brainwagon

Ralf Vandebergh has a really interesting web page, where he shows pictures of the ISS and Shuttle missions taken with a 10″ Newtonian telescope. The detail is really amazing. Images of ISS, Space Shuttle and other spaceflight objects by Ralf Vandebergh George Tarsoudis has similar equipment, and produces similarly impressive results: Images of Satellites by […]

While mucking around this morning, I bumped across the Sixty Symbols website, something I hadn’t seen before. It describes itself thusly: Ever been confused by all the letters and squiggles used by scientists? Hopefully this site will unravel some of those mysteries. Sixty Symbols is a collection of videos about physics and astronomy presented by […]

A few years ago when the amateur satellite AO-51 transmitted a beacon message on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, it was enough to rekindle my interest in amateur radio (which had lain dormant for nearly a decade) and got me working amateur satellites. On April 16, 17 and 18, there is an Echoes of Apollo/Moonbounce […]

Today I was cleaning out my office. I’m a clutterbug: I have tons of treasures, but also, let’s face it, an even larger amount of crap. When I first moved to California 19 years ago, everything I owned fit in 13 banker’s boxes. Now, I don’t even think my power adapters would fit in 19 […]

Poking around on archive.org, I found that Louis Bell’s classic work The Telescope was available for download. It is a pretty nice book, well worth reading if one has an interest in astronomy and telescopes. It is part history, part engineering, and part user’s guide. It also includes some great illustrations such as the one […]

IMG001221st November, 2009 Dan Lyke of flutterby drew my attention to the astrometry pool on Flickr. If you upload an astrophotograph to this group, a process comes by later and tries to identify the stars in your image, and adds annotations and labels to it. Very nifty. Check it out. Try clicking the image above, […]

We were fogged in here, so I didn’t have an opportunity to watch, but it looks like I didn’t miss much: early reports are that basically no one saw any visible plume, not even at Mt. Palomar. Here’s a link to Sky & Telescope’s story: SkyandTelescope.com – News from Sky & Telescope – LCROSS Impact: […]

This Friday the NASA LCROSS probe will deliberately impact in a dark crater on the moon, with the ultimate goal of trying to decide if any water exists on the moon in these deep craters. As it happens, I was going to take Friday off from work anyway, so being awake at 4:35AM Pacific Time […]

On this day in history, 400 years ago Galileo Galilei demonstrated his telescope to a group of Venetian lawmakers. In March of the following year, he would publish his most famous work, Siderius Nuncius (commonly rendered in English as The Starry Messenger). This invention ushered in the modern era of astronomy, and quite literally changed […]

I was scanning through the recent additions to Project Gutenberg, and found that Volume I of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dating back to 1666 had been converted and uploaded. It’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it (as well as some uninteresting) but the thing which caught my eye was this […]

Glancing through the recent additions to Project Gutenberg, I encountered this nice little book which details some of the pioneering scientists in the field of astronomy. It even has some nice illustrations which might be useful, such as the one on the right of Newton’s first reflecting telescope. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pioneers Of […]

While recovering from my brief outpatient procedure yesterday, I was surfing around, looking for the ChirpHell and ChirpPix programs that some people mentioned in the context of creating the Hellschreiber IDs that I saw yesterday. A bit of Googling revealed that they were written by DF6NM, so I did some more websearching, and as soon […]

While reading up on Adrien’s blog, he mentioned a site which I hadn’t seen before. It attempts to predict how good the conditions will be for astrononomy and astrophotography for locations around North America. For instance, I teach (well, more properly used to teach, since I’ve been enormously busy lately) telescope making at the Chabot […]

It’s been quite some time since I’ve bought a book about telescope making: I just have been more absorbed in the world of amateur radio lately. Still, on my trip to Portland, I noticed that James Daley had published a book on an unusual telescope: the Schupmann. The Schupmann Telescope The Schupmann is an unusual […]

It’s been quite some time since I posted a “Gutenberg Gem”, a book from Project Gutenberg that might deserve some special attention. Today’s example contains a bunch of nice illustrations about telescopes and their associated astronomical instruments. Very nice. Not just traditional refracting telescopes, but also instruments like spectrum comparators and filar micrometers. The Project […]