[ATMoB-discuss] Green Lasers?

[Steve Beckwith]

Brewster,
SHAME ON YOU, for bringing enlightenment and reason to this
conversation!

One of the benefits of living in a free society is the ability of a
handful of members (and a few non-members who won't fork over $25 for
dues), to take inquiries or announcements and morph them into inane
discussions.

Your reply should've been as follows:

"I need directions to the star party that I won't attend because the
organization has boy/girl (select one) in its name.  However if I did
attend the star party, I would comb through their by-laws before setting
up my telescope to insure they did not have a discriminatory possible.
While doing this, my other 'discussion group friend' would be using
green lasers to point out to the star party attendees the tiny little
eyes in the tiny little heads of through the tiny little windows of the
tiny little airplane that is thousands of feet in the air and moving in
hundred's of miles per hour.  The death and destruction would be
horrific (oh the humanity) but fortunately it would be somebody else's
fault.  I think the Executive Board should do something about this
before we get sued".    

It sure would be nice if a fact based discussion regarding the
scientific information outputs of the ISS versus space telescopes and
unmanned mission through the solar system.   

- Steve
"Impeach the ATMoB Vice President"

I am a Twit







 

  

-----Original Message-----
From: atmob-discuss-bounces at atmob.org
[mailto:atmob-discuss-bounces at atmob.org] On Behalf Of Brewster
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 12:08 AM
To: atmob-discuss at atmob.org
Subject: Re: [ATMoB-discuss] Green Lasers?

At 10:28 PM 3/6/2007, valleli at rcn.com wrote:
>some lives could be lost out of foolishness.

OK, pardon my ignorance, but I thought the FBI or some similar group 
ringed the white house with (high power) lasers to "warn" pilots (I 
can't find a reference on what power level it puts out, but it costs 
$500K, so seems like it would have some oomph...)

During the summer Canobie Lake has what must be a pretty high power 
laser blasting away at night (I can sometimes see it from Andover, a 
good 10+ miles away) and they're in the flight path for Manchester
airport.

How can a single beam from a small pocket pointer possibly be held 
steady enough to hit two 1/4" (pupil) targets in succession (four if 
we add teh co-pilot) at a few thousand feet, and low enough beam 
spread to do much other than look like a green light?  Those big 
spotlights they put up at auto dealers would seem a bigger threat - 
they put out kilowatts of light into a large beam, much more likely 
to hit a target for a long time...

Don't get me wrong, I certainly believe the last thing a pilot needs 
is distraction when taking off or landing and don't think there's any 
reason to even begin to "take a chance" if there's a plane anywhere in
site.

The green lasers are a *huge* asset for star parties and yes, people 
will do stupid things, but they also do stupid things with kitchen 
knives and guns too and we haven't outlawed those yet...(ok a knife 
on the ground isn't much of a threat to a plane in the air...)

Certainly I agree for the need for care on the ground as at close 
range anything over a few mW could be a problem. But shooting planes 
out of the sky?



Regards,

Brewster 


_______________________________________________
ATMoB-discuss mailing list
ATMoB-discuss at atmob.org
http://lists.atmob.org/mailman/listinfo/atmob-discuss