Year: 2015

A few years ago, I remember sitting out in my back alley and trying to gauge the faintest star I could see. During the summer and early fall Lyra is high overhead and has several stars around magnitude 3-5. The Little Dipper is often used for this but from here in Brooklyn that involves looking …

Bright SkiesRead More

I’ve avoided this for a long time. Finally I launched into it to find what it would take. You’ll notice the web site looks a bit different. That’s mostly because I didn’t try to migrate the old theme; I’ll eventually go through and tweak things until it morphs back into something closer. But that’s not …

Painful Drupal 7 MigrationRead More

I received this last year at the Rockland Astronomy Club’s Summer Star Party as a raffle prize. Nice camera, designed as a planetary camera with 1280×960 resolution, small pixels at 3.75μm, compact and light-weight, and best of all, it has an autoguider port. So…at this year’s Summer Star Party, I finally got it out. Yes, …

ASI120MM Astronomy CameraRead More

Summers are always busy and this one was no different. But at least I finally got to do a little astronomy. First there was the update on writing a curriculum for Ten Mile River to try to get the scouts through the astronomy merit badge. The operative word here is “try” because it’s not actually …

BSA AstronomyRead More

I think I stumbled across this a while back but I can’t remember where. The classic freshman physics question is, assuming a uniform density for the Earth and a perfect, frictionless tunnel cut through the Earth in a straight line, how long would it take to travel between any two points on the surface of …

Gravity Tunnels, Falling through the EarthRead More

I’m trying to catch up on my reading by skimming through back issues of American Journal of Physics when I found this one in the March issue: “Impact behavior of a superball,” Am. J. Phys. 83, 238-248 (2014). It’s a fun little article that covers some of the basics that you can find elsewhere like how the …

Superball Physics!Read More

I recently picked up an older Thinkpad T400 that had Windows 7 installed. After a bit of angst, I went ahead with my plan to scrub the disk and install Fedora 21. Why the angst? Well, I had originally thought of using Windows 7 32-bit to control my older Canon Digital Rebel XT cameras. They are …

Testing Astro Video Capture in LinuxRead More

The authors point to teaching programming languages as opposed to logic as being a seriously weak spot in computer science education. While the “Hour of Code” has a lot of appeal and can introduce people to computing, they point out that new computing languages are continuously being developed to try to solve new problems. They …

Teach Foundational Language Principles (CACM May 2015, pp 30-31)Read More

This article initally caught my attention with it’s graphic and caption “SCIENCE:Gravity makes haveier things fall faster.” The author goes on to recount her experience with just such a poster in a local elementary science fair and her lack of success in having it taken down. The point: we have started pushing instruction of computing …

Education: What Are We Doing When We Teach Computing in Schools? (CACM May 2015, pp24-26)Read More