy. Such a tremendous difference between 
now and then, made possible by discarding obsolete technologies, and 
embracing new ones. Almost no large airliners crash nowadays, and far, far, 
far more seat miles are flown now than every before in history. Vacuum 
tubes, reciprocating engines with propellors on large airliners, flying 
boats, etc. All gone. Progress. But how elegant those things were.

No one will get hurt painting a very large, attractive setting circle on his 
split ring horse shoe for right ascension, or on the side of his big 
Dobsonian box section of his tube for altitude.

Thanks for requesting. I hope the piece was not muddlingly confusing. If it 
is, perhaps at some time I will go to the extensive task of making step-wise 
drawings. However, I think you guys will all understand it. Let me know if 
you don't, and once again, thanks for requesting, all of you-

Davey
N9606H
N95207 


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