brainwagon

Tom Van Baak has a fascinating obsession with timekeeping. His website, www.leapsecond.com, has a great deal of information regarding timekeeping and his vast collection of odd and accurate timekeeping devices. He even wrote a nice paper which details the state of the art in amateur timekeeping. The short of it: amateurs can achieve ridiculous accuracy […]

Today’s useful link of the day is to Mini-FAQ Macro Photography, Frugal, mostly Digital. This page has lots of good ideas for getting images from digital cameras, microscopes and flatbed scanners. I’ll have to try this sometime. My Zeiss-Jena microscope I bought at a flea market for $15 isn’t getting enough use.

While doing one of my usual bored browses of the web looking for odd science projects, I ran across a page detailing a homemade 3d laser scanner. This is another of a long series of projects that I thought would be fun to do, but never have gotten around to working on. I’ve also seen […]

A Panoramic Camera is a terrific webpage by Giorgio Carboni. The rest of his website is awsome too, and includes many nifty science projects. His panoramic camera though is awesome, and the construction description is detailed and interesting. But most important, images that he takes with it are awesome, and include some beautiful Italian cityscapes.

My friend Phil sent me these pictures he took using a Canon D60 through a small wide angle telescope. He sent me these pictures to ask what the streaks are. My best guess is a geosynchronous satellite. To verify this, I was thinking of first of all plotting the direction of the trail. Assuming they […]

Last year I carted my wife and son out to view the Leonic meteor shower, and we were blessed with a pretty spectacular show. I went out sometime after dark (my house is actually a pretty dark location, at least for a suburb of Oakland) and didn’t see any in the first five minutes when […]

In an earlier story I mentioned the project to fly a model airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. So far they have managed to lose two of their four planes in rather disappointingly short periods of flight. Check here for updates. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them.

I’ve been interested in CCD imaging for quite some time, but haven’t had the scope + budget to really get involved. Nonetheless, I monitor a couple of CCD imaging mailing lists, and there are occasionally excellent pictures, pictures every bit as detailed as classic Sky Survey images such as those done at Palomar.

Often I donate my Friday evenings to teach telescope making at the Chabot Science Center. Gert Gottschalk often shows up to participate, and he reminded me that he has a very nice webpage of his own, which has many nice astrophotos, done with film, digital cameras and CCD imaging. Take a browse, they are quite […]

When I was a young, I used to spend a great deal of time at our local library, which was within two blocks of my grade school. They frequently gave away old books and magazines that were no longer determined to be valuable to the community. On one particular day, I scored several dozen copies […]