Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

One night, while I was making another star chart, I decided that I'd attempt to make tinted glass during the daytime for a while, to eventually make solar filters for the telescope.  I had initially thought I could just make a single, strong filter to use, but that is actually quite a bit harder than making multiple panes of more lightly tinted glass, and then just stacking the filters.  The main issue with making a single, very dark piece of glass is uniformity.

Uniformity will be a problem for any tinted glass I make, however, for light to moderately tinted glass, I can look at the entire pane that we pour and select the most uniform section to make the filter.  If the glass is too dark from the start, I can't make those observations easily.  As an added bonus, I won't have to worry about any weird interactions happening in the glass as a result of doping it too much with different oxides.

We have access to a few metals, which it shouldn't be too difficult to make some oxides of, and then sprinkle into the glass mix to tint it with a particular color.  We'll have to wait to see what colors we get until after making them though.  If I wanted a single filter, I'd probably need to mix multiple oxides into the one glass mix, but with multiple filters, I can just stick to one type per filter.  That also should offer flexibility down the road if, for instance, I wanted to look through a particular color spectrum through the telescope.  Blue and red would be ideal filter colors to have in that regard, given the prevalence of stars in those colors in my home universe.

I took eleven days tinkering with glass additives, and while I didn't get perfect results, I'm content with what I did get.  Iron oxide gave me a green color, which was reminiscent of beer bottles on earth, copper oxide gave me a nice blue, and both lead and zinc didn't seem to affect color much, though they did affect the glass slightly in other ways.  For good measure, I also tried adding powdered pyrite made from solid pyrite crystals, which gave me a yellow-brown color.

I had been hoping that I could find a good red colored glass to use as a filter as well, but with just blue and yellow-brown, I could filter out a significant amount of the light.  Enough, in fact, that we could safely look at the suns.  Working up to that point was quite tricky, however.  After I made a few of those filters, I would layer them in front of the telescope, and then aim it at one of the suns, with a paper behind the eye piece.

Two, three, and four layers weren't enough.  With two layers, I still had to turn the telescope away quickly, because the eye piece got too hot to touch.  At four layers, the paper still heated very quickly.  At five layers, it seemed cool enough, but for good measure, I went up to six before attempting to look through.

I had aimed it at the brighter of our suns, and what I saw was actually quite boring all things considered.  I saw a fairly uniform circle, with a few dark spots on it.  I turned the telescope to the second sun, and had to remove two of the six filters to see anything.  It's considerably darker than the larger sun, but without the filters, that would be hard to determine.  This sun was quite a bit more boring as well.  There were no visible spots or anything, just a dim circle.

I kept up observations for 26 days, periodically checking both suns during the day, and making star charts at night.  The smaller sun had no noticeable difference in it's appearance.  The larger one, however, is seemingly tidally locked to the smaller one.  The total orbital period for the two stars around each other is about 13 days, and the sunspots on the larger star always point the same direction relative to the smaller sun.

On the 27th day of observations, we experienced another solar eclipse, signaling the next month of the year.  As I watched it happening, something clicked mentally, and I realized why the seasons are what they are, and why each year perfectly lines up with the lunar eclipses.  The solar-lunar eclipses and solar-solar eclipses are probably regulating temperatures.  

As the two suns orbit each other, they eclipse each other occasionally, resulting in less solar radiation reaching our planet.  We have thirteen months, and it takes thirteen days for the two suns to complete an orbit around each other.  Our moon eclipses both suns for about six hours every thirty days.  Since thirteen is a prime number, and thirty isn't a multiple of thirteen, it means that each of our lunar-solar eclipses occurs during a different time during the solar-solar eclipse cycle.

Sometimes, our lunar eclipses occur while both suns are visible, and other times it overlaps with one of the solar-solar eclipses.  Any time we get a lunar-solar eclipse, we get no light from our two suns for those hours, cooling the planet.  If that lines up with a solar-solar eclipse, then we lose out on relatively less heating than we would otherwise.

If my hypothesis is right, then I suspect that during our winter months, our eclipses will occur only during non solar-solar eclipses, giving us the lowest amount of solar radiation in the year.  With winter coming soon, this should be easy enough to check.  I asked around with the dwarves and humans if they'd ever heard of a thermometer, which they hadn't.  Which means I know what I'm going to start working on next.  We do have some alcohol that has been brewed in the past few years using dwarven crops, which I should be able to concentrate enough to make a thermometer.  With that, we can start making temperature measurements, and actually get some hard data on ambient temperature.

Thanks to thermal hands, I was actually able to make a thermometer in only 12 days.  After concentrating ethanol to a reasonable level, I then added some dye to make the fluid more visible.  I made multiple different prototype sealed bulb thermometers, then with thermal hands, it was easy for me to manipulate the temperature of the bulb to have the ethanol move up and down the capillary portion to test which design worked best for what I wanted.

Ultimately, I found that I needed to cool the bulb portion first before sealing and adding the capillary tube, otherwise the fluid wouldn't give any readings at ambient temperature.  Ultimately, this thermometer is quite large.  The reason being that I need to be able to tune other thermometers to this one to keep consistent readings down the road.

Without a machine to produce duplicates, every thermometer we make will have to be labelled with temperature after being mostly completed.  I'll basically have to label it against the big thermometer at three different temperatures, and then use those to mark out all the other temperature points on each thermometer.

For now though, we only need the one thermometer.  On Earth, I'm sure many people would be upset that I'm going with an approximately Fahrenheit scale, but I already think in terms of Fahrenheit, and I don't have a way to measure the boiling point of water to mark since the ethanol would boil before that.  Instead, I'm using the freezing point of ocean water as 0, and a comfortable air temperature as 70.  Since this is imprecise anyway, I think it's fine.  I only really want to use this for relative measurements of temperature.  I've hired three goblins to help me with my endeavor.

We'll be measuring temperature at four points in the day, sunrise, sunset, midday, and midnight.  The midnight time is going to be more imprecise, given the lack of references and clocks, but again, I'm really only measuring relative data here.  I'll also have them mark down when solar-solar eclipses begin, and they'll make more temperature measurements during those, and the same goes for lunar-solar eclipses.  Ultimately, each will also be marked down relative to what day they were measured.

In a few years time, I can review all the data, organize it, and make some graphs to see if there are any trends that I haven't noticed.  With that planned out, I only have a few more nights until I'll consider myself done with the star charts I'd planned to make.  After that, I don't know what I plan to work on.  I should probably check on the mine again with tectonic sense, to see if we're near anything interesting yet.