No, there’s nothing magic about 40lbs. I guess if you do demonstrations in public halls it’s the sort of weight which is big enough to be impressive but small enough to carry there and back. And also small enough that you can lift it to some extent when there’s no gyro help.
I popped out for 30-40 minutes. Standing close to my house shields me from the worst of the town light but only leaves about 30-40% of the sky visible. The seeing wasn’t great - any low cloud just reflects the town light and even if there are gaps you can’t see anything because your eyes never get dark-accustomed. A big gap did open up for a while in which I could see fairly easily down to magnitude 3.5 or so (the dimmest main stars in Cassiopeia). I saw a couple of bright Perseids and maybe one dim one in that. Then another cloud bank rolled in and the moon rose and I called it a night.
Watching prof Cox The other night. The universe reaches entropy in a trillion trillion trillion trillion blah blah blah number of years. So big is this number that if you counted every atom in the universe you would run out of atoms before you reach this number. The last lights of black dwarf stars go out and a sea of photons remains for infinity.
The truly interesting but is that the stars required to support life go out after a billionth of a billionth of a billionth blah blah blah of one percent of this time. We are only at the beginning of that very small percentage. All the big white stars will be done within this small time.
We live in the best time that the universe has to offer.
You can probably anthropic principle that one - it may be that intelligent life might only emerge when conditions are perfect, so it’s not surprising that we (as allegedly intelligent life) note that conditions are perfect.
