Sunsets, Stars, West, Wind
Good news for Wolfguard fans this week. The band shook off the rust tonight at rehearsal. Terry will be taking it very easy, as his back, ribs and ankle are still not fully recovered.
Tomorrow night, come out and hear them play a few songs for open mic night at Sweetwoods Bar & Grill in Leavenworth.
China Grove from June 2010
Wolfguard at Sweetwoods back in September 2009
My first photographic effort using the Meade ETX90 and the Pentax K100D (on a two second delay shutter in an attempt to prevent blurring and shaking of the telescope) is above. I chose the moon, because it’s large, bright and easy to focus and doesn’t necessarily need to be tracked. I did not use the Autostar to track and sync the moon while taking both of these photos.
I like the second moon photo (above) the best of the half dozen or so shots I took.
My efforts attempting to focus and track Jupiter did not bear good fruit. Of the handful of photos I took, the one above is the best of the bunch.
That’s all the photographic practice I’ll get this evening. I need to devise a counterweight for the telescope’s tube so the camera doesn’t pull ‘up’ the altitude.
The commute home provided false hopes for my star gazing this evening. While light hazy stratus clouds filtered the sunlight sporadically, the skies looked promising as I traveled northward on K-7.
I stepped outside a few minutes ago to catch the moon before it set, but saw only gray clouds underlit with orange glow from the well lit Lansing Correctional Facility a few blocks north of my house. I stepped out the front door and could still see Jupiter, but only for a few minutes as the clouds overtook even that bright object. I spied no sliver of moon in the southwest or west.
Besides trying to locate Comet Hartley 2 (again), Earthsky earlier today mentioned Antares proximity to the moon.
Perhaps tomorrow evening will provide better weather and opportunities for gazing up and out and back in time.
9:00 pm update: Let Apollo back in (I’d forgotten I’d let him out) and noticed a crystal clear sky. However, Cassiopeia is dim as it hovers over the LCF. If I can’t sleep or wake up early I’ll try for the comet then.
This December, my son, Derek Moss, will do what I never did myself (nor that I thought he would do for high school, let alone college). He will graduate from SMU’s Guildhall!
This last term he is focused on expanding and publishing his portfolio and pursuing career opportunities in the gaming industry. He recently published his portfolio and resume online here: Derek Moss, Environmental Artist
I’m excited, thrilled, overwhelmed, anxious … all the things a mother is when her fledgling soars on eagle’s wings.
Subtitled: Everything I forgot to mention in the previous post due to time constraints and memory overload.
I did lend a hand, at least temporarily, with reviewing and tweaking the old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. I manually removed over 10,000 files from the temp folder after which my dad showed his brother how to use Window’s built in Disk Cleanup utility. The laptop has only 512 MB of RAM, but could probably benefit from a memory upgrade to 2 GB if possible. Both dad and uncle are pricing RAM this week. The hard drive is anemic at 30 GB (and Office 2007 is fully loaded on it) and is using compression (ugh!). Without more time and some of my normal utilities, I couldn’t accurately predict if turning off compression would result in a fully utilized hard drive (i.e. no free disk space for Windows to operate ‘normally’). Granted, the laptop is over seven years old, so I’m not much that gone be done to improve performance without dumping too much money into it. As with most electronics, it’s sometimes better to cut your losses and jump to new and improved hardware. I suggested a netbook if 90% of their needs involve internet access (webmail, Googling, weather, news, etc.).
My uncle and I (both avid readers and he’s also an aspiring author) swapped several pounds worth of books. I’ll do the inventory this evening and start sorting for swapping and trading via BookMooch and my local used book store. My dad gave us both the evil eye, since I somehow ended up with about twice as many books on the return trip to squeeze into his car, along with the telescope and me.
I spied and watched some local fauna, including a large woodchuck, a small green and gray toad and a pasture of self-shedding sheep and their well trained unsupervised sheepdog. On the ride down to Winfield, we saw many red tailed hawks in the pre-dawn life puffed up like owls, but later in the morning they were sleek or fast as the glided over the planes in search of breakfast.
And we ruminated squeaky floors and their cures and the consensus became you must pull up your flooring, use screws (not nails) and possible some glue to quiet those squeaks.
This will be a conglomeration of star gazing journal and family events and I only have fifteen minutes to spit it out! So here goes:
First, the star gazing report: My dad and I traveled to Winfield to visit my aunt and uncle for the weekend. Since the weather was forecast to remain calm, clear and the moon was just barely a sliver, I took the telescope and accessories with us. We spent the day visiting, enjoying experimental cooking from my aunt and uncle (which was delicious, don’t get me wrong) and doing fall tree trimming and another household repair a la my dad. I have photos of a couple of the close calls my dad avoided, but that will have to wait for another post.
Later in the evening, after another wonderful new recipe for dinner, as the sun set and the moon quickly followed, we setup the telescope just in time to catch a glimpse of the craters of the moon along the terminus. Everyone got a chance to view before the moon slipped towards the horizon and behind the tree line.
Now, we waited for Jupiter (which was visible already) and the first few stars (Altair, Deneb and Vega). We relocated the telescope to the backyard (for a better angle on Jupiter) and my aunt invited a couple of neighbors to view Jupiter’s spectacular display. We discovered, over the course of the evening, the Jupiter’s moon move quite fast, so much that when the evening began, we only saw three moons, and as it progressed we saw the fourth appear and a couple others move out and up in their orbits.
My personal goal for the evening was a second attempt to find Comet Hartley 2. So I was just killing time until the skies darkened enough to make the attempt. In the meantime, I showed my aunt and uncle the double star in the Big Dipper (Mizar/Alcor) and of course we began to see the great sweep of stars for the Milky Way.
We took a break (about an hour or so) to sit inside and rest our backs (tree trimming was only a regular activity for my father) and returned to hunt for the comet. My dad and I tried for another hour, but haze, trees and light pollution were not helping us. We finally gave up around 11:00 p.m. and headed off to bed.
I woke at my normal 5:00 a.m. timeframe and migrated up to the dark living room. My uncle soon arrived and we both exited outside to determine the location of Cassiopeia. That region of space was still not dark ‘enough’ I believe and clouds were rolling in fast from the west. I did point out Orion and Sirius almost directly due south at that time of morning.
After another wonderful meal (this time breakfast of course), we visited and discussed books, movies, politics, religion … all the usual topics I’ve come to know and love with my close family. Lunch was a local Chinese buffet followed by a mini-tour of Southwestern’s campus, where it’s celebrating it’s 125th year and Ron’s art (as an alum from 1968) is featured in Baden Hall. Recently remodelled, it had formerly housed some of Arthur Covey’s artwork and still sports a block dedicating the fireplace from Arthur to his art professor Dunlevy.
Rain rolled into Winfield and followed Dad and I north along the turnpike, peaking in Emporia where we stopped for supper and Braum’s ice cream, but tapered off as we continued northeast along I-35 to K-7 in Olathe and finally reaching Lansing/Leavenworth by 8:00 p.m. — only one hour late mostly due to too much talking (missing exits) and stopping for gas and food.
A wonderful weekend getaway in Winfield I hope to repeat in the future.
Ciao,
Jon
I tried several times this week to spot the comet Hartley 2 using my birthday preset as an assist. According to EarthSky’s blog, you should be able to find it with binoculars near the constellation Cassiopeia. Here’s a graphic from that blog posting to assist in pinpointing the comet:
Since tonight is October 9th, the comet is below the Double Cluster. I’m taking all the telescope equipment with me to Winfield today so I can make the attempt again tonight (since the moon is still very new and the skies are dark).
Happy comet hunting and keep looking up!
While driving somewhere this week (either to training or home from it), I heard the DJs on KLOVE mention a new documentary entitled ‘The Contents of Her Purse.’ Apparently, the contents of a woman’s purse says something about her. What, I don’t know, since I haven’t seen the documentary.
So, the DJ’s asked for women to comment on their blog answering ‘What does your handbag say about you?’. It got me thinking. I haven’t done much but stuff things in my purse for many moons, so I took everything out of my purse this afternoon:
So, briefly from top left to lower right: my purse, my pick, my bifocals (in the case), my reading glass (also in a case), my wallet, my chapstick, my lipstick, my microfiber glass cleaning cloth in plastic slipcover, my brush, my ibuprofen, my mortgage payment booklet, my spare auto insurance card, a fine line permanent marker, a pen, two tissue wrapped coins from my father, a couple of hairclips, an old used up set of check duplicates, my water bill, my library cards (for Lansing, KCMO and Johnson County), my gum, salt/pepper packets, my keys, my St. Louis office security card, an old prayer request from this past March, an old bus pass receipt and a flyer that came with my new Price Chopper Shopper card.
I didn’t take everything out of my wallet, which is crammed full of old receipts, various plastic cards (debit, credit, shopper, membership, etc.) and checkbook and pen.
I’m not sure what this stuff says about me besides that I like to read (three library cards and two pairs of glasses). Any thoughts?
After my fourth day of training in SQL Server 2005 (at the New Horizons Computer Learning Center in the Metro South Mall in Overland Park), I stayed in the area to attend the October meeting of KCOG (Kansas City Office Geeks) held at yet another training facility (Centriq on State Line Road).
The presenter was Karthik Venkataraman of Rishi Solutions and he gave a short presentation and demo on upgrading SharePoint 2007 to 2010. The demo failed (of course) because the prerequisites for upgrading are steep, including Windows 2008 64-bit along with MOSS 2007 SP2.
The most promising avenue of upgrade I witnessed was the Database Attach method. This may coincide with our plans at work to stand up brand new servers (especially since 64-bit architecture is required) and re-install/re-configure OneView in parallel with our production SharePoint system. A second learning/preparing step includes running the command STSADM -o preupgradecheck on the 2007 system and documenting all your customizations (especially those that do NOT reside in the database, but rather live in the file system on your SharePoint server).
The basic steps for the Database Attached method include:
The list above is not comprehensive so please do your research (learn and prepare) and test, test, test!
And don’t forget the five steps to any upgrade process: Learn, Prepare, Test (the most important step), Implement and Validate.
It will be several months before I get to learn this method in a test environment, but I’m so looking forward to SharePoint 2010.
Transferred from my MySpace blog (originally posted October 5, 2010):
Second star gazing journal. After calling Meade Support on Monday, I recalibrated the drives and retrained them as well as finally dialing in (for the most part) my viewfinder … all before the sun went down.
Then I packed everything up (carefully) and headed west to my local community park a couple of miles west of my park. I was a bit disappointed to see what appeared to be a soccer practice occurring even though the sun had set at five minutes before seven. Since I didn’t want a stray hyperactive youngster to knock over and destroy the expensive and sensitive telescope equipment, I resolved to wait until everyone left.
In the meantime, at five after seven, while sitting in my car, I could already see Jupiter with my naked eye … clearly the brightest object in our autumn evening skies.
I waited another thirty-five minutes before everyone finally left. So by 7:45 p.m. I was finally set up and ready to try again. I first manually found Jupiter and confirmed my viewfinder was centered and in sync with the telescope. It was for the most part. I then spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking at Jupiter and it’s moons. I started out with the 26x eye lens and then added the 2x barlow which really brought Jupiter in close and didn’t dim it too much.
By then it was dark enough to attempt an alignment. I aligned on Altair but didn’t recognize (nor now do I remember) the second star the AutoStar wanted to use for alignment. I centered on the brightest star I found in the viewfinder. Then I told it to find the constellation Cassiopeia and it tried, but ended up off by half a sky (basically looking southwest instead of northeast). I interrupted the sidereel so I could synch it by moving the telescope around to the correct portion of the sky. My goal was to attempt to find the Double Cluster near Cassiopea and eventually the comet Hartley 2 which is between the two (Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster). I didn’t have much luck, but I enjoyed viewing so many stars … layers upon layers of them.
Next, I then went in search of the binary star in the handle of the Big Dipper … Mizar and Alcor. That was easy to find and quite interesting to view.
Lastly, I focused on a bright flashing object in the northwestern sky. When I attempted to focus on it it appeared to flash green and red rapidly. (I later determined this flashing star was Arcturus and the red/green was caused by the Earth’s atmosphere).
Unfortunately, about that time, the local constabulary arrived with bright headlights (thankfully not pulling out the spotlight) to inform me he needed to close the park. I replied the posted sign stated the park was open until 10:00 pm. He rebutted my statement by saying it was supposed to close at sundown. I replied the posted sign did not state that caveat. So, I took one final look at Jupiter and it’s moon, then packed up the equipment and was home by 8:45. I barely got an hour’s worth of star gazing in.
I’ve learned, though, that my telescope probably needs to be serviced. Meade, in it’s proprietary wisdom, does not provide parts or service partners, so the telescope will have to be packaged and shipped to their world headquarters in California for service and repair. I’ll call them tomorrow to get the gory details.
I enjoyed a wonderful but short hour of moonless nearly perfect dark sky viewing. Not too cool, no wind, and not a cloud in the sky.
Keep looking up!