[AZ-Observing] was: Juno at opposition, now dusty AZ

From: "Wayne (aka Mr. Galaxy)" <mrgalaxy@xxxxxxxx>
To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 26 May 2012 21:37:13 GMT
Benson, AZ 85602
hm ph: 520-586-2244 I thought I was the only one having problems with my email 
being stripped of punctuation and paragraph organization! Your email structure 
looks okay when I see your incoming messages. I wonder if it just happens when 
your/my "sent email" comes back to us. I saw someone else's email come through 
in all ASCII characters a couple times. I still can't look at the images posted 
by another member whose name escapes me now. I just love to hate computers! 
They're like cars, when they work they're wonderful but when they don't it's a 
nightmare. Has it been dusty up there? Our skies have not been very dark at 
all, but interestingly the seeing has been pretty good though it's been windier 
than all get-out day and night. I was chased back into the house because it was 
so windy a couple nights ago. That being said, I had a good night surveying 
some pretty close doubles, mostly around 1-2 arcsec separation and had no 
problem splitting them though I would like to have seen more pinpointed stars.  
I had a question for the reflector afficionados in the group: my secondary 
mirror support oscillates (rings) pretty badly when it is windy. The support is 
very close to the front of the OTA and I have thought about putting a dew 
shield in front to isolate it better from the external environment. I wondered 
whether anybody has experimented with something like Kevlar or carbon composite 
materials to stiffen and reduce the secondary oscillations which cause the 
stars in my telescope to appear very astigmatic for several seconds and makes 
it impossible to observe. The idea is to keep the support vanes as thin as 
possible to keep diffraction effects to a minimum. Is there some product out 
there already available?  Part of the reason I moved from southern California 
(other than to get a job!) was to get away from the Santa Ana winds. It seems 
to be just as bad here at times, especially in the spring. I saw a very 
interesting sunset here a few days ago. The sun did not turn orange as it set 
in the west, but was very dim and white. Our local mountains (the Rincons) 
which are usually wonderfully detailed completely disappeared.
Clear skies, 
Wayne (aka Mr. Galaxy)
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Michael Collins <cal_donley@xxxxxxx>
To: mrgalaxy@xxxxxxxx
Cc: Michael Collins <cal_donley@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: (3) Juno at opposition
Date: Fri, 25 May 2012 23:09:54 -0700

> I love those type of animations demonstrating dynamical astronomy. I
> used to do something similar on comets and supernovae (and even
> Uranus and Neptune) years ago at the OCA's Anza Observatory in So.
> Cal, but my technical knowledge and (homebrew) software available
> only allowed us to do blink comparisons.

Hi Wayne,
 Everything you see was done with free software. I used GIMP to
register the images and generate the scaled sub-frames, then the convert
utility from ImageMagick to produce the GIF animation. All on a Linux
machine.

 Now if I could just get the AZ observing list server to echo my
messages without mangling them to make me look like like an idiot...

 Glad you liked the animation. It's one of those things I've wanted to
do for a long time, and finally got around to last Saturday night.

-- Mike --
-- 
cal_donley@xxxxxxx

--
See message header for info on list archives or unsubscribing, and please 
send personal replies to the author, not the list.
[AZ-Observing] was: Juno at opposition, now dusty AZ

Other related posts:
