Another nice new plugin, Wavatars (by Shamus Young) shows a Gravatar-style face next to your name when you leave a comment. Of course, if you've set up a proper Gravatar, that will be displayed by default.
Wavatars can generate 956,384 different shapes in 57,600 different color combinations for a total of 55,087,718,400 (55 billion) unique Wavatars. Here are a few examples:
See them in action here.
Sorry but you don't get to choose, that's all sorted by the plugin.
Yesterday we had another fine breezy afternoon, so we went to the local park for another session flying the Imp. I'll let the pictures tell the story...
Elanor learning the ropes
It's up there somewhere
Going in under the radar
Taking the strain
Heads up!
Unbalanced
Chris takes control
Incoming!
Beating a retreat
First time out for the new scope. It's not collimated yet (I'm waiting for the postie to deliver the required laser-gadget) so the view quality was never going to be good. Couple that with the fact that I've only got the one eyepiece until the new set is delivered, so I was restricted to just the one magnification (x50).
First off was a shufty at Mars. At x50 it's just a tiny flat orange disc so there was nothing to get excited about. It served as a handy target for practicing with the manual RA and Dec adjusters (leccy computerised set on order).
Next up was the Moon. It's just past full, so there was much detail on the terminator, where there were shadows which added depth to the view. Chris was really impressed when she eventually got a chance to have a look-see. I grabbed the D50 and took some hand-held snaps through the eyepiece. I really need to get a T-ring to fit the camera directly to the scope.
Finally, Saturn was visible to the left of the Moon, so I slewed around to that and got a decent view. Titan was obvious, and two other moons were just visible. Anna was still awake so I let her have a look, she was really wowed by the view. Her class is studying the planets, she's so chuffed now that she can tell all her classmates that she's really seen another planet and another moon! I took a few snaps but they're rubbish and don't show any moons, so I'll not post them here.
A few of my blogging friends have added a moon phase module to their blogs, they're using the widget thing that's available at http://www.calculatorcat.com/moon_phases/moon_phases.phtml.
Now, it looks fine and dandy when set to display for a Northern Hemispherian like me, it looks like this:
No problems there, that's what the moon looked like last night.
But clicky-clicky on the arrows to set the display for my antipodean cousins and you get...
this:
Tell me it ain't so. Surely the terminator can't just change it's position just because the observer has moved from one hemisphere to the other.
The experts over at SGL concur that it should look like this:
All this space stuff. It's not rocket-science, is it?
Update 27/01/2008: Just visited the website again and the error's been fixed. Another indication of the power of the internet, eh?
During the day, it hides in the wardrobe...
at night, it just wants to go out and have fun, see the sights, shoot the moon, that sort of thing...
I predict that we can look forward to a deep and meaningful relationship.
It's a Celestron Advanced C8-N, by the way. Here's the low-down:
General Details:
Technical Information:
Normally priced up at around £375, they're currently on sale at £249 (inc. VAT and delivery) at various places, I got mine from Rother Valley Optics.
