Covering information that shouldn't be caught out in the open.
Covering information that shouldn't be caught out in the open.
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Clustermap added Oct. 15, 2007
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May 8, 2008 How to really mess up a telemarketer Michael Covington came up with a couple of great lines to shut up a telemarketer. Problem is, they have thick skins, they don't care, and they're happy to have an unproductive call identified as such quickly, so they can move on to the next mark. I have a more labor-intensive technique that causes them much more anguish. A couple of months ago, I was getting tape-recorded [that's just plain illegal, right there -- see 47 USC § 227 (b)(1)(B)] calls from an outfit simply identifying itself as "Carpet Care." No entry in the phone book, not registered as a corporation with the California Secretary of State. So, when the next call came, and the annoyingly bubbly voice (perky people tick me off) on the tape said to press "1", I pressed "1." And set up an appointment. Sure. Waste their time like they wasted mine. At some point, you have to regard this as a sport, just as duck hunters don't mind the cost, effort, cold water, etc. involved in hunting waterfowl; otherwise you might as well cut your losses and hang up early. I was waiting for them, with my notebook computer out in the garage, on Wi-Fi, already set to the Secretary of State's Business Portal. I had a phone book out so they could show me which of the firms was theirs. Important point: I was waiting for them outside, in the garage, not at the front door. I had no intention of letting these people into the house, under any circumstances. So their "carpet cleaners" came by. Now, most carpet cleaners show up with a large van that houses all their equipment, the power-operated machinery, long thick hoses, clean and gray water tanks, etc. These guys showed up with a tiny Ford Explorer. No company name on the door, nothing. In the back was a tiny "carpet cleaning machine" like the kind you rent at the supermarket, and a couple of gallon jugs of chemicals -- like you buy at the supermarket. They refused to give the name of their company. Their "work order form" was preprinted but had no company name, no address, and only an 800 number as contact. I asked for a business license. They wouldn't produce one. The apparent leader whipped out his cell phone and called his boss and had me talk to him. Guy with a Middle Eastern accent. "I could geef you hunnert names, you not know if any true." I said not to worry, I could find out. I said if they were honest with me, they could clean my carpets. Guy on the scene says "Well, can we see the carpets?" No. So they took off. I tracked down some info on these clowns on the Internet. It's a scam operation. They rip off people. One callback number I was given, in case I needed to cancel an appointment (866-519-2650 -- for the benefit of anybody googling for these dirtballs) turned up some interesting complaints (one of those is my own entry). For the record and the search engines, other numbers given include 888-533-8002 and 888-845-8684. That complaint led to this charming profile of one of their operators. End of story? No. A few weeks later they called again. Same tape. Same pitch. So I said "Sure! Come on down!" They didn't show up. I figured they must have gotten wise and realized they had been here before. But then, a few days after their missed appointment, I got another call. (One thing about telemarketers, they're greedy, larcenous bastards and they'll flog that horse until they're sure they got out all the money that's to be gotten). It seems they called ahead and nobody picked up to confirm I'd be here, so they didn't come out. I said if I set an appointment I was here, either I was in the back yard or garage and didn't hear the call. So they came out again. This time I had something better planned for them -- a talk with the local police. I was on the phone to the local PD before their truck's wheels stopped turning. Within minutes of yet another Ford Explorer with minimal equipment showing up (this time with only one "operator"), two patrol cars descended on the scene. Asked to see ID, driver's license, business license. Guess what -- here's what they found:
(I never got a name so I'm not sure if this was the "Ohad Gibli" mentioned in the profile above; given all their accents, it's probably a ring of illegals). Again, the operator whipped out his cell phone and called his master. I didn't hear all of the conversation but it's never a good sign when the cop (with, in view of the particulars of the case, the satisfyingly Germanic name of Sgt. Hartmann -- yes, just like R. Lee Ermey's role in "Full Metal Jacket") starts yelling into the phone "Are you going to answer my question or not? Do you have a business license?" They issued a citation for conducting business without a license. My understanding is that when (if) they show up for court, they have to not only pay a fine, but also get a business license. Not cheap. I hope that even if they skip out on the court date, at least they're now appearing on the radar of officialdom. They couldn't write him up for driving without a license, because they didn't actually see him drive, but by the same token they wouldn't let him drive it away either. And as far as I'm concerned he should have been arrested and turned over to our blessed Department of Homeland Security for immigration or visa violations, but we all know how that system is broken in this country and the cop said as much. The operator hoofed it out of the residential neighborhood. (I said to the cops, "He's probably going to walk around a bit until you're gone, then come back and just drive away." Cop says "Yup, that's why we're going to cruise around for a while to see if we can catch him at it." It helps that I live about half a mile from the main police station). Two hours later he showed up with an obviously American kid who got behind the wheel. Probably somebody he found at the nearest video arcade and paid to drive him beyond the city limits. This operation is apparently based on the other side of LA, 50 miles away in Beverly Hills or thereabouts. And THAT'S how you waste a telemarketer's time, and money, but good. If you're less confrontational, at the very least set up an appointment or do whatever else to sucker them in, short of giving them money or a credit card number. Then, rig for silent running and simply don't open the door. Lead them on. They will use a cell phone to call you from out in front of your home. Don't answer. When they call back afterwards to find out why you weren't home, have them come out again -- and stonewall them again. Most of us have been conditioned to be polite to strangers, to be honest about setting up appointments, and the like. With telemarketers / scammers, you have to break that conditioning and be as rude and deceitful as they are. By law, until money changes hands, you do not have a contract, and you owe them nothing. If everybody did this with every solicitation, telemarketers and scammers like these carpet cleaners would go broke because of the small return on their time investment. (I also send back any unwanted mail solicitations that have prepaid response envelopes -- stuffed with supermarket sale flyers, coupons, other companies' offers, etc.)
May 3, 2008 I told you so Anybody notice that the price of groceries has shot up recently? (Sure you have). Along with the price of motor fuel. Here's an interesting bit of news on that topic. (In case that link goes away, the short version):
To quote that erudite thinker of the 1960s, Gomer Pyle, USMC: "Well gah-lee Sergeant Carter, surprahse surprahse!" Two years ago, on May 10, 2006, I wrote a little rant , with crunched numbers, about the absurdity of hoping to make a dent in oil demand by using agricultural crops to make motor fuel. Back then, two years ago this very week, I wrote
And starve in the proces. Since I wrote that, we've already seen food riots in Mexico over the price of tortillas, as well as food riots in other Third World countries. (Reminds me of the Kingston Trio song, The Merry Minuet) Of course, it doesn't help either that the world population contiues to grow and those pesky people insist on eating.
So if that's to be believed, we have the bizarre situation of those pesky foreigners taking fuel out of the mouths of our SUVs. (Or maybe it's the other way around... these zero-sum games are so confusing sometimes). And there's also this counterclaim, oddly enough from the exact same unimpeachable source -- The Prez.
In other words, one day, the official reason why prices go up is that Third World bounders have the temerity to eat like Westerners. But the same crew, just days later, claimed that food prices are going up merely as a reflection of energy costs -- the fuel needed to harvest, transport, etc. the food. Doesn't matter; come what may in November, that crew is only going to be around for another 8 months. Regardless, on May 1, Pres. Bush asked Congress for $770 million in overseas food aid. For some reason, we're expected to grow the crops to put in our gas tanks, and feed the rest of the world at the same time. Go figure. Got that? Our fuel prices are spiking. Grocery prices, the same. This year, the economy is deemed so bad that the government even takes pity on the taxpayers and gives $600 back -- sort of like an armed robber leaving some change behind.so the victims can call a cab. And somewhere we're supposed to shake loose three-quarters of a billion from the budget to put into foreign food aid. Two years ago, in that number-crunching exercise on soy for biodiesel, I wrote that soybeans were trading at $6.09 per bushel. Yesterday, soybeans went for $13.07. H. G. Wells said it best in his epitaph. .
April 27, 2008 The Black Eye Galaxy Last night I imaged Messier 64, the “Black Eye Galaxy.”
This was shot using a Meade DSI II Pro, no color filters (“Luminance” filter only — IR blocking), through my Vixen ED80Sf piggybacked on the Meade 12" LX200GPS. A Meade DSI Color camera served as an autoguider on the 12" scope. The setup works amazingly well; no trailed stars, and I left the scopes to do their thing while I went back inside. Exposure time of individual images, 60 sec; stack of 40 exposures; dark frames, flat frames and flat-darks (1 sec. exposure time). Automagically processed by DeepSkyStacker (freeware!). I tried both DSS and the (non-free) AIP4WIN2.0, and it seems like DSS does a better job.
April 17, 2008 Another ISS pass I managed to get some more imagery of the International Space Station passing in daylight late this afternoon. The pass was 7:00 to 7:06 PM, sunset was at 7:27 – so it was full daylight. All told, I had it on the screen for a little more than a minute, off and on in various segments of the resulting AVI file. I processed three segments, stacking images in Registax and tweaking the result in Photoshop. One of these managed to stack about 100 "good" frames out of an even longer segment. Equipment: Meade 12" LX200GPS, 0.33x focal reducer, Philips ToUcam 740K webcam, tracked using Brent Boshart's Satellite Tracker, captured in Peter Katreniak's K3CCDTools, settings adjusted on the fly using WcCtrl, edited with VirtualDub, stacked with Registax 4, tweaked in Registax and Adobe Photoshop.
(Retweaked in Registax and Photoshop 4/19/2008; first image is stack of 250 of 674)
I have no idea what we're seeing here; there used to be an ISS Simulator that provided a simulation of the current state of the station, as seen from Earth at any point and time, but it's now hopelessly out of date. Too much stuff has been added, or shifted around to other positions on the ISS. At present, the ISS looks something like this and this (and even those are already dated, since there has been one Shuttle mission since then, the ATV-1 Jules Verne has docked, and there is presently a Soyuz docked). How far away is it? I don't have time stamps to the second on the AVI file, so I don't know exactly when in the pass these images were taken, but at its closest approach on that pass, the range was 471 km (293 miles). The ISS orbits at about 340ish km (~210 miles) so that's the closest we can ever film it. March 29, 2008 The absurdity of "Earth Hour" Omigawd, it's Global Warming! We have to do something!!! Wait, I know, we'll just turn out the lights! (But only for a little while, otherwise it gets too inconvenient). The touchy-feely crowd is going gaga for "Earth Hour." That hour, once a year, this Saturday night, when we're all supposed to turn off the lights, the TV, the computer (even Google went "dark" to "remind" us of the blessed event)
and (I'm not making this up) stay home and play board games by candlelight. Sydney, Australia was among the first.
And then, I suppose, an hour later, the now totally empowered, indeed enlightened Lord Mayor turned the lights to the bridge and opera house on again. It's billed as "a global campaign to raise awareness of climate change. As in "OK, I'm aware already, let's turn on the lights and party!!!" This whole thing is patently absurd because:
I'm going to go outside to fool with my telescope tonight, but I can just about guarantee that this gesture will make an absolutely indetectable dent in night-sky illumination. I know this because I've been out at 3 AM, and despite most of the population being sound asleep (in the dark), the sky is no darker than at 8 or 9 PM. The light pollution comes from users (municipal and commercial) who don't care and don't want to turn off. I'm going to compromise. I'm going to turn off all the lights and surf the Web using my laptop, because that has batteries so it doesn't use any electricity.
March 27, 2008 International Space Station flyover I managed to image the ISS for a few seconds as it made a twilight pass. I would have gotten a lot more but it drifted out before I could take control with the joystick (it's slow to respond with this telescope model; 5 to 10 sec for inputs to show up on screen). I used Brent Boshart's "Satellite Tracker" program, which has just gone freeware / abandonware with V2.4.8 It may not remain available for much longer; to get it, you have to join the Yahoo support group for Satellite Tracker and look for it in the Files section. If one has registered with the U.S. government's Space Track (also free), one can automatically download satellite data to use in the program. (Here's how they get that data). All except classified satellites, and those are handled manually by downloading the appropriate zip file from Mike McCants' site. (How do amateurs get the data for "secret" satellites? The story is kind of funny. And, there's a basic problem with secret satellites – you can see the things if you just look up. Here's one saga of finding a lost satellite, and losing it again, and the efforts made to hide the things.) Here's the first ISS frame, to give some idea of how big the ISS is on the imager. It turns out I could even see the solar panels visually through my smaller piggybacked scope, an 80mm f/7.5 operating at about 20 power. Note that the longest dimension of the ISS, at 240 ft, is nearly the size of a football field.
And here's the animated GIF, extensively cropped.
Time of pass: 7:12 to 7:22 PM PDT, March 27, 2008. Maximum elevation 54 deg. (Sunset was at 7:11). Equipment details: 12" Meade LX200GPS, Meade 0.33x focal reducer giving EFL ~1000mm, field size 9.6 x 12.8 arcmin (long dimension a little less than half the size of the Moon), Philips ToUcam 740K webcam, captured in K3CCDTools, processed and animated with Photoshop and ImageReady. Camera settings: frame rate 10 fps, exposure 1/1000 sec, brightness 100%, contrast 95%, saturation 100%, gamma 0%, white balance set to "sunlight", gain 60%.
March 20, 2008 Sometimes, you don't have to fake it with Photoshop. My friend Donn Mukensnable's son, Alex, shot this incredible image of the already-eclipsed moon rising within the shadow of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano on February 20th. It was featured on the NASA "Astronomy Picture of the Day" web site for March 1st.
Go here for the spectacular time lapse of the rising, eclipsed moon.
March 18, 2008 Arthur C. Clarke † Word came today that science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at the age of 90. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=axkmx6LQPGFQ&refer=home http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/books/18cnd-clarke.html?hp http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/03/the-passing-of.html http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1309902,00.html He is perhaps best known to the general public as the co-author, with director Stanley Kubrick, of the screenplay for that director's seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story evolved from Clarke's earlier short story, "The Sentinel." He also proposed the idea of communications satellites as early as 1945, when the closest thing to spacecraft was a primitive ballistic missile. When I was growing up, there were the "Big Three" of science fiction authors: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. I read everything, by all of them, that I could lay hands on. Science fiction today is a mere shadow of what it was in the '40s, '50's, '60s, and even '70s. It was what it was because other writers had to live up to the standards set by Clarke and his fellow Prometheans. There were giants in those days and we shall not see their like again. Heinlein passed away in 1988, Asimov in 1992. Our vision of the future is a lot dimmer now than it was 40 years ago. 2001, of course, created a vision of space that steered the course of an entire generation – my generation, our generation. A generation, now fast approaching retirement age, that saw Man set foot on the Moon, and then, in the most colossal failure of vision in recorded history, withdraw from the frontier, without taking the next step. My favorite Clarke novel is "Against the Fall of Night." In elementary school, I remember reading Clarke's "The Sunjammer"
in the March, 1964 issue of Boys' Life magazine. It's about a race using solar sails for propulsion. To me, that cover art is typical of Clarke's view of our immediate future in space: a sunlit adventure, a quest for knowledge. The same feeling was conveyed in one of his later novels, "Rendezvous with Rama." In high school, assigned reading even included Clarke's short stories "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "The Star," both of which may be read in their entirety online. A third Clarke on our reading list was "A Walk in the Dark." For those who have never read Clarke before, I envy you.
Asteroid (1620) Geographos Yesterday, I mentioned the Spaceweather site, and its listing of current Near Earth Objects. One of those caught my eye because it is relatively bright – (1620) Geographos. Its nearest approach to Earth was on the night of 16-17 March. I caught it the following night. Geographos, at the time of these exposures, was about 49 lunar distances away, or 0.125 A.U. (astronomical units – 1 AU = the average Earth-Sun distance), or 18.7 million kilometers, or 11.6 million miles, and shining at magnitude 13 – about the limit of detection by eye in a 6-inch telescope. Following is an animated GIF. Exposures were taken for one minute every ten minutes, and automatically stacked by the Meade Envisage software. Telescope was a Meade 12" LX200GPS, 0.63x focal reducer, Meade DSI II Pro camera, exposure time 2 sec per frame. To give some idea of the size of the frame, the long dimension is about 40% of the apparent size of the Moon. You'll see a faint blob move from upper left to lower right.
Some interesting tidbits of information on Geographos. Wikipedia claims it's the most elongated object in the solar system. It's shaped about like a long potato, 5.1 x 1.8 km (3.2 x 1.1 miles). Here's the orbit diagram. With an albedo of nearly 0.33, it's fairly shiny, as rocks go; our Moon has an albedo of about 0.12. A lump of coal has an albedo of... about 0.10, only slightly darker. With all its bright clouds, Earth's albedo is about 0.37. In keeping with the news of the day, and the current theme of asteroids, I checked to see if there was a space rock named for Arthur C. Clarke (there just about has to be). It's (4923) Clarke. Discovered on the same day in 1981 as (5020) Asimov. I just checked, 4923 is very dim at mag. 19.4, it transits just before 5 PM and sets just before midnight. Tough target.
March 17, 2008 Asteroid (5424) Covington, Asteroid (10656) Albrecht, and the end of the world In his Daily Notebook for March 13, telescope and astrophotography author Michael Covington posted a photo of "his" asteroid, (5424) Covington (actually named after an unrelated Canadian radio astronomer). After he had mentioned it the day before, I figured, just for grins, I'd try to image it. So, I got the data online, had Cartes du Ciel plot its position, and drive the telescope to the appointed place. I got something, but I couldn't be sure it was the asteroid because it was ever so slightly displaced from where the program said it should be. Later, when I saw Michael Covington's own image, taken the following night with that one little point of light displaced farther left, I knew I'd gotten it after all. (Compare the two images; north is up in both, but my image scale is slightly larger. Note the bright star in mine, at upper right near text, appears at right center in his, and go from there).
Which prompted Jeff Duntemann to bring up an interesting question. Is there an asteroid with my name on it? Well, lessee... This list should tell us. Yup. (10656) Albrecht. Who was he? Probably no relation. Wikipedia says
JPL has an interesting little utility, the JPL Small-Body Database Browser, that plots minor planets like this. Here's the data on "my" lump of rock. Turns out that this one was discovered relatively recently, in 1971 – heck, I was already using my first home-built telescopes by then. Co-discoverer Tom Gehrels, who shot the discovery plates with the 48" Schmidt telescope at Mt. Palomar, is a well-known name in solar system astronomy, and he's still kicking around. Before becoming an astronomer, Gehrels had a colorful career in the Dutch Resistance in WWII. How many paratrooper/resistance fighter/astronomers can there be? (Sounds like the premise for Buckaroo Banzai). Entering this in my list of asteroids and doing some fiddling with Cartes du Ciel, it turns out that this year, 10656 will be at its closest to us, and brightest (mag. 17.5, just a tad fainter than 5424, above, which is 17.2), within a couple of days of my own birthday. Coincidence or... cosmic conspiracy? 10656 has a rather eccentric orbit, with e = 0.089. That means it has a more elliptical orbit (compared to the Earth's more circular orbit, e = 0.017) and comes significantly closer to the sun at some point. In August 2012, we'll be passing 10656 just as it's closer to its own perihelion – its closest approach to the sun – and at that time, it will be brighter than the upcoming 2008 close approach. It will be 1.89 astronomical units away – about halfway between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Still not close close, but closer than now. It completes its orbit once every 5.65 years. To see what space rocks are currently near Earth, and how far, see Spaceweather. Right now there are three rocks, all less than 20 meters across, listed as passing closer than the Moon. One, as little as 0.2 lunar distance – about twice as far out as your geosynchronous TV satellites. That one is listed as 6 meters in diameter. Not even big enough to leave a mark, according to this nifty meteorite impact simulator. On the other hand, if it's going to be 2012, no point in staying up that late to watch it. Because we all know, the Mayans have told us, the world ends in December 2012. Right around my birthday again. Maybe it doesn't just have my name on it; maybe it has all our names on it! (Moahahahaha....)
March 9, 2008 Asteroid 45 Eugenia (and the Zulu Wars). Last night, asteroid (45) Eugenia passed very close to a brightish star. In fact, along a path just south of me, in northern Mexico, the asteroid actually blocked ("occulted") the star for about 12 seconds. And just north of me, one of the asteroid's moons did the same, for about 0.7 seconds. The third moon occulted for about 0.3 sec in northern Baja California. I couldn't see any of those events, but I did shoot a time-lapse sequence of the asteroid heading pretty much straight at the star. Maps of this occultation track and here. Here is the track for the larger of the two moons, Petit-Prince. Yes, "The Little Prince." Depending on which source you believe, it was indeed named for the prince from the Antoine Saint Exupéry story, who lived on an asteroid. (The prince, not the aviator/writer...) The asteroid itself is named for Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, one of the most gloriously incompetent monarchs in history – the man who made France the only country ever to be defeated by Mexico, (the Foreign Legion still celebrates a lost minor skirmish as their finest moment; you've got to hand it to them); the man who started the Crimean War, the man who decided to pick a fight over who gets to be king of Spain, invaded the Saarland (huh?), and so kicked off the Franco-Prussian war and finalized the unification of Germany under Prussia (and another French defeat). Petit-Prince, according to some, is named for their son (of Napoleon and Eugenie, not France and Mexico... oh, never mind), Napoleon IV, who managed to get himself killed in the Zulu Wars, about five months after the ignominious British defeat at Isandlwana (the film Zulu Dawn) and the glorious minor non-defeat at Rorke's Drift (Zulu). Can't say he wasn't warned. Western Europe probably owes the Zulus a debt of gratitude for making Napoleon IV eligible for a Darwin Award; who knows what damage he might have caused if he had somehow wangled a job as Emperor of France. (This concludes today's tangential history lesson). General info and maps on upcoming asteroid occultations: in general poyntsource and in detail , and at asteroidoccultation. Sky and Telescope story on this "three-fer" (Eugenia, Petit-Prince, and the smaller moon, Petite-Princesse). Eugenia was discovered in 1857. Petit-Prince was the first asteroidal moon to be discovered by a ground-based telescope, in 1998. The first asteroidal moon had been discovered by the Galileo probe in 1993, orbiting (243) Ida. But what's interesting is that there had been hints of such moons from the 1970s, based on just such occultation observations. Equipment details: Meade LX200GPS, polar mounted on Meade Superwedge, imaging through Meade DSI II Pro camera; each frame is a stack of 4-second exposures over one minute, sets of exposures are 10 minutes apart, (i.e. expose from 9:00 to 9:01, wait until 9:10, expose to 9:11, etc). Time lapse set up automatically in the Meade Envisage software (while I watched TV). Saved as jpg images, processed in Photoshop, animated gif created in ImageReady. The sequence will repeat three times and stop. The faint stars in this image are all about magnitude 15. Eugenia is about magnitude 13. The bright star is 5.5. The sequence ended when the view was blocked by trees, or I would have captured the asteroid coming out of the star's glare. The occasional spikes are diffraction spikes caused by nearby power and telephone lines.
February 8, 2008 (but really Dec. 31, 2007) Rocket Day! Through the good graces of Tim van Milligan at Apogee Components in Colorado Springs, who put me in touch with Dave Virga of the Colorado Springs Rocket Society, who put me in touch with the club's VP Ernie Puckett, who didn't need much convincing to lay on a short-notice, unscheduled launch day at the Preble Ranch outside the town of Peyton, CO, my friend Jeff and I were able to launch rockets for the first time in... uh... nearly a couple of decades (for me at least). Ernie had an excuse: says he needed to try out a new electric launching system he had built. And we were going to be the guinea piggies. So Jeff Duntemann and I set to work building our Christmas presents to ourselves, what for us are huge rockets: the newly released Estes Interceptor E, powered by a so-called "E engine."
The old, smaller, original Estes "Interceptor" was the model rocket that every kid wanted when I was in high school – but few of us ever saw one, much less built or fired one. It was produced from 1971 to 1980. At its introduction, it was prominently featured on the cover of the 1971 Estes catalog, which I still have and treasure in mint condition. (Mine's in much better shape than that). Estes recently re-issued the original Interceptor, and it was such a hit that they came up with a supersized version. I mean, that ship has more pointy appendages and razor-edged things than Sigourney Weaver's "Alien" in a butcher shop. It's a dramatic contrast to most of Estes' current offerings, which look pretty generic. Not many scale models to speak of in the bunch, much less fantasy ships like this. We had our hands full getting the things built between Christmas and the launch date, Dec. 31. And Jeff had other things to worry about so he didn't get his finished, but we concentrated on mine. As it was, we finished epoxying the fins on the night before, and there just wasn't time to apply the incredible decals (three sheets of markings!) before launch. As a token gesture to the spirit of "scale" modeling I painted the "cockpit glazing" black and the molded styrene wingtip pods dayglo red, and left it at that. Here's the finished rocket
And here's Jeff holding it to give some sense of how big this is.
For a sample of what the pros can do with this kit, have a look at the prototype, built by an Estes employee months before it was released. There was a lot of chatter on the Ye Olde Rocket Forum bulletin board, and this Estes employee, using the handle "Roguepink," chimed in. His detailing hints are in post #30, on p. 3. And positively spectacular photos of his own prototype rocket are can be seen in top view, bottom view, nose detail, and wing detail. Enough yak. How does it fly? Well, the short version is, just fine. Jeff already reported on the events of the day on his own web site. I used up three Estes E9-4 engines and had perfect flights every time. The last one just seemed to go straighter and higher, and it seemed to take a lot longer before the 'chute popped, then the wind carried it way out beyond the highway that runs near the launch site. I checked it on Google Earth later, it drifted about a quarter mile. But, the rocket was undamaged by any of this. I really thought the plastic pods were begging to snap off, but they were fine. Here's the rocket on the launching pad, and a view of Ernie's launch control panel.
Here's a typical scene of a landed rocket.
I also brought out some rockets from California: my old (circa 1990?) Estes semi-scale "Phoenix" air-to-air missile, powered by a D12-3 motor (the Phoenix was the reason for the Navy's F-14 Tomcat – a big missile with more than 100 mile range against anything that might try to attack a carrier group), and a re-creation of my very first rocket built back in 1969, an Estes Astron Beta (two stage, but I only flew it single stage on this windy day, successfully as I had all those years ago with the original). In comparison, the Beta looks tiny today, but back then, we had a lot more two-stage rockets, and a much larger selection of zero-delay engines for first stages. I didn't have a chance to film the Interceptor launches, since I was the one pushing the button, but I did record the Phoenix. Here it is on the pad
and post-flight. One lower fin cracked, but that has since been fixed with Elmer's yellow wood glue.
I spliced two of the videos together using AVIDemux 2.4 to convert the .mov files to .avi, and the older Zwei-Stein, V3.01, to do some elementary editing. I don't like the Zwei-Stein interface, but I tried to install Microsoft's Movie Maker for Win 2K and it is total junk. (It may work just fine, and with more features, in XP and Vista, but I won't allow those on my system). Click on the thumbnail below to start a .wmv video in a new window. That's Ernie nearest the camera, Jeff with his finger on the button, and, later, playing the role of recovery helicopter.
Fortunately, a couple of other members of COSROCS got word of the short-notice launch and came out on this sunny, cold, blustery Colorado day, so Jeff and I didn't feel quite so guilty about talking Ernie into coming out. All told, the crew had a total of about a dozen launches, all successful, all rockets recovered, none lost or wrecked. It's a good thing we moved the date up from the previous Friday, because I just plain would not have had the Interceptor done. And what am I doing now in the way of rockets? Building a replica of the Estes parachute-recovery Boeing Bomarc.And after that, probably the Nike-Ajax on that same page. Someday, I might pop for the big Madcow Rocketry Bomarc. I like scale models. The problem is, I have to go to Colorado to launch these. In California, "security theater" has become "theater of the absurd." I used to launch from the schoolyard down the street, and higher-power rockets from Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley, but that's now YAGC (Yet Another Golf Course; Orange County needs more golf courses!) The people who control these things promised an alternative site for the rocket, R/C cars, and R/C planes that had used the old abandoned runways at Mile Square, but thanks to 9/11, they no longer have to keep their promises. "Well, the whole world has changed, don't you see..." No, I don't. For an example of what the many would-be rocket amateurs among ten million or so people in the Los Angeles Basin have to put up with, see this site and this flyer.
With those restrictions – use smallest possible motor, 350 ft. max – what's the point? Catapulting lawn darts with a rubberband slingshot would be more rewarding.
February 5, 2008 It's safe to go back to Griffith Observatory now I was scouting photo locations for a company in Los Angeles last week, and discovered that it is again possible to drive up to Griffith Observatory. Checking the web site, sure enough,
So there. Go enjoy the universe (because there isn't anything else).
January 22, 2008 Model Rocketry links Lately, I've been busy building model rockets. Some of the results may be seen on Jeff Duntemann's web pages. (I hope to add more of my own on this "happening" but I've been too busy to process the videos etc.) But, in the course of reliving my pre-adolescent pursuits of launching model rockets, I assembled a large number of useful links for the similarly afflicted. Tech info, vintage Estes catalogs, plans, and parts lists, modern sources for building materials... just go here or click on the navigation box at left.
October 30, 2007 Comet 17P/Holmes Last night was the first clear night since the onset of this year's round of California wildfires. The fires started on Oct. 21. On October 23, Comet 17P/Holmes began a spectacular outburst, in which it brightened from magnitude ~17 to ~2.5. (Since a 5 magnitude difference is defined as a factor of 100 in brightness, that makes it 100 x 100 x 100 or about 1 million times brighter). The exact reason for this is as yet unknown, but it may be due to the comet breaking up, releasing or exposing more of its icy interior to sunlight. So last night I shot some images. I tried the Meade 12” LX200GPS with an 0.63x focal reducer, but even with that, the comet was larger than the frame of the camera. Although I now have a more capable Meade DSI Pro II monochrome camera, I shot the comet with my older DSI Color. (“DSI 1 Color”). I used the Vixen ED80Sf telescope, which has a wider field. The raw data was shot in FITS format and I haven't combined the various color channels yet, but here's a stack of 50 luminance images out of 94. Exposure time 4 sec. each.
The brightest white dot near the center is the nucleus of the comet. The comet is nearly on a straight line from the Sun extended outward through the Earth, so if it has a tail (and traces of that are starting to appear in some folks' photos), it is pointed away from us. We are in effect staring right down the barrel of this thing. It is, however, moving outward in its orbit after perihelion passage, which is still twice as far from the Sun as Earth's orbit. As our viewing angle changes, we may see more of a tail. Comet names — 17P indicates that this is the 17th periodic comet discovered; in other words, its orbit brings it back into the inner solar system every few years. In this case, about 7 years. At its farthest, it is 5.18 times as far from the Sun as Earth's orbit — about as far as the orbit of Jupiter. The first comet ever shown to be periodic is, of course, 1P/Halley which returns every 76 years. Last night, the comet was clearly visible with the unaided eye even in my light polluted suburban location. I went outside without a star map, knowling only it was somewhere in Perseus. Sure enough, one of the stars in Perseus didn't look quite right. I went back in and got binoculars, and the comet was clearly visible as a fuzzy ball. October 19, 2007 Helix Nebula While warming up the Meade DSI II Pro camera last night, I shot a series of images of NGC 7293, the Helix Nebula. This is a stack of the best 14 of 43 two-minute exposures through a red filter. Vixen ED80Sf, tracking with Meade DSI Color through 12" Meade LX200GPS. Stacked in AIP4WIN, final tweaking in Photoshop CS.
October 17, 2007 First attempts at color with DSI Pro II I've been spending the last few nights trying to gather enough decent-quality images of M33 through red, green, and blue filters. Here's a first attempt at M33. The colors are still not quite as vivid as I expected, but a few huge Hα regions (upper left, and right center) are clearly visible by their slight pink color. I want more color... (Working on it). The images used to make up this composite are all 1 minute exposures, through the Vixen ED80Sf, while a Meade DSI I color did the automatic guiding through the 12” LX200GPS. Who says all this modern CCD and computer stuff isolates us from the night sky? I basically stretched out on a lawn chair while the setup was gathering photons, and watched the sky. I saw a bright fireball, and a classic UFO — in other words, something flying that I couldn't identify, but was most likely a group of American White Pelicans in a neat V formation. (No need to invoke little green men, which were and remain completely unverified, when pelicans, which can be “verified” at the local marsh any day of the week, will do the job). I checked, yes, they are known to be nocturnal. It turns out that last night, which wasn't terribly clear anyway, the limiting visual magnitude at my well-lit suburban location was somewhere between 4.5 and 5.0. Not quite dark enough to see the Milky Way. Click on the image for a larger, higher resolution view.
October 11, 2007 First light with new camera I received, as a gift, something I've had my eye on for quite some time: a Meade DSI Pro II camera. More details soon, but I wanted to get the “first light” images up quickly. This camera is monochrome; to get color images, you have to shoot through color filters (included), and do some fancy computer work later to combine the R, G, and B channels. I haven't gotten to that yet. But here are some mono images. These were shot through my Vixen ED80Sf, piggybacked on the 12” Meade LX200GPS. Guiding was through the 12” scope, with a simpler Meade DSI 1 Color camera and an 0.33x focal reducer (mostly because that's what's screwed on there now and I'm too lazy to swap it for the native f/10 focal ratio). All of these images are composed of 60 second exposures. The first, of M16, is the result of the Meade capture software sorting and stacking images on the fly. The following two are stacked after the fact in Meade Envisage software with “Drizzle” processing, then reduced back to smaller JPG images for web display. M16, the Eagle Nebula and the “Pillars of Creation” in the center:
NGC 7331:
M33:
October 1, 2007 Scouting for the Dawn Patrol Last week, on September 27, NASA launched its Dawn Mission, to the asteroid Vesta and “dwarf planet” Ceres. (“Dwarf” is such a demeaning, judgemental word; can't they call it a “vertically challenged planet”?) Funny, when I was a kid they were all asteroids, and Pluto was a planet. And 200 years ago, they were called worse: “the vermin of the skies.” So I decided to see if I could image these (should be no problem compared to Pluto, which is way less than 1/100th as bright), and furthermore, show their motion. It turns out that you can see motion in as little as one hour, on both. The surprise is that Ceres is currently showing retrograde motion; as Earth passes it in its orbit, it appears to move “backwards” against the far more distant stars. Ceres and Vesta both circulate about two to three times as far from the Sun as Earth's orbit; Ceres an average of 2.8 times, Vesta an average of 2.4 times. These are quite bright, and could easily be seen in binoculars if one knows where to point them. Vesta is mag. 7.6, about one magnitude dimmer (1/2.5th as bright) as the dimmest stars that can be seen by the typical unaided eye under dark skies. Ceres is slightly dimmer at mag. 8.0. Ceres was the first asteroid ever discovered, on the night of January 1,1800. Its discoverer, Giuseppe Piazzi, not surprisingly, was a monk; in Napoleonic Europe, everybody else would have been partying, or hung over (think back to our own “Y2K” festivities). Vesta was the fourth to be discovered, more than seven years later. Since then, they've been coming fast and furious, and at this writing the Minor Planet Center at Harvard has logged and named/numbered somewhere north of 700,000 of the things, and they keep coming at the rate of up to a couple thousand per month. Here, then, is the time lapse of asteroid 4 Vesta. This was a hard one to get, as Vesta is following Jupiter into the evening twilight, and at my location, it was down in the trees, or even the shrubbery, by the time I got the last of the (unevenly spaced) frames. As with Pluto, these were shot with a 12” Meade LX200GPS telescope, a Meade 0.33x focal reducer, and a Meade DSI 1 color camera. Exposures are five seconds, stacked. Image scale is the same as for the Pluto image of Sept. 28. The Vesta image is slightly cropped to eliminate empty borders. The frames were shot at approximately 7:30, 9:00 and 9:15 PM, before it was lost to sight. Something, most likely an aircraft, flew through the field, causing a vertical streak in the last frame.
And here's Ceres, shot the same night. In this case, due to a lack of suitablly bright, widely spaced guide stars, I had the scope track Ceres itself. Note retrograde motion relative to stars. Shot at one-hour intervals, 1:50, 2:50 and 3:50 AM.
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September 28, 2007 Pluto This past week, Pluto passed very close to a brightish (mag. 8.70) star, SAO 160793 in Sagittarius. The actual moment of the close-pass happened while it was over central Asia (Mongolia, western China, maybe southern Siberia and northern India). Some predictions called for Pluto to pass on one side of the star, and its moon, Charon, to pass on the other. For individuals or observatories with photometry equipment, this near-occultation would provide a good means of checking to see if Pluto has a ring system, as has been speculated (so far, nobody is reporting any results of this event). I figured I'd see if I could capture Pluto, since it was going to be close to a bright guidepost. With a near-full Moon in the sky, I could not see Pluto visually. But my first-generation Meade DSI color camera (an item now on closeout at $99) had no problem capturing Pluto, with only a 5 second exposure time. Three nights were easy; the fourth night, after the pass, I had to shoot through clouds. Even with thin hazy clouds obscuring dim Pluto (mag. 14.0), the camera had no problem capturing it. Here's a time lapse of the four images.
To give some idea of how far we've come in 77 years, here's a link to Clyde Tombaugh's discovery images of Pluto, taken in January, 1930. The telescope he used, at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, still exists. It is a 13" three-element astrographic refractor — not much larger than my own Meade 12" LX200GPS. (The other significant piece of gear in the optical train included a Meade 0.33x focal reducer and a Lumicon UV/IR block filter). Back then, using glass photographic plates, Tombaugh was exposing these for one hour at a time (which was an improvement over the three hours that Percival Lowell had been spending). The glass plates were 14 x 17 inches, giving a field of 12 x 14 degrees — much larger than mine. His fields appear to reach about the same magnitude, but took more than 700 times as long to expose. I let the Meade software drive my scope to track the bright star while I had dinner. Here is the story of Pluto's discovery, in Tombaugh's own words. And here's an American Heritage magazine article. It's an interesting exercise to enter the date, January 23, 1930, into the free skymaping program Cartes du Ciel, set the time for midnight, have it center Pluto, and see the same field Tombaugh was dealing with. In the discovery photos, notice the galaxy he captured, at top center, NGC 2365; it's a star that doesn't look quite right.
September 22, 2007 Why I still won't visit the Griffith Observatory / Planetarium Way back on Jan. 27, I wrote about the heavy-handed new visitor policies at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory.
It seems it's even worse. The place has not only gone stormtrooper, it's gone Hollywood stormtrooper. Browsing through a 1997 issue of Sky & Telescope, I ran across a reprint of this NY Times editorial., "The End of Dignity," which decries New York's Hayden Planetarium going the theme park route. One friend wrote back "Imagine what LA would have done to it." (Too late...) Here's somebody's blog entry about how, after the renovation, Griffith replaced its science-trained presenters with more photogenic actors. Way to go. Fine way to support the people who struggle to make a career of science, or to inspire young people who look forward to one. I have at least four friends who worked with me at the Adler Planetarium, as operators of the Zeiss planetarium projector. Most of us were not photogenic. All of us had some connection to astronomy, either on a professional, student, or hobbyist level. Of those five, two went on to obtain Ph.Ds and professional careers in astronomy and scientific research; two others are in computers; one is an engineer. We would not be considered for any of the job openings at Griffith. Read that link, especially the reader comments, and see how Griffith not only dumbed down its presentations, but also royally screwed over its loyal staff. The LA Times ran an editorial on this topic. Here's a telling observation:
And They (the scientific community) wonder why kids have no interest in science, and why kids grow up to be taxpayers with no interest in funding science? There's part of the answer, staring at us through the glass of a ticket booth selling overpriced admission to a schlock show.
Messier 16 and 20. Images of Messier 16 and 20, shot with a Meade DSI Color on a Vixen ED80Sf, piggybacked on a Meade LX200GPS. Unguided 30 sec. exposures, luminance image processed using "Drizzle" method for higher resolution, combined with RGB images generated by DSI Envisage software. M16:
M20:
September 14, 2007 Total Lunar Eclipse, August 28. I finally got around to processing the images I shot of the total lunar eclipse last month. Here it is, in time lapse.
The camera used for this was my Kodak P850 on a tripod. These are all at maximum zoom (maximum optical + maximum digital zoom). This was a very dark eclipse, and I found that I had to switch from ISO 100 to ISO 400 sensitivity as it got darker, just to keep exposure times from getting out of hand and showing star (and Moon feature) trailing. Toward the end of the sequence, the star TYC5807-00441-1, magnitude 7.31, can be seen to the right of the Moon, as the Moon passes it. This really shows how rapidly the moon moves in our sky; frames are nominally 5 minutes apart. The sequence ends at some time past the deepest part of totality, when I ran out of battery. In all, I shot about 120 frames, at various exposure times, ISO sensitivity, and zoom factor. The following wide-field image shot at 3:37 AM shows more field stars. 2 seconds at ISO 400, at maximum optical zoom, equivalent to 35mm 432mm focal length.
These may not all show up on your monitor but the stars are as follows: brightest star in the field, at upper left, is σ Aquarii, magnitude 4.82; to its left is 58 Aqr, mag 6.38 (in other words, barely visible with the unaided eye at a really dark location on a moonless night). Immediately to the left of the Moon, TYC5807-01695-1, mag. 7.01, only visible in binoculars; and the aforementioned TYC5807-00441-1 close to the upper right.
September 10, 2007 And still more M27 I just can't leave this one alone. Last night I fitted an 0.63x focal reducer to the Meade 12" LX200 GPS, carefully focused the Meade DSI 1 Color camera (it can take 10 or 15 minutes to get a good focus), and let it rip while I passed out on the couch. The alarm clock rang to remind me to shut down the scope and button everything up. I hand-selected about 100 of the best luminance images (those with the roundest stars), stacked and processed them, and used the R, G, and B layers generated automatically by the camera for the color info. The Luminance images were combined in Meade Envisage using Drizzle for higher spatial resolution; the four images (R, G, B, and L) were combined in Photoshop CS. I do believe this is my best M27 yet.
September 2, 2007 Still trying to improve M27, Dumbbell Nebula Last night I got what I thought were pretty good raw images for M27, the Dumbbbell Nebula. These were shot with a 12" Meade LX200 GPS, polar mounted, 0.33x focal reducer giving (nominally) f/3.3, (I haven't checked the actual plate scale; that comes from precise measurement of the reducer focal length, lens principal plane, and principal plane to imager spacing). The imager was a first-generation Meade DSI Color, a camera that's already obsolete (now on closeout at $99). Images were 15 second exposures, the scope was tracking but not actively guiding during exposures (although it would try to keep a stacking alignment star centered by guiding between exposures). Initially the software stacked 125 frames. For this multi-layer composite, I used the 125 frame color image generated by the software but used a Luminance layer with tightened quality criteria, so the L image has fewer staced frames. I used the "drizzle" feature of the DSI software, as described by Matt Taylor in his tutorial DVD.
A friend took that image and looked up the area in sky-map.org (more precisely, this link). It takes a while to load but eventually you can read off data on individual stars by mousing over them (a yellow data box pops up. If it didn't pop up on even the brightest stars, it's still loading, give it a few minutes). It's easier to see faint detail in a negative view; here's the lower portion of the nebula and some faint stars with magnitudes marked. It seems I'm getting down to 18th magnitude – from a well-lit suburban location, on a warm moonlit night with an uncooled $99 camera.
August 16, 2007 OK, now this is stupid.
Bassmasters, look out. Here comes "Extreme Aerial Bowfishing." You think I'm making this up? You think it's a parody of "Skeet Surfing" from the Val Kilmer movie "Top Secret"? (Ya gotta love the lyrics – "If everybody had a 12-gauge, and a surfboard too...") It's apparently an Illinois thing. Here's the Chicago Tribune story. You know those parasite Chinese (what else?) fish that have been making their way into various Midwestern rivers? And how they jump like crazy in boat wakes? Well, it didn't take long for somebody to figure out how to make an "extreem™ sport" out of it. The only added challenge that I can think of is, you should have to tow the shooter behind the boat on a wakeboard. Yes, friends, this has it all. Projectile weapons, boats, motors, big but inedible fish, probably a cooler full of cheap beer somewhere, what Bubba could ask for more? I don't know, I still think dynamite fishing is the techno-geek's answer to a question nobody is asking (like, "how can we kill as many of these worthless critters as possible, with the least amount of effort?) Of course the animal rights whackos are all upset. Oooh, they're shooting arrows through poor defenseless fish. (Apparently they're not so defenseless, as the article says getting smacked by one is like doing a face plant into a flying bowling ball — sort of an act of piscine jihadist martyrdom). All we need now is to have TWO gangs of animal rights activists having at each other, one defending the Chinese crap — sorry, carp; old typing habits die hard — and the other defending all the native species displaced by the carp. The "inventor" of this new sport says
Yeah. He probably figured he'd be shooting his fellow employees first. (Sorry, but I just can't let a setup line like that go unused).
I think they ought to introduce aerial Gatling fishing experiences. You start out as a door gunner in a helicopter gunship. If you're really good, you get to fly an airplane with machine guns in the wings. (Always thinking high tech, that Pete).
I must be living wrong. Do you suppose I could get $250 to teach people how to shoot fish in a barrel?
You know what's coming next, don't you? Get some cameras in those boats! This will make those idiotic "Pro Wrestling" shows look like kids in a schoolyard!
Somehow, I don't think it's a good idea to "face another boater with a bow and arrow." (And all the more reason to go the Gatling route. As long as you go it first).
And once again, it is my solemn duty to point out that Monty Python thought of it first:
Mmmmm... now there's a Bubba Woman... Be still, my heart.
August 6, 2007 Mo' betta Jupiter Tried a new (to me) technique of imaging a planet in color, and then in infrared, and using the IR image as a "luminance layer" in Photoshop. In other words, the color image tells us what color to make any given pixel, but the luminance image tells us how bright to make it. So the sharpness of the resulting image is defined by the sharpness of the infrared image, and infrared is slightly less susceptible to atmospheric "seeing" effects. One little tweak is that chances are, you have to refocus for the two different wavelengths because the filters will change the optical path ever so slightly. This takes valuable time, and with Jupiter, you don't have much time; there's enough rotation in just a few minutes to show up in successive images. So I used a digital focus indicator based on the TeleVue TVFocus system. You find your focus positions beforehand, store those locations in memory, label them with descriptions if you like ("IR filter", "Visual filter"), and when you switch filters, quickly move to the predetermined position and immediately reset and start the camera again. Here's the result. 12" Meade LX200GPS, TeleVue 2.5x Powermate, Atik manual filter wheel, Baader UV+IR block filter and Baader IR pass filter, Philips ToUcam 740K camera, my own custom 2" and T-thread to ToUcam lens mount. Exposure 220 sec. each, 5 frames per sec., about half (~550) of the resulting frames stacked. Captured with K3CCDTools 3, stacked in Registax 4, final processing in Photoshop CS.
And here's another. This was taken later, but I did not use the IR luminance layer technique. The difference between this color image and the previous: I used a shutter speed of 1/50 sec instead of 1/25 sec. This would tend to "freeze" atmospheric seeing rather than give it time to blur. Another run with 1/100 sec did not turn out as well. Somewhere there is a sweet spot between freezing seeing, and reducing your incoming light to the point where you have to increase amplifier gain and so you get more noise. Note also the amount of rotation (the Red Spot has moved). Time difference between these exposures is about 18 minutes. Compare sharpness of white spots in the "South-South Temperate Belt," below and left of Great Red Spot).
July 28, 2007 Jupiter last night Seeing was horrible, but I was trying out some new equipment. Here's Jupiter, shot at native f/10 of the Meade LX200GPS, with a Philips ToUcam 740K. I also tried f/25 with a TeleVue Powermate, but by then seeing had deteriorated even more, and the result was even less detail. Acquired with K3CCDTools3, processed in Registax, final tweaking in Photoshop CS. Stacked 1357 frames of 2404, drizzled to 2x, automatic realignment to compensate for atmospheric refraction. Great Red Spot is clearly visible below center.
Meanwhile, continuing the theme of the past two entries: yesterday afternoon, I shopped at four stores. Two of them, a specialty foods store and a large supermarket, had tellers who had difficulty making change. In one case, the teller was busily chatting with the guy behind me, comparing new wedding rings etc., while trying to process my purchases.
July 18, 2007 More on "The Future of Western Civilization" Perhaps there is hope. The other side of the Home Despot coin. I had to buy some building materials the other day. Now, for this particular item, from past experience, they never have the bar code on the package, and they can never find it in their Big Book of Secret Bar Codes, so the checkout droid flails around, asks if I wrote it down (not my yob, mon; besides, there's five numbers on the stock tag on shelf), phones that department, gets no answer, and often, eventually, picks a similar-sounding (but completely unrelated) product off the computer screen and asks if that sounds about right. Sure, I say. (Usually it means I get my item for half the price posted on the shelf). Well, the other day, I had this item in my shopping cart, headed for checkout, and the girl at the counter saw what was coming toward her in the cart, immediately whipped out a looseleaf binder, flipped to a page of construction materials, found the item, and waved a scanner over it. I said "In four years of buying this product, this is the absolutely first time I didn't have to wait for somebody to figure out what the heck it is. Most don't even know it's in that book." She replied, "Oh, that's not the store's book. That's one I put together for myself." I said "I have a prediction. You're headed for management." She said that actually, yes, she was hoping to. On the other hand, I have seen, I swear, the kid at the local bottle recycling depot (where I have to go to pry my deposit back from the state), I have actually seen this person count how many bottles there are in a six-pack. Out loud. Obviously, not management material.
July 2, 2007 The Future of Western Civilization I just got back from Home Despot, where I got an interesting sneak preview of the future of America and possibly civilization in general. The bimbette at the checkout counter was apparently able to apply eyeliner in a swoopy, artful, indeed almost Egyptian manner, but could not make change for $7.48 out of $10.50 (a $10 bill and two quarters – that's quarters of a dollar, as in 1/4 of a dollar. Two of those. Yeah.) to save her life. In my kind, gentle way I pointed out that this was, at best, sixth-grade arithmetic and hoped she got caught up Real Soon Now. Maybe I should have posed it as a word problem she could understand. On the other hand, perhaps it's a good thing that Home Despot hires the handicapped. That way, checkout duties won't someday be passed off by means of a cheap video link to Bangalore, India (where, unfortunately for us, their kids have learned to count money and make change).
June 11, 2007 Carl and Jerry Stories My friend Jeff Duntemann has just released the third volume of the “Carl and Jerry Stories” from the pages of Popular Electronics Magazine of the 1950s and '60s. (Disclaimer: like the old Shake & Bake comercials, “An' I hailped.”)
I suspect most of us geeks and gearheads will find them entertaining – sort of Hardy Boys meet Bill Nye the Science Guy. A sample chapter may be found here. The Carl & Jerry stories are similar in concept to a long-running series in Popular Science magazine, Gus Wilson and his “Model Garage.” Instead of an electronics theme, Gus' Garage stories are wrapped around clever fixes of automotive problems. Running from 1925 to the final story in December 1970, the stories all carry the byline “Martin Bunn,” who, it turns out, was a catchall nom de plume for a number of hired pens. Those stories are all available online, thanks to a fan.
May 20, 2007 Moon and Venus Last night, on the way to the grocery store, I noticed the conjunction of the Moon with Venus, went back home and shot off some snaps with my Kodak P850, mounted on a tripod. DateTimeOriginal : 2007:05:19 19:44:56 ExposureTime : 1/20Sec ApertureValue : F3.6 ISOSpeedRatings : 200 FocalLength(35mm) : 432(mm) DigitalZoomRatio : 240/100
May 7, 2007 Thermoforming a Hartmann mask For no apparent reason, I got the urge to thermoform a Hartmann mask to assist in focusing for astrophotography through my ED80Sf. What's a Hartmann mask? Lots of info on the web: http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/FOCUS/METHODS.HTM I wrote up an illustrated html file showing the process. Here's some photos of the thermoforming process using some plywood formers, a heat gun, scrap plastic from a food container; and views of the finished product..
April 24, 2007 The Sun in stereo, from STEREO NASA has just posted some 3D videos of the Sun, taken by the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft. These are anaglyph images; to view them properly, ya puts on yer cyan-and-red 3D glasses. (You do have 3D glasses, don't you? You don't? Well, you can get them for just a few cents: the cost of a stamped envelope, from these folks). The NASA site has several videos, in your choice of formats: Quicktime, Real Player, and Windows Media Player. You can click on these thumbnails to go directly to the download page for that image. Quicktime takes a long time to load, Windows Media Player is fairly fast.
This will get really interesting when STEREO captures a full-blown major solar flare.
April 4, 2007
More better Saturn The atmospheric seeing was a lot better last night, and I got much sharper images of Saturn (compare to March 16 image).
Note the faint purplish C-ring (or “crepe ring”) appearing inside the brightest (B) ring, and stretching about halfway to the ball of the planet. The shadow of the ball on the ring is a lot sharper, as is the dark Cassini Division in the rings. Image details: 12” Meade LX200GPS scope, Philips ToUcam 740K webcam and Televue 2.5X Powermate giving f/24.4. Best 1200 of 2350 frames, 1/33 sec at 5 frames/sec, gamma zero, brightness max, saturation max, contrast 95%, gain 54%. Captured in K3CCDTools 3, stacked and wavelet processed in Registax 4, final adjustments in Photoshop CS. Although it looks like I might have captured the wide, slightly darker Encke Minimum (certainly not the incredibly narrow Encke Division aka Encke Gap) in the outer, A ring, I doubt it. It's most likely a processing artifact. Here's a good description of the rings and what may or may not be captured with equipment like this.
March 28, 2007 More Moon shots Processing some more images from March 24. Here's the "Arago Domes," Arago Alpha and Arago Beta, two apparently volcanic domes near the crater Arago. These are #32 in Charles Wood's "Lunar 100" list of interesting features. The northern one, Alpha, appears to have a large lump sticking out of its top. At the left are the Sosigenes Rilles (Rimae Sosigenes), one of which runs right through Sosigenes A, with half of Sosigenes visible in the corner. Arago has a diameter of about 27 km (16 miles; the domes are 20 km in diameter (12 miles) and of indeterminate height.
And here's the craters Sabine and Ritter, #38 on the Lunar 100 list. The Hypatia Rilles are at the bottom, and the Apollo 11 landing site would be off to the right.
March 24, 2007 To boldly go... ...where this telescope hasn't gone before. This evening, I imaged the Moon, currently at about half phase. Using the excellent freeware Virtual Moon Atlas and my handy copy of Antonin Rükl's Atlas of the Moon, I sat inside at my computer and slowly, remotely, moved the scope along the terminator, looking for interesting features. I finally landed, as it were, at Tranquility Base. Here's the result. Meade 12" LX200 GPS, TeleVue 2.5x Powermate giving f/24.4, Philips ToUcam, captured in K3CCDTools 3, processed in Registax. Four-minute exposure at 5 frames/sec, for 1200 frames; used best 533; final processing in Photoshop CS.
The features are identified in this view. To give some idea of the sizes of these things, crater Moltke is 6.5 km in diameter; Armstrong is 4.6 km; Aldrin 3.4 km, and Collins, 2.4 km. Armstrong and Aldrin are about 83 km or 51 miles apart. The three are #90 in Charles Wood's Lunar 100 list, which is supposed to be roughly in order of increasing difficulty in spotting the features. It's apparent that : 1) there is no way on Earth, that a telescope on Earth can see any trace of the actual landing site, or what's left of the lander (I have to say that because inevitably, somebody always asks). To put it in perspective, the tiniest features visible in this image are on the scale of Meteor Crater, Arizona, about a mile across. As for actually being able to see an astronaut, or the flag they planted, forget it. 2) to get to anything like the Surveyor 5 lander would have meant a hike of 15 to 20 miles each way. The first crew couldn't do that; the later crews, with their Rovers, could, maybe, barely, if the batteries held up that long, but only as a desperation measure; in practice they never got more than 4.7 miles from base. Longest ever traverse was 12.5 miles.
Here's a shot taken from the Lunar Module; the Command Service Module is face-on, above and right of center. Moltke is the large crater at bottom edge, Hypatia Rilles to its left, Apollo 11 landing site is near dead center, near the “messed up” looking triple crater (called “Cat's Paw” by the astronauts; see below). Collins is the large one near top center, right above the CSM and below/left of a crater chain. Gives some idea of what a simple handheld 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 Hasselblad camera can do when 1) you're only a few dozen miles up, and 2) there's no air in the way. From this site.
And, here's the “approach plate” for Tranquility Base. “Sabine D” has since been renamed Collins; “Sabine E” is now Armstrong.
Ahhh, roger, Eagle, you are number one to land, make a left at the boulder field and report short final...
March 22, 2007 Telescopes: not for sissies Just to prove it takes manlymen to handle telescopes: (click on the image)
March 20, 2007 NASA Minister of Fundamental Political Correctness (ret.) is back... Way back on July 23, 2006 I wrote of one George Deutsch, an administration political appointee in the NASA Public Affairs Office who apparently tried to muzzle a respected climatologist. Well, he's back. |
