Author: Roland Roberts

Well, I contacted the seller of the camera about my problems and he said he had a similar problem, also with his laptop, and the problem was the parallel port. The troubleshooting guide also mentions that as a warning and says some people have reported problems with IBM laptops. Of course, I have an IBM …

SAC 8-II Woes, Solution?Read More

I purchased a used SAC 8-II off astromart a few weeks ago after which it promptly sat in the box apart from a cursory examination. The intent was to use it as a light-weight autoguider. I quickly installed the software and "tested" it without being attached to anything. I was getting a signal out of …

SAC 8-II WoesRead More

I was having a problem on with using Gallery’s image block which requires loading PHP code . It would usually work just fine, but for some reason, the image was occasionally truncated. Since I have access to the backend, I could look at the raw file and knew it had uploaded just fine. Turns out …

Truncated (large) images in Gallery2 — not!Read More

It turns out that g2image can only insert thumbnails. There’s apparently a hack for the WordPress users and the ability to insert full images (and then they can use TinyMCE edit/scale them). I’ll have to keep checking to see when that’s available.

Okay, it’s not really fighting, but if feels that way. I misunderstood the instructions for setting up g2image and put the plugin under modules/tinymce/plugins because that directory already existed and had something in it, namely drupalbreak. Oops, that’s not where it is supposed to go, it has to go under modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins. The clue came after …

Fighting with G2ImageRead More

It was a busy day with a long talk by Ron Dantowitz who was trying to make up for lost time after missing yesterday’s talk due to a family emergency. I was a bit conflicted since I would have liked him to finish a bit earlier in order to have time for lunch, but on the other hand, I loved every minute of the talk. Of course, some of it was just being green with envy for his job!

Tony Hallas had the opening talk discussing deep-sky processing talk with a lot of useful information about his workflow. There were a number of useful tips on using Photoshop, and once again there was a large emphasis on signal-to-noise ratios. The fun part of the talk was the introduction which covered the history of astrophotography …

NEAIC: Tony HallasRead More

Patterson’s talk focussed on photometry and began with a survey of areas where photometry plays a major role: asteroids, supernovae, and variable stars. Up to about 1910–1920, the area was dominated by amateurs, the best of which were often hired by the universities. Post World War II, that changed, largely due to money as the …

NEIAC Pro-AM Collaboration TalkRead More

I contacted the Mayor’s Office of Correspondence again today to get an ETA on the response to my letter of one month ago (happy anniversary?). While the front office person was again polite, even friendly, she couldn’t give me an ETA saying that it was assigned to someone who was looking into why I hadn’t …

Still Wating on Mayor’s OfficeRead More

Don Parker gave a fascinating and humorous talk on planetary imaging which has got me ready to head back out with my ToUCam to try some more imaging. I’ll have to work through some of his formulae to see how I ought to be setting up my camera and, given that I live under a flight path to LaGuardia, I might have to consider replacing the ToUCam with something that supports USB 2.0 so I can take images at a higher frame rate to try to beat both the seeing conditions and the lovely jet wash induced turbulence.