Author: Roland Roberts

I spent three days at the NSTA STEM Expo in St. Louis last week and over the next few days, I’m going to try to do a few posts related to the sessions I attended and things I learned (and cool freebies I learned about on the web). This is the second year I’ve attended, …

NSTA STEM Expo 2013Read More

It’s that time again. Actually, Globe At Night is running multiple campaigns, the first is going on right now, but there are others later in the year including later this month. Have a look. If you’ve never done this before, it’s a great way of participating in a citizen science project, learning a little about …

Globe At NightRead More

Well, our post-Sandy migration is nominally complete at this point. Pictures and all.

Okay, we’ve finally managed to get the web site transferred, but pictures aren’t yet working. Yeah, I know, what’s the point of a photo web site without pictures. Sorry, I’m working on it.

This morning I managed to drag myself out for a pre-dawn walk/jog and enjoyed the view of a thin waning crescent moon east (below) a brilliant Venus. Higher up was Jupiter. The jog was nice, and the view was a nice extra bonus.

A couple of dozen folks showed up in Shore Road Park hoping to get a peek at Venus transiting the Sun today, but the weather did not cooperate. After setting up shortly after 5pm, I had to cover the equipment due to some light rain which passed through. Eventually the Sun peeked through a thin …

Transit of Venus 2012, Clouded out in BrooklynRead More

Event Cancelled due to Clouds/Rain. Yes, again. The past few years, TV Turnoff Week and stargazing have not worked too well due to a string of bad weather. The clouds are not expected to clear out and the local forecasters are all mentioned that we won’t get to see the “super moon” tonight. Nor much …

Stargazing in Shore Road Park (Cancelled due to Weather)Read More

Blech. Had to do some manual database maintenance. Gave up on default multi-site configuration as too painful, and turned off all caching. Things seem to be working, but we’ll see.

I’ve been rather frustrated with my web site lately as I’ve been getting random Drupal failures telling me it can’t find “settings.php.” Utter nonsense; the file is there, permissions are correct, and it usually finds it just fine. So, if you’ve been confronted with a rather odd home page or link when navigating my site, …

Random Drupal FailuresRead More

Okay, temptation overtook me again . I pulled out the IR blocking filter and took an hour’s worth of images, plus enough calibration frames that I should have been able to eliminate the flaws in the previous images. The results, below, are better, but there are a few nagging issues. [G2:41283 class=g2image_centered exactsize=800] This time, …

M31 with a Meade DSI Pro II – reduxRead More