Science Daily: Neptune
- Uranus and Neptune are hiding something big beneath the blue December 10, 2025
- Mysterious object found dancing with Neptune July 20, 2025
Mag 5 skies in Brooklyn?
Well, not quite, but if you’re in NYC and reading this tonight (Oct 3) go outside! I spent a few minutes on our front stoop around 7:15 pm and noticed how clear the sky seemed to be. Then using my hand to block out the street light at the end our our cul-de-sac, I let …
Lowdown on the sun
There’s an interesting article on the solar wind on Science News today. For those of you too young to remember (and, ahem, those of us old enough to start having trouble remembering), the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched back in the 1970s are still plugging away returning interesting data on the nature of the …
NGC 7000 Not-so-Preliminary Image
I finally had time to try reprocess this image using data from the August 31 outing. Much better, but I still need some practice. The overall appearance is still a bit dark, but I need to go back to the originals and start from scratch again. If you look in the lower right-hand corner, you …
Linux Groupware Frustrations
I was asked to look into groupware for a grant project. Okay, I know there are several freebies out there that shouldn’t be too hard to set up. So I looked around and did a little reading and saw that really, it was hard to choose. I mean, there are some that are not well …
NGC 7000 Preliminary Image
We spent the long weekend in upstate New York at a friends house on the Delaware River. Naturally, I couldn’t resist taking the astrophotography equipment. I took the AstroTrac, the laptop, and everything needed to shoot with my Canon 350D. Friday night was a wash-out, but that was expected. Sunday night looked like it might …
Gtk, Glade, and gPhoto Steep Learning Curve
In my quest to build a Linux replacment for DSLRFocus, I’m hitting a steep learning curve with Glade, Gtk, and gPhoto. I’m making progress, but it is slow. I’ve also come to realize that sometimes "best practices" can get in the way. What do I mean? Well, in the gPhoto library, a Camera object is …
Eyeglass Material II, Abbe Numbers
Okay, I’m a physicist, but I kinda slept through the optics part, so I’m okay on the concept of dispersion and having index of refraction being a function of wavelength, but I’m a little weak on just what that Abbe number means in absolute terms. But I do know bigger is bettter (as far as …
Eyeglasses and Dispersion
I took a trip to my local optometrist this afternoon as I need new glasses. Having joined the over-40 crowd a few years ago, I’ve taken to wearing bifocals. I gave up on the progressive lens version as I simply couldn’t get used to them. That’s apparently a common problem, but annoying to find out …
Changing UID/GID on Mac OS X 10.5
Okay, this is not an astronomy topic, but I got stumped on this for a long time and searching the web, while helpful, didn’t make it exactly obvious. Why would you even want to change GID or UID? Well, I needed to synchronize UID and GID with my NFS server for file sharing. We have …
Canon DSLR and Linux II
I’ve been busy not writing (that is, doing other things) and have discovered that Linux can control both of my Canon Digital Rebels at the same time. It turns out there is a bug in gphoto2 that ignores the –port setting if you didn’t also supply a –camera setting. If you supply –camera, you must …