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A colleague of mine is so into Python that he split his blog in two like a French guillotine. Of course, I hope without the same results.
Check out his original blog here and his new python-only blog here. That second link is a feedburner link, cool.
Now playing: Coverville - Coverville-050222
I finally broke down and picked a telescope. It’s a mid-range model from Meade, an 8” LX200GPS.
It’s a “goto” scope, which means it has a microcomputer in a little controller that allows you to pick an object and goto it as long as the telescope is properly “aligned”.
When I was looking for a scope, I had a few requirements:
The LX200GPS fits all of these requirements, though I’ll probably have trouble finding some of the Messier from my light-polluted backyard skies The LX200GPS seems, from my reasearch, a relatively safe scope and a very popular one. It certainly seems good enough for me.
The scope has an integrated Altazimuth mount. This is not an ideal mount for astrophotography, as the motor has to move in two directions. For long exposures, the two motors are more likely to introduce swirling errors in your exposure than if you had an equatorial mount. When equatorially mounted, a motor only needs to operate in a single direction and there is less of a chance you’ll have smearing errors in long exposures. However, I can add a equatorial “wedge” to my scope when I’m ready and this will make my scope equatorial. This makes setup take a bit longer, but this was a compromise.
Anyway, I bought the scope from a local dealer 5 minutes from my house. He gave me a decent price ($2,200) and I bought a bunch of accessories. These were mainly more powerful optics and the AC/DC transformer which will save me from buying loads and loads of batteries.
I can already see that I’ll need to buy some kind of case to carry the thing in. The original box, while usable, will become kind of beat up if I keep shoving it in my trunk for every dark-sky expedition. Also, I’ll need some high magnification optics for very clear nights (powerful magnifications are useless if the sky is not clear enough).
So, last night I assembled the thing (first in the house and then outside) and went through the initialization procedure. T he scope has a GPS so it knew my longitude and latitude. From there, it took a level reading (to compensate for my tripod tilt) and a True North reading. While all of t hat is well and good, you still need to tell it where two bright stars are located before the scope can be truly aligned. This was kind of a pain in the ass! I suspect it will get easier as I am more experienced. In the meantime, this is the part of the process that is pretty painful… especially when you have a 4 year old kid begging to see Saturn.
So far so good. I’ll likely have more reports on the scope’s peformance over the coming weeks and months.
Clear Skies,
Nick
Some of you may be interested to know that the star Polaris, which is the tail star of the little dipper, won’t always be our North Star. In fact, the star called Vega was our north star some 14,000 years ago.
What’s this you say? Well, the earth rotates and wobbles as it makes it’s way around the sun and in turn, around the galaxy.
I decided to fire up Starry Night and run a simulation. The video you see here demonstrates how North, in celestial terms, changes over time.
You will see Polaris start off in the North position, then it will quickly spiral into chaos between the years AD 3,000 and AD 14,000. Vega is never as good a north star as Polaris is, and you can see this as Polaris returns to the North position toward the end of the clip, around AD 26,000.
Enjoy the Quicktime video .
I took a nice and early train this morning only to get stuck for about 45 minutes. I’m still here before most of the office, but I’m still bummed.
Anyway, I had a gorgeous view of a series of tracks leading into Jamaica station so I snapped off a couple shots of trains going by. The busy trains gently kicked up snow from yesterday’s sprinkling as they passed by. It was kind of peaceful to watch.
Have a nice morning.
To quote the Astronomy Picture of the Day, “…an event of that size scale did occur off the Antarctic coast over the last three months”
Wow!
I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. I had to take a perfectly good scientific instrument and do something perverse with it. I figure I need some controversy on my site if I want to attract large audiences.
If you remember, my brother got my son a Digital Blue QX5 USB microscope. I even posted some pictures with it. Well, over the weekend I did something pretty horrible. I trained the microscope on my half-chewed figernails and started to pull apart my flesh at 60x magnification.
Dare you click on this link to see what happened? HiQ (12.5MB), MedQ (3MB).
This blog is heading downhill in a big way. By the way, I’ll know if you clicked on the link since Feedburner will tell me so.
I encoded the 2+ minute movie using Quicktime Pro. I used the mpeg4 encoder. If you have Quicktime, you should be able to play it. I shrunk the image 50% from it’s original 640x480 size and limited the datarate to 20Kbps for the MedQ link (3MB). The HiQ link runs at about 80Kbps. I used Apple's default encoder. It's kind of slow, but the quality is very good.
I added a new category to my blog tonight, Astronomy. I can promise you that there will be a lot of activity on that category in the coming months.
Some of you may or may not know that Astronomy has been a passion of mine since I was in high-school. When I was 14, I got a department store-grade refractor probably like this one. I either got it for my birthday or Christmas. I should ask my mom, she might remember.
I spent many bittersweet evenings observing the heavens with that scope. On one hand, I marveled at the details I could see on the moon. On the other hand, I cursed at the shaking and bobbling of the images in my eyepiece. And why did everything keep moving our of my field of view? Damn that Earth rotation!
Now I’m out to buy a real scope. I’m doing a lot of research on the right scope for the job. It may surprise some of you that I’m not really thinking about my kids as I plan for the purchase. My kids are still pretty young and I doubt they will want to join me more than once in a long while once the novelty of the purchase wears off. From what I read, kids don’t take a serious interest in Astronomy until they are quite a bit older. Also from what I read, most serious amateur astronomers have multiple scope for multiple jobs. I doubt the scope that’s ideal for my kids is ideal for me and at their age, I doubt any scope is ideal.
As I read review after review, I’m getting a sense on what the tradeoffs are in this space. It seems like a) more money doesn’t solve all problems, b) the bigger the scope the better the image and the greater pain in the ass the bitch is to set up, c) good optics and a steady mount are almost or more important than the aperature (the diameter of its main, light-gathering lens or mirror).
My primary resource is SKY & Telescope magazine and skyandtelescope.com. They have plenty of good tutorials, buying guides, and tons of archive telescope reviews.
There is a really decent telescope shop in my hometown (what do I know?) and the owner and his wife are really helpful. The guy is a real computer geek too and he spent a while showing me numerous astrophotos he’s taken with CCD cameras.
He said that I should hook up with the local astronomy club and look through some scopes at a Star Party. On my to-do list.
Lots more information is coming as I read and read and read.
I posted some photos (slideshow) of my trip to Whistler/Blackcomb. Other people have obviously been there (slideshow). The other photos up there definitely depict the Whistler I was hoping for, plenty of nice big-mountain powder. Conditions when I went were less than ideal.
That’s ok, they had beer.
Now playing: The Lascivious Biddies - 1-23-04 Biddycast
Man, do I have a lot of catching up to do. All last week, I was wither sick or snowboarding in Vancouver. This week, I’ve had a ton of catching up on “life in general” and I found that it’s already Thursday and I’m almost caught up.
One of the things that I meant to write about before, but which has slipped my mind, was a computer microscope that my son Giovanni got for his birthday. His birthday was on January 25, but this present came kind of late so we played with it a lot before I left for my trip.
Here are some cool pics we took:
The Microsoft connects via USB and can do video in addition to stills. You can even detach the main sensor and stick it in your ear if that’s what you’re into. The microscope allows for multiple resolutions and the 200x setting is pretty cool but theimages are pretty dark. Plus, it’s hard to keep the damn thing steady at that high resolution. 60x is much easier to manage and 10x is good to get your bearings.
Unfortunately, the scope isn’t powerful enough to see cells or single-celled organisms. Even so, it’s an aweful lot of fun to play with and quite educational for the kids.
Now playing: Adam Curry - DSC-2005-02-06
Google maps are very cool. It’s easy to get directions from wantagh to JFK. So uncluttered, so unfull of ads. You can easily link to a set of directions as I’ve done here. You can do quick locality searches as well, like Pizza near Wantagh. I wonder if you can do all of this from the Google API?
I’m back from my snowbording trip to Whistler/Blackcomb mountains in Vancouver, B.C. Wow, what a rush. It was a crazy good trip but I’m pretty beat and jet-lagged to boot. I have lots of pictures to post, but that will have to wait until I am more coherent and my camera stuff is unpacked.
The only reason I’m up so late is because I’m in West-coast time. I tried to stay on East Coast time, but I obviously failed.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while, just about as long as I’ve been making french toast. When I pour vanilla extract into a milk and egg mixture, the vanilla writhes like it’s a living thing. Very strange. Click on the image to see for yourself. Warning, it’s a 3.5MB download.
I took that clip this morning while I was making breakfast, as if you couldn’t guess.
Anyway, I’m playing around with the codec that I should be using to encode movies I post on my site. I’d be interested in any feedback you might have on what happens when you click on that clip. If it doesn’t play right away, it should work if you save it to disk and manually load it int your mpeg2 media player of choice.
I’m on the train and I’m busy wacking away at my laptop. For some reason, I was curious about the wireless situation on the train. I thought maybe there were other wireless-enabled PC’s? Were the neighborhoods that I whizzed by Wifi enabled? Does the train itself have a wireless network?
So, I slapped in my wireless-g network card and viola, two networks popped up.
What? No joke. Here is what I saw in my wireless connection list:
Well, I did wind up getting an IP address:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Autoconfiguration IP Address. . . : 169.254.213.63 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
However, I didn’t get a gateway so no Internet access for me. So, I decided to keep hitting refresh and I saw more networks as the train moved along on it’s route.
and more
Through all of this, the original network named 198.168.1.106 has always had a strong connection. This was true for two days in a row. So, I suspect the train itself has this connection but I’m just guessing.
I tried to ping 198.168.1.106 and got nothing. I then investigated the connection and found out some more information about it here:
Does anyone know what is special about the 198 and 169 octets? I’ve seen the 169 octet before, usually when I’ve had network problems… actually, so I’m not sure if it’s significant.
Anyway, I’m approachoing Jamaica Station soon and yesterday, there were a bunch of WiFi networks crawling around there. It would be cool to get a 60 second connection to the Internet where I could upload a blog post or get some mail!
I want to do a podcast, but should I? What would I talk about? A friend at work would love to do one and we talked briefly about doing one together. More than likely we’d do it over Skype, which has excellent sound quality. My ID is nickcody, in case you want to try it out and see what the quality is like.
Lots of topics for the podcast come to mind but some of the best podcasters don’t bother choosing a topic. They just talk.
I could talk about what I’m blogging about but then what would I blog about if I didn that?
Now playing: Adam Curry - DSC-2005-02-03
Now playing: Dave Slusher @ Evil Genius Chronicles - Jan 31, 2005 - "Why I Don't Believe in God"
Here is my January Drawing Finale of cartoons, before I move onto Robots and Spaceships.
(This one I drew without a reference. It’s off of course, but I think it’s better than I would have been able to do before I started practicing!)
Onto February!
I just heard a great tip on how to increase the number of connections that Firefox will use when downloading content from a web page. They call this pipelining. What’s almost as interesting as the setting is the method you use to access and change it.
Typing about:config in your address bar brings up this screen. I changed two options, shown in bold and voila!
I’m on the train so I haven’t experienced any performance improvement, if any. We’ll see.
I wonder how IE operates? I was always under the impression that all browsers did this kind of pipelining and I was surprised to find out that I had to turn it on for Firefox.
UPDATE: I got into work and fired up the browser. I went to bloglines.com, gmail.com, tenbyten.org, primordial ooze (of course) and I was pretty much blown away. There is a significant difference in performance.
Why on Earth would they disable this? I suppose it’s because it could seriously degrade a dial-up user’s experience and the Firefox team didn’t want to try and writing a Tuning Wizard or a bandwith detector of some kind.
Anyway, if you’re a Firefox user, you really have to enable this option.
