Tag Archives: Personal Blather

I want to build a home stereo system that uses tuned Tesla coils instead of speakers…

Ok, it looks like it’s time for me to get serious about writing again. Weeks have gone by with nary a peep from my… fingers? Hm. Odd way of putting it, but then again this is typing and not speaking.

So. My non-peeping fingers have been lax in updating here. Lots of reasons why too, and I’ll try to go into them over the course of the week. Right now though, I’m going to go in search of coffee.

The big problem with doing astronomical photography is that if it’s too cloudy, you’re pretty much out of luck.

The other, not quite so big problem, is that an equatorial mount is a kind of arcane looking device. Lots of dials, lots of knobs and gauges. And if you’ve never used one before, it’s not an easy thing to figure out from scratch. Consider this a very basic primer.

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So! We’re up North and visiting the folks. There’s a couple tons of photos from the drive up that My Wife will be posting in time, and while we’re up here I’m going to be doing some experimentation with astronomical photography using tips from the Astronomy Magazine website. I’ve got the old Yashika J-7 SLR set up with a clock-drive equatorial mount to try doing long-exposure shots with minimal trails. We’ll have to see how that works out.

I’ve also got the old Ansco Karomat up here. It’s loaded with an ancient roll of high contrast Kodak Rapid Process Copy film. It seemed like an interesting experiment to mix a camera from the 1950’s with some film manufactured some time in the mid 70’s.

Follow this link to learn the step-by-step process of how to become a T-Shirt Ninja!

Did a bit of a home-network project today. Kind of satisfying, now that it’s done. While it was in progress… Well, not so much.

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I don’t know why, but I always like listening to British rappers. I guess I find their accents amusing…

YouTube is being a bit squiffy, so if that’s not working, click this link instead…

I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” books – I’m about 3/4 of the way through Blue Mars at this point – and I got to wondering about a theoretical space station. The idea I had is for an agricultural station. Something wheel shaped, rotating around a central axis to produce gravity on the inside surface of the drum, and angled so that the sun provides natural light for the inside of the wheel for half of the rotation. It’s a fairly standard Sci-Fi design, but the tricky part of this particular one is that I wanted the period of rotation to be 24 hours.

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