The Czar was strolling through the Castle’s second floor cafeteria a few minutes ago when he bumped into the Mandarin.

“I just posted a great email I got,” he said.

“Bullshit,” we said, and then boggled. The Mandarin replied to an email? This is perhaps a first. The Czar was about to apologize, but he waved us off, saying he had no time. He rushed off to the basement to drill a hole through the surface of the moon. Or rather, “the moon isn’t about to burn a hole through the surface of itself.”

Second, ‘Puter comes in to the commissary to drop some Necco wafers into the vending machine to get a two-pack of strawberry Pop-Tarts (he could easily have our kitchens get him some, but he says they don’t taste as good as the stolen ones).

“Cool post,” he says, “But can you get a regression? That is, every time you look in a dark space, you find more stars, which then have more dark spaces, which then have more stars, ad infinitum?”

Well, no. The HST is pointed to a dark spot in the sky and left on for 48 hours. Brighter light sources appear right away in infrared light. Then some more appear. Then more, as the light collects. After that duration, you don’t see any more blobs of light appearing. So you know you pretty much got them all.

Second, the red shift on the light tells you how far away they are. If you start getting galaxies around the 13 billion light year mark, you probably aren’t going to get much more with this technology. Galaxies did not necessarily start producing significant starlight until the universe was half a million years old, so the oldest you would realistically get would be 13.2 billion light years away.

Future technology might allow us to see a bit past that, but you are at a practical limit with a picture like this.

“Sure,” ‘Puter replied, “But stars are ghey anyway, so who cares.” He then flipped the bird, and ambled into the second floor men’s room with a package of Pop-Tarts and a copy of Maxim.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.