Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Shocking Similarities Between Our Eyes and Telescopes

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Have you ever wondered how your eyes compare to a telescope?  The answer is more surprising than you might think! Today, we will look at the fascinating parallels between the human eye and one of the most powerful astronomical instruments - the telescope.  From lenses and apertures to light detection and color vision, we will explore how these two systems, one biological and the other mechanical, have strikingly similar properties.  Tune in to learn more about how nature's best telescope matches up with cutting-edge technology. This episode is part 1 of a series where we’ll uncover even more intriguing insights about the connections between our eyes and telescopes, so stay tuned! Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro  01:29 How telescopes inspired me as a kid 06:24 Comparing the anatomy of the human eye to a telescope 12:51 Light sensitivity and resolution in the human eye  17:23 Color vision and polarization  21:03 Historical contributions and confirmation bias 25:41 How to improve our astronomical observations  28:39 Outro Additional resources:  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome back to my channel. This is Brian Keating. I'm the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. I've been an astronomer for over 40 years. And I hope to convey some of the lifelong learning and loving that I've had of astronomy with some new discoveries that are being made both in optical astronomy and how astronomy relates to the brain. And to do this, we're going to take a tour of the similar.

and the differences between the human eyeball and the telescope. The human eyeball is effectively a telescope that you're born with. It has all the features of a modern telescopic camera system, and we'll investigate those, as well as some of the fascinating connections between the eye and the brain. And this is partially in preparation for an upcoming episode of Andrew Huberman's Huberman Lab podcast, which I've been invited upon, and I plan to talk about these similarities with Andrew when I do go on this podcast.

Andrew and I have other similarities, such as the fact that we are both inspired in some way to become scientists around the same age by encountering very inexpensive, or as Andrew loves to say, low cost to consumer, tools of science. In his case, it was the aquarium and fish. He loved learning about them. He'd collect fish. For me, it was getting a cheap telescope, no bigger than this one, to explore the mysteries of the universe as I could perceive them from my home in Dobbs Ferry, New York. So today, I hope to instill some of that inspiration in you, especially you parents out there. Those of you who are interested can find a buyer's guide for telescopes on my website, we'll put links to all the resources in the show notes below.

For those of you who have been here, you know that the telescope has played an important role in my life. Described in my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, how an encounter with a telescope looking at the moon as a 12-year-old inspired me to become an astronomer and still inspires me to this day 40 years later. I also work with some of the most brilliant scientist in the world on enormous telescopes, thousands of times bigger than this tiny little telescope that launched me on my astronomical adventures, many years ago. I do that in combination with collaborations that I've founded and been a part of for decades, the Bicep collaboration, and now the Simon's Array and Simon's Observatory collaborations. The Simon's Observatory is an observatory unlike any other. It's poised to be the biggest, best, and most expensive observatory of its kind ever make. A lot of the motivation for this video is inspired by my friend Andrew Huberman. We've been talking all the while about the fascinating

world of the human eye. And I hope to really convince him that the telescope is really one of the few ways at low, very low cost to consumers, only $50. I don't sell them, but I have a buyer's ground on my website, that you can install a lifelong love of astronomy in children or even in yourself. I have here some models of the eyeball and I have telescopes and we're going to be building telescopes using these powerful lasers and tools that I have here to represent the function of optical elements and instruments in both the human eye. and in modern telescopes. We'll also discuss the limitations of telescopes, because what sets a scientist apart is when he or she can indicate where he or she does not understand the functionality

or the true behavior of a discovery. So it's not enough to make a discovery. You have to understand what are the limitations of your discovery. So let's dive in to what makes the eye, nature's first and some say best astronomical instrument. As a kid, I was transfixed by the appearance of the night's sky, even to the naked eye, my very first telescope. And then beyond that, with a tiny little $50-dollar refracting telescope, no different from this little one, except that had a better amount, inspired my journey from a young kid in Westchester County, New York, all the way to a professional cosmologist working at the boundaries of the Earth. Now, this video is appearing at a time when a very, very interesting celestial guest may be appearing as well. And that's

a comet, which was discovered in 2023, almost accidentally, originally was thought to be an asteroid. And it goes by a name to Suchistan, to Shoochinsan dash Atlas, discovered by the asteroid, terrestrial impact, last alert system Atlas in South Africa in February of 2023. Over a year after its discovery and more, this object may pass through your eyes and your telescope. And so it's fitting to kind of prepare yourself in this video for what we might be witness to. And have no fear, this is not a last chance for humanity type comet. Don't look up situation. I want you to look up. I want you to explore the night sky with your eyes and even with inexpensive telescopes and optical systems. I'm going to give advice for both amateur astronomers and even you pros out there. I know many of my

audience are experts in astronomy and astrophotography. I know you're going to really love it. And the resources available to you have never been better. I couldn't imagine in 1986 having a CCD camera with 48 megapixels attached to my telescope to record things to post on Instagram and show and amaze my friends. It was all naked eye astronomy. Whether you're an advanced amateur astronomer, a professional astronomer, a Nobel Prize winner, or you just stumbled on this channel out of curiosity. I hope you'll enjoy this deep dive into your own. Own it all. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Diego.

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We'll explore the similarities between a telescope and the human eye as we dive deep into the anatomy of the human eye and of astronomical telescope. We'll start by comparing the anatomy of our eye with the design and operating principles of telescopes, refracting telescopes and reflecting telescopes. Then we'll dive into the incredible capabilities of the human eye. Explore the fascinating connections between their sensitivity, their resolution, and their color perception properties. In part three, we'll explore some astronomical tricks that can take advantage of our eyes' unique features.

These are things that are not present in astronomical telescopes. Part four, we'll take a historical deep dive into how our understanding of the cosmos has been shaped from primitive telescopes in the 1600s all the way up to the James Webb Space Telescope and even our Simon's Observatory in Chile. In part five, we'll study how we can optimize our vision for truly squeezing every precious last photon out of every observation. And in part six, they tuned to the end where we'll talk about common eye problems, defects,

the inevitable byproducts of getting older, and what we can do about it to improve and make the most out of our astronomical observations. Are you ready to dive deep and see the universe their new eyes? Let's go. Let's start by comparing the anatomy of the human eye to that of a telescope. So here's a giant human eye about the size of some dinosaurs, I suppose. and we're going to take it apart, not surgically. So you see on the outside some features of the eye already, muscles and blood vessels, et cetera,

that we will explore in further detail. We start with the first optical element, which is the cornea. The cornea is actually optically active as part of the optical focusing system of the eye. It actually is the first optical element that's encountered. It also protects the eye, and it can suffer from degeneration as time goes on. It's also used in Lasic surgery, as we can do here, bouncing a laser, off this. And the laser ablation created in combination with past guest Donna Strickland, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize. These ultra-high pulse amplification lasers blast away the tissue,

the delicate tissue, and sculpt it into a precise form that corrects for deficiencies in the eyes, lenses, and also due to degradation of the muscular structure and the physical structure of the eyeball itself. Our retinas are in the back, and it's not shown here in great detail. We'll talk about that as well as this structure here, the optic nerve, which is responsible for something called the blind spot. We'll talk about the blind spot in Section 5. The retina performs the same job as a CCD camera does in a telescope. It actually detects the faint light systems, but it's also the only part of the human brain that's not located in the cranial vault, according to Andrew Heberman. In other words, there's a part of your brain that's not inside of your skull. It's inside the

squishy eyeball, and it really belongs inside of your brain. It's quite fascinating in the way he describes it. So the retina is a part of your brain in the back of the eyeball connected to the brain furthermore by this optical nerve and connective tissue there that we'll explore in later sections of the video. The iris is this colored, beautiful colored, distinctive patterned piece of tissue that changes the pupil, the amount of light that gets in. And that is controlled. The pupil is the actual blank space, the open space here. that's the term that we call even in optics for an optical surface that's not magnifying or reducing, but it controls the aperture, the amount of light that's getting in, in this case, due to varying conditions of light and dark.

Now, a modern-day camera can do that automatically, but CCD cameras or telescopes have to be done manually. You have to adjust them as a user operator, depending on what objects you're looking at. When you're looking at a planet or something in our solar system, you have very different conditions, what's called dynamic range, the ability to change the amount of light getting into the camera so that doesn't overwhelm the amplifiers and the computer circuits later down the road. The lens is obviously responsible for focusing light. It's actually pliable. It's frangible.

It can be squished and squashed by muscles, these tiny muscles shown here and here that can restrict or distort physically this semi-solid biological tissue. It's quite incredible that that can then change where the focal, rays converge in the back of the eye. So this big bubble here is called the vitreous humor. Nothing funny about that. Although I do have a great astronomy, Joe. What's the difference between an ophthalmologist and an optometrist? I've got $150,000 a year. And the properties of the lens and the focus onto the retina are what we turn to next. We can actually model that. In a telescope, there's the equivalent of the pupil of the iris here. It's not as beautifully colored as yours is, I'm sure.

and then the amount of light is restricted. You don't want all the light that could possibly enter the lens. Lens is much bigger than this brass disc, the iris size here that restricts the pupil size. In an optical telescope, there's two lenses. In our eye, there's only one. And what's so fascinating, as we'll show in a moment, our eyes focus light to a point or to a focal plane, the retina. But that retinal image is actually upside down.

The image that you see is actually the inverse of what's actually happening outside. Because we only have one lens, we can't invert the image, as I'll show with these two-lens systems over here. Although most telescopes use a two-lens system, and you don't have, and you don't actually, and you have an inverted image as well. It is possible to get a right-side-up image using either reflecting or refracting optics, as we'll see later. So here you see these laser beams coming out, and the laser beams are brought to a focal point over here at some distance away, and that's based on the curvature and the refractive index of the lens. Now, for a telescope, a telescope that's said it has two lenses, and typically that's done further to capture the features of the object and present them in a way that will then match to the third lens in the system of an optical telescope. It has two lenses itself, one here and one here.

But then you also have to take into account the human eyeball has a lens as well at the very end, and then it gets projected onto a retina. It stood in four by my finger over here. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed, sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. So this is how a refracting telescope works.

There are other types of telescopes called reflecting telescopes. Those use mirrors. Those were invented by Isaac Newton in the 1700s. And they have other features that are superior to those of refracting telescopes. In fact, the biggest refracting telescope on Earth is only about a meter in diameter. And even our Simon's observatory telescopes are a good fraction of a meter in diameter. And there's some of the biggest telescopes ever made for this type of astronomy that we do. So to get a much bigger telescope, we need a reflecting telescope.

We'll talk about those later. So again, the three parts of the telescope system that are most analogous to the human eyeball are the lens in the telescope or the lens in the human eye, the iris, which controls the aperture, how much light goes in through what's called the pupil. And in the human eye, they look like this. And then in the last essential component is the final detector component of the system, which is the retina or the CCD camera. in the case of an astronomical telescope.

But again, our eye is a living organ. It's not made of silicon. It's not made of glass and brass. The pupil can change its size. It could be distorted in diameter by tiny muscles that are fed by tiny blood vessels that change the aperture, just the same way you can change the focal, the ISO, the exposure, the F number of a telescope or telescopic camera system. The human eye can detect single photons in a properly darkened room.

It's just incredible. Now let's talk about light sensitivity and resolution. Our eyes have two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. Rods are extremely sensitive. They're the most lizard-like and ancient of the light-sensing receptors in our retinal system. Cones, on the other hand, are much less sensitive, but they give our eyes color vision. You can remember that as a mnemonic, which is always my favorite scrabble word, by associating letter C cone with color.

They work best in bright light. telescopes, on the other hand, gather light independent of color, although the lens itself will have what's called chromatic aberration, in that it will focus light to different places depending on the color. That's one of the drawbacks of lens-based telescopes that reflecting telescopes don't have. But since our eyes are refracting telescope or a lens-based telescope, we do have to deal with those issues. It is true that you can actually sense single photons. If you're properly prepared, these studies have been done. I believe in the journal Nature, I'll ask Andrew about that, how sensitive the human eye can be compared to a telescope, compared to a CCD camera,

which might have trouble detecting single photons. Of course, a CCD camera can only sense certain wavelengths as well, and eventually the color images may want to be connected, so-called color correction and white balance to match what the human eye would see in a similar situation. But one area where eyes have a huge advantage, even over telescopes, is the wide field of view that we have. Over a whopping 150 degrees, almost side to side. Now, some animals can see much farther around and some have their eyes on the sides of their heads and some can like owls can swivel their eyes around completely but our wide field of view dwarfs that with even some of the best telescopes the Hubble space telescope had a minor field of view the James

Webb space telescope has a minor field of view optical telescope that you can buy like this maybe a few degrees at most only a few times the full moon sometimes much less than that our wide field of view is one of our greatest advantages over a telescope along with what's called peripheral vision which gives us incredible situational awareness. We've evolved to not want things to be able to sneak up from the side because that's how they come to attack us, or at least the way that they did. Imagine if we always look through a narrow tube with no perspective.

We wouldn't be able to see much. And this wide field of view is crucial for early ancestors for their survival, and it's an important trick that we can use to this very day. Averted vision. This is a cool trick that not many people are aware of, but it allows you to be incredibly sensitive, especially at night. If you look slightly away from the image

when you're staring through a telescope. Most of the time we're staring straight at something we're interested in. That's called the fovea. The phobia effect is what you're looking at. So phobia is the small depression within the retina itself where visual acuity is the highest. It's the central portion of the structure of the eye called the macula, which is responsible for so-called central vision. And it's also sometimes we talk about the phobia as the field of view in the central area that we're most concentrated on. Averted vision takes advantage of the fact that We spend so much time looking at very bright light with our fovea because we want to take in as much information as rapidly as possible for evolutionary purposes. But looking to the side, you're exposed the less frequently exposed rod cells in the retina to actually be used them and recruit them to into the purpose of seeing more detail and even lower sensitivity.

Now, it's a trick you have to master. But once you do, you can see things much, much fainter than you can with the directly viewing foveal portion of the retina. The phobia has this weird distinction that it's located right next to the optic nerve, which will find out gives us the blind spot. So the phobia centralis can sometimes be not the greatest tool for looking through a telescope at faint features. You don't need this when you're looking at the moon or a planet or something bright, however. Now, telescopes achieve color vision via an intriguing trick, which we don't have to make use of

because our eyes are sensitive to colors through their cone cells, as I said. All a telescope can see is a zero and a one. A CCD camera can either be, is a transistor at the most basic level, and it can either be active, you know, high state or low state and voltage. So it really can only see on or off. So what astronomers and other people do, and your phone does this as well, is it has three pixels with different filters or a single pixel divided into three parts, red, green, and blue and blue, with a filter in front of each one of them. That actually degrade some of the resolution, the slight amount, because red wavelengths are longer than blue wavelengths. It actually makes certain wavelengths less highly resolved. And experienced astronomers know this fact and take advantage of it.

So what astronomers do, they take multiple exposures to get color images through different color filters, but our eyes do this processing instantly. Now, one feature which is common to both optical telescopes and to the human eye, is the relative insensitivity to polarize light. So there are three major properties of light. It's intensity, its polarization, and its spectrum or color. Now, we're familiar with the intensity. Obviously, we see a bright light.

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As I say often, it's the way the bread gets buttered around the Keating household. And that's polarization. I say the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. But there is an effect that actually can reveal that you will have the capability to see polarized light. It's a phenomenon called Haydinger's Brush. It's a phenomenon that allows some of us to detect the presence of polarized light, perceiving it, manifesting in it as an elliptical, yellowish, bluish effect on a blue or white background.

You can see this. I'll make the screen completely white for a second. And then I'll take it away. And you may see this quadrupolar pattern. And that's attributed to what's called the birefringent structure in the eye, particularly what's called the macular pigment, xanthophilus, xanthin, lutein and meso-zantinin. Again, I'll have to ask Andrew about this. And this structure in particular around the phobia offers some sensitivity to some people to polarize light, which is quite interesting. And some clinicians use Hedinger's brus to assess the functional integrity of the macula and the phobia,

macula has a diameter about half a centimeter, and the phobia centralis is part of the macula. So sometimes the macula can get degenerated and you can actually detect that degeneration, what's called age-related macular degeneration, possibly by seeing if a subject can observe Hedinger's brush or not. So don't get scared if you can't see it. I have trouble seeing it sometimes. I don't believe I have macular degeneration. But I am going to see my optometrist soon, or my ophthalmologist, I should say, charges, she charges me a lot more. People with low pigment density they found are at greater risk of developing AMD at age-related, macular degeneration.

So Haydniger's Bruss polarization has become useful in the past. We have access to it with the human eyes it is. And it's called adaptive optics. And really, we don't really make use of adaptive optics the way astronomers do. And reflecting telescopes, an astronomer can ploy, it's called a deformable mirror. This was invented in part at the University of California by an eminent astronomer Claire Max, I hope to have her on someday and colleagues. And it was classified information because it was used in the military. And so in that situation, you produce an artificial

or guide star from a laser that illuminates a sodium atom in the upper atmosphere. It makes an artificial star and then knowing what the star should look like, the pattern of the star, the mirror can be deformed to exactly counteract the turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere that leads to scintillation. The famous like twinkle, twinkle little star is a real phenomenon. Stars twinkle in atmospheres like ours. They don't twinkle in space. You can get rid of that twinkling, which is caused by differing refractive indices. It's effectively like little tiny lenses that are coming into and out of the beam of your eye or the telescope. And you can actually correct that in a telescope. We can't really correct it with our eyes. By making an artificial star,

you can effectively make a correction in a deformable mirror. You can make a deflection. And there you can see much clearer to much greater distances, even rivaling a space telescope, effectively freezing the atmosphere over short periods of time and taking multiple exposures. Now, I've been told by my contacts in the military that this is used in the military for sniper scopes. You can also use this tool during the day. And astronomy has this long history. In fact, the telescope itself was used by Galileo first to garner some cash flow for

the old maestro. He showed the Venetian Senate that you could see a ship in the Venetian lagoon with a telescope three days before you could see it with the naked eye if you had one of his patented, he patent it. He didn't invent it either. Hans Lipper Shea did only a few years later, but old hands never thought to look up at the sky or sell it to greedy Venetian politicians. At any rate, the telescope has been used for military purposes for, you know, literally 400 years since the time of Galileo in the Venetian Senate. And there are pictures, paintings, will show some of those of him demonstrating it to these politicians. And that led to him receiving the most important

goal of any of any astronomer or professor, which is he got full tenure. And he's, he got full tenure. got an increased startup along with it. Now when Galileo turned the telescope to the moon, he discovered that there were craters there that didn't exist, as we'll talk about. He also saw the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters or Subaru, and he made this sketch here, there's a show, which shows six open stars. We call it the Seven Sisters, because that's the Greek myth of Dionysus. These were his nursemaids that fed him wine, and then he was the god of the grape. I'm not going to get into all that. But Galileo, when he observed the Pleiades cluster, he saw what he called enumerable, stars that you couldn't see with the naked eye. He colored those in in black to depict things you

could only see with a telescope. It's the first example of data science and history where he was using visualization techniques, early PowerPoint, to emphasize a scientific point that only through the use of a telescope could certain phenomena be witnessed. And he went farther, too far, as he often would do, and he claimed that the whole of the Pleiades was comprised of stars that he just couldn't resolve with his tiny little telescope. He realized the bigger the telescope, the bigger and better the resolution of that telescope. The smaller the feature the telescope can see. And this is a phenomenon that you'll catch if you start buying a telescope.

You'll get a telescope of a certain size. And then immediately you'll be thinking about, oh, what can I get with a bigger telescope? And that's called aperture fever. It's a very pernicious disease that has affected me for four decades and is done much to my wife's consternation as I take it out of the kidding. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG.

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Now, Galileo did things to prove many scientific hypotheses, including the heat. heliocentric model. We've talked about that before. He was right. The Earth does go around the sun, but his evidence was that the tides on the earth are due to sloshing and squashing of waves, and due to the Earth's rotation and revolution about the sun. But that's not true. The moon's gravity, the tidal force of the moon, and to some extent the tidal force of the sun, not the revolution force, but actually tidal gravitational forces. That's what causes tide. He was right, but he was right for the wrong reason, which is a very pernicious effect called confirmation bias. But it's interesting because he, Galileo, claimed that what he saw was proof.

In other words, he called it visual certainty. All you needed to do is to look at something to prove the scientific hypothesis. It's a very dangerous thing because it leaves you susceptible to confirmation bias. As well as why he depicted the moon with this huge crater in the center of it, as seen in the last quarter or first quarter moon, his depictions here. That crater doesn't exist. There is a big crater relatively near the meridian, this prime meridian on the moon, but it's nowhere near as big as depicted.

But that's okay. What Galilee was trying to do, again, with his forays into data science, was to demonstrate how it felt to see that crater for the first time. So he was conveying an emotion, a feeling, a reaction, in a way that you couldn't do with mere words. So this is an example of what's so beautiful about astronomy, why I love it, and why I implore you to get a telescope for yourself or for your children or grandchildren. Because you can't feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson. you can't feel what it was like to discover the double helix structure of DNA unless you have powerful x-ray machines and all sorts of, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope or the

large Hadron Collider. But you can feel exactly what it felt like to discover that the moon had craters, that the moon had mountains, that the moon had oceans, quote unquote. These were all discovered with Galileo's telescope. The moons of Jupiter were discovered with the telescope of Galileo that's smaller than what you can get for $50 if you go to Briankeeting.com slash, now if you go to Briankeeting.com slash hits, I do have a telescope buyer's guide. I don't get a penny from it. Again, as Andrew would say, zero cost to consumer, at least I'm not charging you, but you can buy one for a tiny amount. And then you will not only see what Galileo saw, you'll feel what Galileo felt. How cool is that? And how rare is that? There's no other

similarity within all of science. How can we improve our astronomical adventures, our astronomical observations. Oxygen plays a huge role and a high altitude's like 17,200 feet where the Simon's observatory is, it can really affect our vision. I remember once on my Keo when I was observing with the Caltech sub-millimeter observatory right near the kectaloscopes that if you just held your breath for a little bit at night and then you start to breathe really deeply and even maybe took a hit of oxygen. It wasn't required but you could. You would see the stars as if they're lasers shooting into your eyeballs. And even higher at 17,000 feet, the view gets better.

But there you do need oxygen. And I can take off the oxygen for a second. Look at stars. Look at planets. And the sensation, the sensitivity is so much better when you start breathing oxygen. They sell oxygen canisters. I'll put a link down below. They're called boost.

You can actually breathe these in. You buy them on Amazon. Again, I don't get a penny from it. But they can be used to improve your night vision. It's a really cool trick that I've used on a few occasions. So try that. Experiment with it. Don't go overboard on any of these suggestions, by the way. I'm not, I am a doctor, but I'm not a real doctor.

Another key fact is dark adaptation. It takes about 30 full minutes for eyes to become fully adapted darkness. That's why serious stargazers avoid bright lights before observing, and we typically don't do much visual astronomy when the moon is full. It's very difficult to do that. You can do it. You can look at the moon, and you can look at planets, but it's very difficult to see very faint things in the night sky when the moon is out and full. Any other time, a few days before or after, it becomes fine. Physical fitness, because of oxygen, your overall health also affects your cardiovascular health also affects your proper blood flow to your eyes. They have these tiny vessels, some of the most sensitive things, receptors, nerves are in your eyeballs.

This is incredible. Now, there's some lifestyle factors you can improve your optical night sky vision by avoiding or partaking of. So alcohol is a no, no, unfortunately. And this is where Andrew and I agree 100%. I drink, you know, once a week maybe. A glass of wine, that's about it. He steers clear of alcohol, it seems like pretty much all the time.

But for astronomers, alcohol's a no-no. You know, it might be tempting to enjoy a hot toddy or Irish up your coffee while you're stargazing. Alcohol can actually impair your nightbed. Caffeine. A cup of coffee might help you stay awake, but can make your eyes more jittery, actually. And your hands, if you're moving the telescope also. Or the camera can make it worse. Nicotine, smoking.

You know, I enjoy fine cigar on occasion, but not when I'm star-dazing. Not only will the smoke get into the, into your line of sight, it also restricts blood flow, and that is not what you want. The eye needs blood supply for the musculature, and also for the readout of the data that your eye is seeing. I mean, this is a tiny fraction, how big the optic nerve is, you can see it's a tiny fraction of just your pupil. It might only be a few millimeters across in most people. And then to constrict the muscles in the blood flow is just awful. So you do want to avoid those things altogether.

So that's it for part one, where we've looked deep into the anatomy of the human eyeball and compared it to a telescope. Stay tuned for part two, where we talk about the deficiencies. Even this wonderful instrument has many, many horrible problems with it, as do telescopes. And we'll compare those features in part two. Stay tuned. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose

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