Question on Secondary

Hello,
I'm brewing an ale and have just racked it to a glass carboy. The book I'm using (Homebrewing for Dummies) says to avoid splashing when siphoning. So, I placed the hose on the side of the carboy to keep the beer from "splashing" on the bottom of the carboy. My worry was that siphoning the beer straight down into the carboy would aerate it, which you are supposed to avoid after the primary is done.

Since then, I've seen pics on the Internet where the carboy has a full head on it. Some don't, so I'm not too worried about mine not having one. My question is: does this effect the beer? If so, how much? Or am I just looking at the wrong pictures?

Sounds like you did it right for the secondary. You do not want to splash around much at that point.

Splash for primary (to give the yeast a good bit of oxygen)
Don't splash for secondary.

You may have seen pictures of fermentation. The head on the beer might have been the krausen (sp).

Cool. That's what I thought, but wanted to make sure. I'm guessing the pics I saw were primarys and/or they wanted to be more "dramatic".

Thanks.

You're perfectly fine. If you can, get a racking cane that will go all the way to the bottom of the carboy. That full head you've seen is the primary fermentation. If you see foamy stuff in your secondary, you probably transfered too soon.

Just wondering, but if you do end up with a head when you put it into the secondary, and lets just say (hypothetically speaking of course) that you might have put it in too soon, should you just leave it in the secondary for a little longer? and how will this affect the brew. Thanks.