Archive for 2008
Observing Report 09th-10th March 2008 (A better Saturn)
During the early evening the weather was looking grim. Low clouds were scudding in from the West, making mount alignment impossible. After resigning myself to another missed night, I got the kids ready for bed and then went out for a smoke only to find the skies were clear with minimal light-pollution, so I raced back inside, grabbed the gear and got set up sharpish.
After three attempts to get the mount-software to accept a 3-star alignment (it's no fun having a 65ft willow tree in the garden obscuring all the reference stars!) I popped in the new Baader Hyperion eyepiece and had a look at a few old favourites (M3, M44 and M45) and was impressed with the view provided at this magnification. By this time, Saturn was well up in the sky, so I slewed around to have yet another look and there it was, bright and clear, banding visible on the surface and with moons to boot. The seeing wasn't good, thin clouds were forming and the image in the eyepiece was dancing around a fair bit, so I decided to skip the photo-session with the D50.
Taking the camera back indoors, I had a flash of inspiration/stupidity/call it what you will, and I grabbed the Olympus C730-UZ, set up the BH Zoom at 8mm and hooked up the camera in auto-focus video-mode. I set it running just to see what I could get, to download the movie click HERE.
Anyway, more of that later.
Ten minutes later and the sky was totally clouded over, so I put the kit away and set to with the laptop, trying to extract something reasonable from the movie file.
I had installed K3CCDTools3 (the free trial version) earlier that day, and was keen to see what it could do. Annoyingly, it won't accept .mov files, so I had to convert the movie to .avi and then start again. Plugging the .avi into K3CCDTools3 resulted in over 3000 .jpg frames, which I then sorted to drag out the best 20% which were auto-stacked to produce this image:
Nope, it’s not me.
Just a quick post to let all those nice peeps on the OM forum know that I'm NOT Urc Oxbig, nor am I his brother Mike. I'm sure that Jon Doran would be able to verify this by having his tech-team compare IP addresses, should anybody have need of such reassurances.
Hopefully the folk on OM know that if I'm going to have a pop at anybody, I'll use a recognised pseudonym, or even my proper name. Somebody did copy one of my pseudonyms a while back, to try to drop me in the shite, there was little that I could do about that except explain the situation to the affected parties.
BG! / Bearded Git
Sexism and the City
Recently-received from the Child Benefit people - one envelope containing: one letter telling me that the amount of child benefit we receive will be increased; and one leaflet from The Department for Children, Schools and Families.
Well, the letter itself is fine enough. OK, the rise isn't much, but we have to be thankful for whatever the Government of the day decides to allow us.
But the leaflet... Oh, no! The bees in my bonnet are swarming madly. The needle on the rantometer is right into the red and is straining against the stop-pin. The word "offended" doesn't adequately describe my feelings.
Why? Essentially, the leaflet's saying "with our help, you can afford childcare, so Mum can go back to work". Sounds fine and noble, eh? We're a 2-parent, 2-child family, nothing unusual in that. But hey, hold on just one darned minute, I'm a stop-at-home dad with what they term "parental responsibilities", my wife works full-time (and more), do we not fit into the equation?
Just look at these passages from the leaflet:
"Mum goes to the office, I go to karate..."
"Mum goes to work, I go to afterschool club..."
"My mum goes to work, I do art at pre-school..."
Not one mention of the word "Dad".
Therein lies my angst. Somewhat naively, I had assumed that sexism is an illegal discrimination, but it seems that it's alive and kicking in the corridors of power.
The Stumble Effect
Somebody "stumbled" one of my blog-posts last night, check out the stats spike:
The sun shines out of my Mum’s…
... conservatory! (According to Google Maps.)
That's got to be one in a million...
and so's my Mum.
Happy Mothers' Day, Mum.
Thanks for dinner and for the bread-pudding!
NEWSFLASH
00:55 am...
We just had an earthquake! The whole house was shaking... the laptop motion-sensor stopped the HDD... plates on the floor... alarms going off everywhere...
I'd just finished an hour of setting up the scope - what a waste of time, expensive accessories all over the floor. 😥
Fantastic.
Edit: news is that the epicentre was 15 miles from Lincoln and about 4.7 on the Richter scale.
