Author Archive.

I am NOT a wildlife repair expert, Brian!

Posted by on August 17th 2009 in In the garden

I was well into our garden butterfly survey (more on this in a later post) when I was interrupted again by another live contribution from next-door. Not content with his donation of a perfectly good young hedgehog ("it was curled up in a ball and I thought it was dead, so I brought it to you to see if you could look after it"), he's now given me this poor critter:

 

 

 

 

It seems to be intact with no broken bones as far as we can tell, but it's weak, flightless and has no parents around. We'll do what we can for it, but I suspect that we'll have to let nature take charge soon.

Cute

Posted by on August 14th 2009 in Camera kit, In the garden, Shiny new kit
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Just a quick snapshot with the new lens:

 

Perseid party-pooper

Posted by on August 13th 2009 in Astrostuff
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According to the weather forecast on Monday, the night skies were to be fairly cloudy on Tuesday and mainly clear on Wednesday. Sadly, it didn't turn out that way. On Tuesday night there were plenty of clear spells during which I managed to sneak out for a quick look around, and there were plenty of Perseid meteors about. I wasn't set up for taking pics, as my camera was off-line due to a sensor-cleaning session. I figured that I could wait another day.

Last night's planned observing session turned out to be a waste of time, as we had fairly comprehensive cloud-coverage here all night. True, there were a few gaps through which the odd trail could be seen, and the clag was thin enough to see when a passing meteor was lighting up the tops of the clouds, but there was no point in setting up the camera.

According to the current forecast there's not much chance that I'll catch the tail-end of the show tonight.

Next year, maybe?

Deep and meaningful stuff

Posted by on August 3rd 2009 in Just for fun

How many five year olds could you take in a fight? 17

What would you taste like to a cannibal? Broiled tofu

Would you eat your buddies in a blizzard? 59%

What are your chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse? 52%

Would you make a good human shield? 55%

 

Edited to add my results. Looks like I'm just an average bloke  :mrgreen:

Back

Posted by on August 3rd 2009 in Great Escapes, Photo hosting
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We're back from a week of rain-dodging in Dorset. Aside from the usual few days of washing/drying kit and sorting hundreds of pics, there's a more pressing task - the final stage of the photo-hosting move from Zoto to SmugMug. This entails the thankless task of going through every blog post, page and comment here to find and edit all of the links to my pics and albums. There's a fair chance that the blog will have to be taken offline, and an even larger chance that I'll not get it finished by the August 8th deadline.

Of course, this all means that you get a week of respite before I start to bore you with my holiday snaps, so make merry while you can :mrgreen:

Observing Report 20th-22nd July 2009 (Jupiter and Io)

Posted by on July 24th 2009 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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Observing reports have been neglected a bit for a while now while I've being commissioning the observatory. This process has included:
  • Getting the mount drift-aligned so that its axis of rotation is aligned as closely as possible with that of the Earth;
  • Setting up the Shoestring EQDIR to control the mount via planetarium software on the laptop;
  • Setting up the Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 as a wireless hand-controller;
  • PEC training - measuring the inherent periodic error of the mount gearing to allow the software to compensate for it.
Anyway, Monday night was the first time I'd used the place in anger, so to speak. There had been rain (see here) and there was still a fair bit of patchy low cloud around, but the seeing was reasonably good. I decided to have a peek at Jupiter. It's quite low in the southern sky just after midnight, so there was always going to be a fair bit of atmospheric dispersion to mess up any imaging, and some hazy high cloud didn't help either, but I needed to give it a go to "prove out" the mount alignment and stability. I shot just the one .avi file with the webcam on a general setting, needing the image shape and drift rather than any great detail. Happy that the mount setup was satisfactory, I decided to process the .avi as a check of the webcam's performance. The resulting image is  below:  

Io emerging from behind Jupiter, with Europa a bit further out

I was pleased to have captured Io right on the limb of Jupiter, but I've made a right botch of the planetary processing, which isn't surprising bearing in mind the settings used for capture. Even so, it proved that the webcam is still up to scratch. Given the choice of reprocessing or shooting more video, I went for the latter. The next night I was set up in good time, ready and waiting to take advantage of any gaps in the clouds. There was a particularly clear half-hour during which I managed to shoot eight good two-minute .avis with more specific settings. After the usual software jiggery-pokery, I've managed to get the images from the best .avi stacked and processed reasonably well, certainly better than any that I've done before. Here are two versions of the best stack, the only difference is in the amount of sharpening. Feel free to let me know which one you prefer:

Jupiter and Io version 1 - average sharpening

 

Jupiter and Io version 2 - more sharpening

  Next I've got a different challenge - getting the DSLRs set up on the mount for some widefield shots of the Perseid meteors, which are on show from July 17th to August 24th, with the peak on August 12th. The possibility of getting decent pics all depends on the weather, of course.
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