Word: faintly
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...fact that any pictures and information reached J.P.L. from Uranus is remarkable in itself. Signals from Voyager's transmitter, traveling at the speed of light, required 2 hours and 45 minutes to traverse the 1.84 billion miles between the spacecraft and the earth, and were incredibly faint when they arrived. To enhance the transmissions, nasa picked them up with antennas at all three of its Deep Space Network complexes in California, Australia and Spain, and combined them electronically. Still, the combined signals were so weak that NASA engineers had to slow down the transmission rate so that information could...
...also quick to pounce, often humorously, when he sniffed out dishonest intentions or botched executions. He acknowledges one novelist's gradations of ineptitude: "She began several years ago with writing unmitigated nonsense, and she now writes nonsense very sensibly mitigated." He praises with faint damns a pamphlet composed by the painter James McNeill Whistler, who "writes in an offhand, colloquial style, much besprinkled with French--a style which might be called familiar if one often encountered anything like it." Holding at arm's length a novel by Louisa May Alcott (Eight Cousins: or, the Aunt-Hill), he mentions the opinion...
...image. Gathering sufficient photons to register an image is accomplished by either taking long-exposure photographs or using a larger mirror system to collect the light. Many astronomical photographs already take hours to make, but even then not enough photons can be gathered for a clear view of very faint objects. Hence the need for bigger mirrors. Complains Palomar Observatory Director Gerry Neugebauer: "We're photon starved...
...prisoners. To some degree these are arbitrary distinctions; the 19th century British painter Benjamin Haydon recorded his financial and artistic woes in 26 confidential volumes. As one of his last exhibitions fails, he laments, "They rush by thousands to see (Tom) Thumb. They push, they fight, they scream, they faint . . . They see my bills, my boards & don't read them." Months later he quotes King Lear, "Stretch me no longer on this tough World," and commits suicide. Is he a creator, a prisoner or merely, as Mallon has it, an apologist...
...sighting of VB 8B was made using a technique known as speckle interferometry, which eliminates most of the distortion that the earth's atmosphere causes to the faint emissions of light from so distant a body. Instead of taking one infrared exposure, the astronomers snapped 10,000 quick shots. A computer then blended all these shots into a composite image...