Exactly this. However, I will be honest. I thought that his claims will be discredited over time. So far it’s the oposite. For long years I thought “This is just egocentric fool.” … For a few years now, I am more like “I have no clue what to think about all this.”
He sure sounds like a crackpot to me.
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People called L Ron Hubbard a crackpot too, and look…oh wait…nevermind. 
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I think my main hobby might be considered tame or uninteresting compared with the other cool hobbies I’ve seen in this thread. But, I’ve been doing genealogy for the last 16 years, first using microfilm and postal mail, and soon finding a lot online. I still use postal mail and microfilm as needed, as there is certainly a lot of information which hasn’t been digitized yet.
I have also been using DNA to try to find relatives ranging from unknown second cousins to more distant cousins. Many people do these tests (such as at Ancestry .com, 23andMe, and others) solely to see if the admixture results confirm what they know of their ancestry (you may recall the TV advertisement about Scottish kilts or German lederhosen), but those kinds of results are not the most reliable aspect of DNA testing for genealogy. I’ve had one match, a previously unknown third cousin to me living in England, who helped to definitively solve the birthplace and family of one of my great-grandmothers, breaking a long-standing brick wall. And matches to two other people helped me with knowledge on another branch, plus one sent me a photo of two ancestors that I would never have obtained otherwise.
Other than genealogy, I had started to dabble in web design back in the late 1990s, eventually obtaining a certificate and trying to work in that field. A decade later, things dried up, family needs took priority, so all that went by the wayside. I do not miss it.
I do some exercise, but not by participating in a sport; just doing stretches, weights, and other exercises, as the aches and pains allow, to keep from turning into a complete slug.
And as for photography, well, all pretty amateur, but sometimes I do try the fancy stuff. I used my Nikon D750 with the zoom lens it came with, a 24-120 mm., plus tripod, various filters, and shutter release cable as needed. From our trip to the Hawaiian islands in late 2015, which I had prepared for by looking up “how-to” techniques ahead of time:
Rainbow Falls, on the “Big Island” (Hawaii), with and without the namesake rainbow.
Next is my poor attempt at capturing the glow of the Kilauea volcano, at the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park (you can see better images at tourist sites online). Three years later it had earthquakes and the crater floor in the photo collapsed as magma flowed out underground, causing eruptions in the nearby communities.
We also tried to get a photo of the Milky Way, while staying at an isolated place away from lights, on the southwestern shore of Kauai. The resulting shots were all dark, but I lightened this one to bring out what detail there was. Oh well, a first try, anyway.
And another first try, of the solar eclipse in August, 2017. We traveled to visit some relatives in Omaha, Nebraska to get in the area of totality, plus celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary for one couple. The second is a zoomed in cropped version of the first.
I hope to be able to take photos of the next full eclipse visible in the U.S., in 2024. We have some other relatives who live in an area in which it will be visible, so we’ll plan a visit. I’ll probably try to rent a longer lens next time.
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I spent years in Family History Centers (In the US, for all you non 'mericans, the Church of Latter Day Saints provide this service to all) ordering microfim and microfische researching records, going to libraries, writing towns, etc. They have all the records the library of congress does.
Not only is a lot of it still not online, what is is darn expensive to access, at least through ancestry.com.
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Or maybe they’re idiots?
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You do have to wonder, @Barney . . . these aliens can cross over God knows how many thousands of light years to get here . . . and then crash land in the desert? 
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Redneck aliens; my biggest fear!
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All this space talk got me thinking about one of the podcasts I subscribe to - This American Life. In episode #655 they talk to Frank Borman the Apollo 8 astronaut and he’s trash talking space for being dull and boring. It may interest some of you.
Frank Borman
Space science fiction still bores me. I’ve never seen-- what’s the name of that-- that very popular–
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
2001?
Frank Borman
Yeah, all that crap. I’ve never seen any of that.
Click on the blue play arrow to listen
Click on the symbol at the end of the arrow to fast forward to the Frank Borman part
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That made I larff.
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That’s how they caught the Golden State killer. It’s an interesting privacy debate to allow law enforcement unregulated access to private DNA testing sites.
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Well part of the idea is they’re scalable and inexpensive; it started with 2 lenses, it has 48 now and they’re adding 120 more. Of course telescopes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to over a billion dollars will be preferable if you have someone to pay for them 
but the dragonfly is still managing to find things the larger telescopes haven’t.
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Inexpensive by comparison.
I never thought of it from that aspect.
This is a very interesting concept. I wonder if future observatories will run with their concept instead of huge reflectors 
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Nice camera.
In astrophotography you need to capture as much light as possible.
With a DSLR this means multiple shots to get the most exposure. The more shots the better the result.
Still if that was a single shot of the Milky Way you took it’s still pretty good and you could not really expect more 
The main issue shooting a lot of frames in succession is the noise that is introduced by the camera’s image sensor heating up. This can be mostly taken care in post production. I used Photoshop for years but had better luck with GIMP, and it is free.
There are a lot of good tutorials on YouTube to explain the most practical way to achieve the best shots, and process them afterwards if you are interested.
Well, don’t act like the only intelligent species we know atm. … species able to escape Earth’s gravity, split atom, measure gravitational waves, construct complex computational machines … this quite intelligent species with all its progress… almost all the time act like it’s just a band of absolute imbeciles
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…and none of us have escaped earth’s gravity for almost 50 years, because NASA prioritized the wrong thing. Orbit is by definition below escape velocity 
“X’aklu, don’t you just wonder why this … humankind, spent so much resources to handle space travel … and then after 50 years just shoot a car with a mannequin into space.”
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Knowing Musk, that thing will probably take out something expensive on its first pass back by the earth, too. “Oops!”
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Can you elaborate?