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- Update on my ETX-90 EC
-
After a series of major storms and rainfall, the weather here in California
has finally cleared up enough to make testing my new little Meade ETX90 possible.
Indeed, the weather has been clear and cold, and the seeing rather good. I was
able to clearly see detail in three different bands on Jupiter, and had rather nice
views of Saturn as well. Optically, the scope is terrific. There is some problems
with high frequency vibration when focussing, and when the telescope is aligned parallel
to the forks, it becomes impossible to focus, at least with my big fingers.
I have had some problems with slewing and alignment. Sometimes it works flawlessly, other times it seems to develop a periodic shift in R.A., as if the backlash motor routines were being periodically invoked. I have a couple of ideas that may still ameliorate the problem though. I'll keep you all posted.
As far as links go, the best I've found is Michael Weasner's Mighty ETX Site. Highly recommended.
Modified Tue Jan 15 14:36:57 2002
- The Millenial Clock
-
In today's Mercury News, there was an article about the
Long Now Foundation and their project to build a mechanical clock that will last
for ten thousand years. A very interesting project, motivated by some very interesting
intellectual concerns. It is also a very interesting (and slow) mechanical computer.
Their website will tell you more.
Modified Thu Jan 10 15:01:48 2002
- Jef Poskanzer's Cool Website
-
Jef Poskanzer has one cool website. I first
became aware of his work years ago as the primary author of the PBM+ toolkit,
a nice set of command line utilities for the manipulation of graphic images.
His website has a number of cool features:
- Online programs for generating labels, license plate images and Valentine's day hearts.
- A simple to use interface to the Microsoft Terraserver
- Source code for
thttpd, the simple and fast http server that runs this website - A personal page which includes links to geocaches, including his logging of TRIFECTA and ALGOR, the geocaches my wife and I created.
Great cool stuff, well worth looking at.
Modified Thu Jan 10 15:01:48 2002