Jerry Oltion designed created The Trackball Telescope, a telescope which rotates around on a spherical ball. It’s not that unusual to see these “ball” telescopes, but Jerry seems to have come up with a reasonably novel way to drive the telescope so that it will track stars as the earth rotates. Very neat for a small telescope.

[tags]Telescopes,Astronomy,Amateur Astronomy[/tags]

Cornell university researchers have apparently cracked the scheme used by the new European Galileo satellites. Galileo is the European version of GPS, but unlike the American GPS constellation which were paid for by tax dollars, Galileo is privately funded and sought to repay their investors by licensing the pseudo-random sequences that scramble the data streams. There are some interesting copyright and intellectual property questions raised by this, as well as some very cool cryptography work. Check it out.

Here is the research page at Cornell.

[tags]GPS,Galileo,Intellectual Property,Cryptography[/tags]