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Astronomy

Neil Tyson Finds Astronomy Events Boring

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 16, 2022
Filed under

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

14 responses to “Neil Tyson Finds Astronomy Events Boring”

  1. Steve Crouch says:
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    Have to say I partially agree with him if he’s only talking about eclipses of the moon. I saw my first lunar eclipse in 1963. Now I wouldn’t get out of bed for one.

  2. David Kinney says:
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    Neil Tyson is so boring, if he said something you’d probably not notice. Just sayin’ 😉

    • Todd Austin says:
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      My word would be tedious. His focus is invariably himself and he tends to wander into pontificating on subjects of which he knows precious little. Musk has wandered into the same logical fallacy lately – the supreme confidence that public attention somehow magically converts knowledge about one thing into wisdom about all things. Their every burp and grunt is not worthy of announcing to the masses.

      • Bob Mahoney says:
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        Their every burp and grunt is not worthy of announcing to the masses.

        Which goes for just about most social media, for nearly every person everywhere. An ocean of nothing with a few items of substantive content worth noting.

        • Todd Austin says:
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          Those who feel the need to share their burps and grunts I’ve either never followed (Tyson) or unfollowed (Musk, Eric Feigl-Ding). Fortunately, there are those who stay on topic.

    • Skinny_Lu says:
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      I disagree. NDGT is a superb speaker and scientific communicator. I wish I had his vocabulary. He understand media and has mastered the art of the sound bite. When I see something about/with NGDT, I always stop and listen to him for a bit. He is my hero in a few ways.
      But, I did get up to look at the last one…. and watched through binoculars. My moon never looked red, just yellowish at best.

      • David Kinney says:
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        I was a kid watching Carl Sagan on Cosmos. I could not wait for the next episode to come out. Maybe it’s because I’m older, or it’s a sign of the times, but Neil Tyson’s take on it was boring, slow, and did not capture my imagination like Carl Sagan did. My kids agreed with me – and they never watched the original. The lunar eclipse might be boring to him, but my 20s son and his friends all thought it was cool enough to be messaging everyone to go out and see it. Calling it boring is just losing out on an opportunity to excite people. Just my 2 cents.

        • Todd Austin says:
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          Comparisons between Tyson and Sagan remind me of Lloyd Bentsen’s comparison of Dan Quayle to Jack Kennedy.

        • Skinny_Lu says:
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          I agree. He could have kept quiet…. don’t ruin it for others. =)

  3. mfwright says:
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    For many of us city dwellers (lot more that rural dwellers) not much to see when looking at the sky, for me it is the same 23 stars. But then it was cloudy so I didn’t bother.

    Which brings up another item, I can’t recall specific YT video, it was a lecture about how much of our culture has lost what earlier cultures had. Before light pollution there was more of a “connection” to the stars in the sky. Night sky was brilliant and imaginations of constellations went wild, and there was different types of constellations rather than the ones documented these days (

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      From Exploring Space, Finding Ourselves
      (https://www.thespacereview….
      Starry, starry night
      And what of that oft-touted claim about “access to the universe?” Let’s not fool ourselves with the advertising hype. They do not have access to the real universe; most only have access to a chopped up, pared down, plasma-screen facsimile of that universe. As time passes, technology advances, and our society changes around us, fewer and fewer children are getting the opportunity to experience the real thing unfiltered and in person.

      Consider the light-polluted night sky that the majority of our techno-culture children live under today. Then imagine the night sky above the ancient cultures who invented stargazing and the constellations. It is the difference between dropping a few grains of salt on a musty grey tablecloth and tossing an entire handful of glitter across an expansive floor of depthless black marble.

      Can we truly grasp how that awe-inspiring horizon-to-horizon vista fired the minds and souls of those who came before us? Aristotle, Homer, Galileo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven—and millions of others—nightly gazed into a vast dome teeming with stars, nebulae, the wandering planets, and the ethereal filament of the Milky Way. Think of the huge leaps of comprehension and innovation that such a frequent spectacle helped bring forth! Is it any wonder that humans mastered astronomy, navigation, and sail? Composed symphonies and sonnets? Harnessed steam? Probed the atom? Conquered the air? Designed, built, and flew spacecraft to the Moon?

      Yet how many kids today experience anything remotely similar? Do even tourists on an ocean cruise see the night sky as it was then, back when our forebears were creating the foundations of our civilization? No, I am not condemning the technological progress that trailed light pollution in its wake. I do grieve, however, for all that night sky awe we’ve lost and the grand inspiration it might have instilled in countless scientists, engineers, poets, and philosophers during the past century.

      And I worry about the children of today who will become the leaders of tomorrow, those who do not see that limitless expanse every night. In its stead they absorb a universe of compressed tag lines, cropped pictures, and truncated video clips confined by the edges of their viewing screens. It is this digital data stream, combined with myriad other trends of our culture, that will in large part define how they ponder—or don’t—themselves, their accomplishments (if any), and the crises they will face inevitably in their brave new world.

  4. Steve Pemberton says:
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    I watched from an urban area but that seemed to have little impact, it looked nearly as good as lunar eclipses that I have seen in dark skies. I viewed it naked eye, with binoculars, and with a small telescope. Each had their own interesting views. And with the telescope I noticed that there were three stars lined up in a row in front of the Moon, and during totality I watched as the Moon “took out” the middle one. Occultations don’t always happen during Lunar eclipses, it makes for an interesting view because the very limited amount of light from the Moon gave a really good view of what I later found out was a 6.3 magnitude double star as it blinked out. It came out the back end shortly before totality ended

    This was a long totality, as the Moon went more down the center of the shadow. But not quite, which I could tell from the lighter edges on one side even at peak totality. But it was overall darker at the peak of totality than most other eclipses that I have seen.

    It was quite worthwhile stepping out onto my front porch to see it. I even talked to a few neighbors that were out, which usually happens whenever you are out looking at something in the sky. That’s not a bad thing.

    I generally like NDGT, but was surprised to hear his comments on what in my opinion is a great type of event to get the general public at least looking at something in the sky. But I think he tends to not like things that get more attention than he does.

  5. Richard H. Shores says:
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    I don’t need a boring and bloviating Neil deGrasse Tyson to tell me what astronomical phenomenon is “unspectacular” because nothing is.