On Fri, 07 Dec 2007 08:48:34 -0600, AndrewR
wrote:

As for the moron that says 2.3' of arc are easily discerned by most humans,
there's another ****ingly useless troll revealing himself. I used to host
astronomer's events and would often ask the general public how many stars they
could see in Epsilon Lyrae. If lucky maybe 10% of them would raise their hands
on being able to see 2 stars there.

Rubbish. The separation of epsilon Lyrae is 208", a distance that is
easily resolved with the naked eye. The only way 90% of them could
fail to resolve it is if the sky was bright or the seeing was poor.
You're the first person I've ever heard try to claim that human sight
has so poor a resolution that it can't resolve two bright points on
a dark field at a separation of over 200', and I suspect (I'm damned
sure, in fact) that you started from the EVF resolution you wanted
and then made up figures to suit.

You can't even get your numbers straight. You gave the separation of
the two pairs as 2.6 seconds. That's actually the separation of the
brighter of the pairs. The two pairs are separated by nearly 3.5
minutes. In good atmospheric conditions anyone with normal eyesight
can separate them. I'd give it a try myself right now but Lyra's too
close to the horizon.

You also claimed "The absolute highest level of detail perceivable by
any human is no smaller than 28 seconds of arc". I assume that by "no
smaller than" you mean "nearly twice as large as", because the maximum
resolution of the eye is about 37 cycles per degree, corresponding to
a minimum resolvable size at 5% contrast of 0.8 minutes.

Keep trying, though. You're funny when you start swearing at people.
Nobody would bother replying to you if you weren't.

--
Matthew Winn
[If replying by mail remove the "r" from "urk"]