Science Daily: Mars
- Ancient hot water on Mars points to habitable past November 22, 2024
- New research explores volcanic caves, advancing the search for life on Mars November 18, 2024
Science Daily: Uranus
- NASA's Hubble, New Horizons team up for a simultaneous look at Uranus October 11, 2024
- Key to rapid planet formation August 1, 2024
Author: Roland Roberts
No Child Left Inside!
October 12-18 is Earth Science Week! PS 102 will be kicking off the Astronomy Club that week and unfortunately, we don’t have our first outdoor event planned until the following week on Oct 24 (see "Upcoming Events" in the sidebar). The week’s activities focus on in-school lesson plans (with suitable opportunities to do the "in-class" …
CANCELED: Stargazing at Shore Road Park
Due to the poor forecast (complete overcast by 7pm), this event is CANCELED. The weather outlook for both Friday and Saturday is poor, so the rain date will not work. We will have another outing in December, to be announced later. Original announcement: In conjunction with the PS102 Astronomy Club, I’ll be hosting a brief …
Mercury Flyby
On Monday, Oct 6, MESSENGER made it’s second pass around Mercury. The spacecraft doesn’t have enough fuel to just pull up to the planet Star Trek style, so it has to make a series of looping passes, shedding a little velocity and angular momentum each time. But it wasn’t all navigational changes; MESSENGER took the …
A Little Less Light (NY Times)
There is a short opinion piece at the NY Times web site called "A Little Less Light" which makes good reading.
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 …