Starship Asterisk*

Keep the current course Makc. Good work up till now. Only one question about your moderation: why are you not logged in for about half of your posts? This seems to invite confusion. BTW: you might want to check your signature. Don't you mean "Did I just lock your topic ..." or "Have I...

christopher antonsen wrote:anyway, there are 3 major celestial bodies reflected, but only the moon and Mercury in the sky!

Are you talking about these lights below the moon? They are also the moon, reflected again because of ripples on the water.

Boldra

Face-to-Face With a Comet Six minutes to impact The alt text on that image says "sixty seconds to impact". I don't know how many people rely on the alt text though; it's supposed to be for people who can't see the image. Why would you be interested in the site if you can't see the image? ...

I found the usage of "false colour" in todays APOD somehow incongruent... Surely it's enough to say that there are radio waves visible in the above image without saying that they're falsely coloured? What colour do people think radio waves are anyway? I realise this kind of thing can cause...

If I'd seen this thread earlier I'm sure I'd have picked the non-rings picture! After all it's been my background image since it appeared on APOD...

Boldra

Up and down again a lot last week. Currently down.

Boldra

It would appear translucent if it was only there for part of the exposure. See the "quantum cat" submitted during the "strange streak" discussion. http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?p=1898&highlight=quantum+cat#1895 There were two similar black marks last week when the ot...

http://nightskylive.net/sd/sd050401/sd050401ut141135a.jpg Again, shortly after being repaired, Siding Springs is showing black things very close to the camera. My first guess is that it's a moth, but it was largely still for the better part of an hour. Check out the archive http://nightskylive.net/...

Yes, yesterday it worked, today it's broken. The camera failed to switch on today (29th). It's now showing the last pic from 28/3/5, which is munged: http://nightskylive.net/sd/thumbnail08.jpg As I mentioned yesterday, it's not the only case of this kind of munging. There were some munged pictures i...

Siding Spring has been ok for the past week, producing lots of pictures of the moon. There's been a couple of recurrences of the "history subtraction" bug, ( http://nightskylive.net/sd/sd050328/sd050328ut181210a.jpg , http://nightskylive.net/sd/sd050325/sd050325ut141135a.jpg), but only in ...

1. How about adding some simple heuristics to check what the difference is between the two clocks. If they're out of sync by more than five minutes, keep the hardware clock time and don't reset it. -ves: "Simple heuristics" are usually a good idea for avoiding disaster, although they tend ...

I checked the photometry data for Alpha Pavonis (http://nightskylive.net/sd/sd050319/HD193924.html), and the first measurement is at 17:52, at 36°. This strongly suggests my ID is correct!

Boldra

As an mental exercise, I poked around in Starcalc ( http://www.m31.spb.ru/StarCalc/main.htm ), to identify some of the stars. I'm pretty sure that the circled star below is alpha pavonis : http://boldra.com/images/alpha_povis.png Which at 17:44 UT was 35° above the horizon. Using this angle, we can ...

I hadn't noticed the movement until I saw your comment, but I have three suggestions: o it's a tarp or a tent, set up quite near the camera. o it's a piece of paper very near the camera o it's a leaf. I think I've seen car headlights in this direction (south) on other pictures, so it could be someth...

Siding Spring seems to be working again. It came online about midnight Saturday night (19/3), and something big and black was visible on the horizon. It's almost Monday morning local time (21/3)now. The black beast hasn't been back, and the pictures have been good. Noctuas - please don't look! Every...

Thanks for the link Boern. I particularly liked this quote: At the right of the figure is another 32-bit number, this one about four billion, intended to give the approximate human population (back in 1974 --- it’s 6+ billion now). Aliens who correctly interpret this will know how large an army to s...

A good question about the colour Makc, the same thing occurred to me. RJN's posted this pic three times now ( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apod/apod_search?message+earth ), always in colour, although the version on space.com is black and white. I suspect that the colour is only there for publ...

Nice investigative work. I gave up when I saw that RFC 977 was dated 1986. But apart from all that, there must have also been mailing lists, which could also be archived somewhere. Quite probably compressed and not indexed by the search engines, so I'm going to give up the search and just assume tha...

Here's a fairly typical geode you might see in a new age shop: http://www.geokring.nl/geode.jpg And then there's the Almeria geode in Spain http://home.freeuk.net/smk/caving/geode.htm which is so big you can crawl inside it. But back to the original topic, Makc. Did you notice that the second pictur...

Slashdot had a few good jokes about the similarity: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl? ... 13&tid=160

Boldra

Siding Spring came back up late on the 7th and has been ok for two days now. Good pictures too.

Boldra

I've looked at this pic again since you mentioned it, but I don't see what you're seeing. Firstly, the light source is coming from the right, not the left. Secondly, I only see two craters (large) and not three as you said. Thirdly, what "two objects in the upper right"? Perhaps you could ...

Thanks for the explanation - maybe we should cross-post it? Usually I don't read the threads about status of other cameras, and I assume people spotting other cameras don't read this thread. I still think one thread for all spotting wouldn't be a bad idea... Otherwise, an extra thread for general sp...

All going well for the past week, except for a couple of images with a lot of noise on them. It looks like a camera hardware problem to me. I don't think this is a serious problem itself, but it just may turn out to be an indicator of impending failure. Sunday 27th: http://nightskylive.net/sd/sd0502...

I can't see any recurrance of the "history subtraction" problem since the 18th. It looks like the problem has been solved and Siding Spring is working fine. Good work.

Boldra