Last night, the atmosphere over Australia settled into a state of rare, crystal-clear transparency — and it did so directly above the observatory of world-famous astrophotographer Anthony Wesley. The result was a picture of Jupiter that some onlookers are calling the finest-ever by an amateur astronomer. “On a scale of 1 to 10, the seeing was a 12,” says Wesley. “Now I know what it must be like to see the giant planet from space.”
Just remember, this was taken, from the ground, by an Amateur, with a 16″ telescope. Really freaking cool.
We used to think Pluto was all on it’s lonesome out in it’s far away orbit. It turns out, we just got lucky in finding it, and it’s part of a class of objects, now called Trans Neptunian objects. As more and more objects got discovered in the Kuiper belt it became pretty clear that there were good odds we’d find something larger than Pluto. In 2005 we did, it’s now called Eris.
If you’ve seen an email, or heard from your friends, about how incredibly bright Mars will be on August 27th… it’s a hoax.
Snopes has the entire history of the event. I’ve corrected 3 people now on the subject already this year. If you see this in the wild, send them to the Snopes site.
Smokey the Bear Says – “Only you can prevent wild hoaxes from spreading on the internet.”
This is way too cool. The European Southern Observatory just released a press release with data for a exo solar system they’ve been studying which appears to have 7 planets. More importantly, the planets are in a pattern very similar to our solar system, with the smallest one found as small as 1.4 earth masses.
This was presumably rushed out after it was announced yesterday that on Thursday NASA would be making the first Keppler announcement. Which means there may well be even more exciting planet news by the end of the week.
Last night was our monthly star party for the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association. It was just about a perfect August night, not too hot, not too humid, and with very clear skies. Apparently the effort that I’ve been spending on publicity for the group has been paying off, because we got at least a dozen new folks there last night.
Once we got enough dark to start seeing things, Bill managed to give a nice tour of the night sky, which people really loved. This hit some of the major high lights of the big dipper, the little dipper, lyra, cygnus, scorpio, sagittarius, the the milky way, which was in quite full force last night. Rick and I managed to effectively hide from the building lights behind a few trees, which left us in a nice dark environment.
With so many folks, and Sagittarius in good striking zone, I spent the first half of the night hitting globular clusters and the lagoon nebula over there. My new ultra high contrast filter got it’s first work out on the lagoon nebula, which was striking.
As the evening wound on we saw two waves of people head out, until just Rick, Bruce, Ray and I were left. Jupiter popped up to greet us, and we got a few views of that, though through that much atmosphere you were hard pressed to get it above 100x and still see anything. I randomly found (only identified this morning) the Omega Nebula and the Wild Duck Cluster as I was just exploring around Sagittarius.
About 12:30 the four us decided to call it a night. I got home at about 1, too wired to go to sleep for the next 45 minutes. It was a great night.
The full agenda for the Central PA Open Source Conference is now out there, and I’m on the agenda:
Sean Dague: Solar System in your Pocket – Developing Android Applications
It started with a simple discussion after a local astronomy meeting trying to figure out which moons of Saturn we were looking at. This seemed like the perfect first Android application, building an astronomy simulator that would let me answer that question wherever I was. Little did I know that trying to do this would take me on a Journey through most of the major subsystems and interfaces in the Android SDK.
This talk will take you along on that journey of writing your first Android application. It will touch most of the major concepts involved in mobile development for Android, and many of the interfaces you’ll need to write you first application. Most importantly it will give you a list of things *not* to do when developing for the mobile space.
Sean Dague has been an open source software engineer in the IBM Linux Technology Center for the last 10 years. His spare time is split between the outdoors, amateur astronomy, and random bits of open source hacking.
I’ve been looking through all the talks listed, and I’m quite impressed. I want to attend at least 2/3 of them, which is going to be a problem unless I can clone myself, as it’s a 3 track conference. From an interest density level this looks like it’s going to be a really great conference, so I’m very excited to be going down for it.
This will also add some impetus to getting the 2.0 of Where is Io out there, which I’ve been hung up on building a custom view. Once I get that one custom view finished, I should be back cranking out more regular releases.
The Android tablet space that is starting to heat up is all running after Apple’s iPad at the moment. It’s got a nice form factor and a nice screen, but it’s entirely unsuitable for a whole set of applications that I care about for one simple reason:
LCDs give off blue light.
Blue light is really the enemy of both sleep and dark. I mostly care about the dark part, because my interest is for Astronomy. It takes at least 20 minutes for your eyes to really dark adapt when you go outside. If you want to see other Galaxies from your back yard, dark adaption is really important. We call them “faint fuzzies” for a reason. Last month at our astronomy party someone brought an iPad with some astronomy application to let them know what to look at with their telescope. After 30 minutes of it blinding them, the finally turned it off and started asking some of the rest of the folks there what they should be looking at, and where to find it.
But, an eink tablet would be great. You could use just enough red light to see what’s going on, and be able to zoom in to your charts. There are 2 things that come close right now, the nook and the kindle, but neither would work without a lot of effort. To do your own apps on the nook you have to hack the thing, and you’ve still got this pesky lcd you’d need to put a filter over. The kindle is a physically better device for this, but it’s not android, so it’s another sdk to learn, and they have all manner of restrictions because the user doesn’t pay for their data usage. As far as I can tell it would be too restrictive for this.
The ideal device would be something like the kindle dx, have a gps, and be based on Android. This device doesn’t exist, but heres to hoping that someone makes one eventually.
