Robert’s Blog

I’ve been testing out a Celestron NexStar 6SE for a story I’m working on, and after a night of headaches getting its StarAlign feature to work last night, I was pleased to get the scope working well this evening. Celestron also sent me a NexImage CCD, which I used to capture this image of Jupiter. It’s actually a stack of about 600 frames with a little bit of tweaking with the levels. Not bad for a first shot with such a cheap CCD. I’ll try a few more Jupiter captures, as well as a couple of deep-sky objects, over the coming weeks and see how far this thing can go.

Four 10-minute exposures shot with GRAS 13 and stacked with Registax.

Also fun is this little snap I took of Jupiter simply by holding my pocket digicam up to the eyepiece of my neighbor’s telescope, which shows a surprising level of detail in the planet’s bands for such a half-assed effort:

50 years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower commissioned the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Today, in the wake of unimaginable challenges, heartbreaking setbacks, and several grave tragedies, NASA continues to study the surface of Mars.

Six months later, I’m still loving my Kindle ebook reader. I had watched plenty of electronic book readers come and go over the years, and reviewed plenty for various publications. Before Amazon got into the game, I would never have laid my own money on the line for one of these devices. Yet the Kindle continues to be the single most satisying electronics purchase I’ve ever made.

I was inspired to write this, because today — for the first time — I tried e-mailing a PDF document (a copy of Max Tegmark’s paper “The Mathematical Universe”) to my Kindle, and the conversion came out beautifully. It’s still considered an experimental feature, but the Kindle converter transferred handily what began as a fairly complex PDF document loaded with hyperlinks and multi-column formatting.

I’m in the market for a new umbrella. Ideally, I’d like something that can tuck away neatly in my already overloaded man purse, but still stand up to fierce winds. Any suggestions?