Author: Roland Roberts
Total Lunar Eclipse
The first total lunar eclipse visible from North America since 27 October 2004 will be in progress at moonrise (5:44pm) here in the northeast USA. In New York City, the moon will already be slightly past it's maximum penetration into the umbra and will only get brighter as the evening progresses. Due to buildings, you probably won't be able to see the moon until after 6:00pm (but that doesn't mean you can't try!).
Sometimes, you might see a deep orange moon at moonrise which quickly becomes white as the moon rises. This is usually due to dust in the atmosphere, but not this night. On March 3rd, the color is due to the sun's light passing through the Earth's atmosphere casting the color of a planet full of sunsets onto the moon.
Take the kids and get out someplace with a low eastern horizon to view the moon as it rises (right at sunset).
About the ending time: don't wait until then! At 6:58pm, the moon will start to emerge from the earth's central shadow (the umbra) and only be partially eclipsed. After that point, it will become increasingly difficult to tell that there is an eclipse at all.
The Rockland Astronomy Club will be hosting a viewing party.
Astronomy Week 2007
No activities planned locally yet, but stay tuned. See http://www.astroleague.org/al/astroday/astroday.html for more information.
Science Demonstrations, more ways to fail
Sigh. One last control experiment. Put the baking soda in the control jar. Oops, the control jar still doesn’t heat as fast as the other one (which is now effectively the "control"). I’ve got something which appears to be sensor/jar dependent but in an odd fashion. I did a check before running the experiment by …
Science Demonstrations
I found an interesting paper on the web by Lueddecke, et al.1 that had a classroom demonstration of the effect of CO2 on the greenhouse effect. It sounded so simple. Hah!
astrofoto.org has a new look
After a long incubation period, I’ve finally moved the test web site over. It meant throwing away a lot of stuff I had custom written in PHP to run the web site, but the move was long overdue as trying to keep the information up-to-date was conflicting with having to mess with code on the …
Basic I/O with the INDI Server
The messages are XML, but the data is in a stream consisting of a sequence of messages. Each message can be treated independently and is self-contained. It is up to the client to organize the messages based on hints contained in the messages themselves (as provided by the device driver). This means that the first …
Connecting to the Server
Our second method is connect. Yes, that name is overused, but it describes exactly what we are doing even if we also have to use the built-in “connect” method that is part of the TCP/IP functions in Perl (and the underlying C library). Ours will be part of the Astro::INDI object we are creating, so …
Boiler Plate
This is the easy part. If you have never written a Perl module, you can find some tutorials elsewhere [need reference]. Our Perl module will be called Astro::INDI and we can produce a skeleton quite simply. I’m going to be bit picky here and insert POD (plain-old documentation) as I do this. It’s a habit …
INDI: Writing an INDI client
This is a work in progress, and is really composed of my working notes more than anything else. The INDI project is still young enough that the focus has been on writing device drivers and implementing potentially useful features. The side effect is that you are “stuck” with using whatever clients are available. The FAQ …
G2Image Hacks
After a bit of work, I’ve been able to hack the Drupal G2Image module to allow inserting full-size images. This isn’t exactly what I want, but it is better than inserting thumbnails. The problem with thumbnails is they look like crap when scaled up. The problem with full-sized images is that they end up being …