Dean W. Armstrong

"Wrong Emphasis on the Wrong Syllable"

2011-12-02T14:17:00.001-06:00

I'm just putting this here because I would doubt Facebook or Twitter would archive very well. Mike Myers, in the movie "View from the Top", has a line "You put the wrong em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble". I was just watching the 1933 movie "Moonlight and Pretzels" at the Northwest Chicago Film Society showing, and a character in that movie does the exact same joke!

Refrigerator payback

2011-08-22T19:46:00.001-05:00

My current fridge (a Hotpoint Foodcenter 24) is older than I am. It was originally the avocado color shown in the ad; at some point someone painted it black but only the front and the sides they could reach; the top back and sides were not. The spread control is appreciated but not used. The giant dust bunnies of a never cleaned coil underneath was not. I measured the yearly annual cost of this fridge at $290 a year with a kill-a-watt; at that rate, a really nice replacement will begin paying for itself in six years. The previous owners had this fridge for 15 years and paid over $4000 in electricity for the privilege.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2UwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA10&ots=b1-UE37tSn&dq=hotpoint%20foodcenter%2024&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=true

7.72 microRads/hr

2011-08-14T23:03:00.002-05:00

A 39 day long sampling of every minute leads the geiger counter to a long term average of 7.72 uR/hr. That's 56658 sampling points. That's about what's it's always been.

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

New Moon of Pluto

2011-07-20T10:49:00.002-05:00

http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/cbet/cbet002769.txt

2011-06-28T23:00:00.002-05:00

whatever, it doesn't matter, the blog is dead in practice if not in theory. The hits now a days are image searches and the occasional conspiracy web site, plus the audio transformer hits. I can't do my job and life and this.

Great Saturn Cassini video

2011-06-13T16:37:00.002-05:00

Go out and see the Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 13th. It's an awesome video of the Saturnian system from Cassini. If all the cosmic ray hits, perspective changes (from Cassini's orbital motion), and dust donut hole moves(due to panning, filter changes, and zooms) are original to the raw images, then I salute Chris Abbas. What a great job.

Now compare that to my crappy gif animation I made of Enceladus and Dione near the rings from 5 years ago. http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/03/saturn-enceladus-and-dione-animation.html

Natural background radiation in Chicago

2011-06-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

A recent inquiry brings up the question of what's the normal natural background radiation rate in Chicago? Using the EPA's online tool, we see the budget for naturally occurring sources listed as
(all numbers per year)
26 mrem for cosmic radiation
2 mrem for elevations up to 1000ft
46 mrem from terrestrial K, U, Th in soil (aka not Colorado Plateau or Gulf and Atlantic Coasts but normal US soil)
0 mrem from radon&daughter products (I'm excluding it here from this calculation but it's a sizeable percentage of your yearly dose)

74 mrem total, which comes out to about 8.4 urem/hr or microrems per hour. The long-term average in my basement office runs at about 7.6uR/hr.

From Duval, J.S., Aerial gamma-ray surveys of the conterminous United States and Alaska, you can see here that the approximate average exposure rate from naturally occurring U, K, and Th in the ground is about 4.5uR/hr at 1m above the ground for Chicago. I say about because the survey didn't look at heavily urbanized ground. But with the high resolution data and a geologic map you should be able to predict what it should be.

The Straight Dope unfortunately printed an error about it in 1980, claiming the rate in Chicago was 2 millirems per hour. That's really off; it's 1/250 of that.

CFL lifetime report

2011-05-14T00:19:00.000-05:00

I just noticed that a second CFL failed in my torchiere conversion I did back in the winter of 2008. I use this light about 7 hours a day consistently. That makes it just under 8000 hours. The first CFL failure I seem to have not mentioned; I think it happened about a year ago.

Re: Las Vegas Anomaly

2011-04-25T17:40:00.002-05:00

A couple of images from that area.

The Las Vegas Anomaly

2011-04-24T15:39:00.004-05:00

It seems all the iPhones as part of the once-unknown location tracking log all have visits to locations in northwest Las Vegas, all at the same time. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden at O'Reilly Radar have dubbed this "The Las Vegas Anomaly", an elegant turn of phrase that will undoubtedly be incorporated into science fiction stories just as soon as writers get wind of it. Speaking as someone born and raised in Las Vegas, I have no clue why those locations are listed. There's not that much between the Kyle Canyon and Lee Canyon roads on US 95. A golf course, a small park, and scattered homes.

Re: Magnetic Cable holders

2011-04-17T23:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I had one issue with my magnetic cable holder: an incompatibility between the hot glue and the adhesive on a particular 'model' of holder. The ones with the adhesive and foam backing cleanly separated from the hot glue after a week or so under a slight load. I scraped the foam and adhesive off and reattached the magnet and the holder. I think part of the problem was difficulty in getting the hot glue thin enough before it set--this is a problem when attaching it to metal surfaces, which act as very efficient heatsinks. But other problem is the glue was not too gluey.

I've come across this incompatibility between hot glue and a few surfaces. The ubiquitous hot glue is EVA: Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate, a thermoplastic. I still need to make sure the adhering surfaces are hot glue compatible. It's really more about the convenience of the glue gun than anything else. I suppose I should be using a more universal glue for my generic adhesive requirements.

Magnetic cable organizer/holder from hard drive magnets

2011-03-27T17:07:00.000-05:00

I was talking with a coworker who had a particular design problem. Her network jack was embedded in a counter and the cable ran all the way across a built-in drawer to her desk and would frequently get jammed in the drawer. I suggested to her to talk to the Facilities guys to get some sort of cable management installed (as that's not my bailiwick) but I knew that the problem would persist into the future. I also thought there was little place to install anything that required a drilled hole, as there was AC conduit and such in the area. Then I had an inspiration: the network jack had been installed in a flat steel conduit. And I had a lot of hard drive magnets. So a little hot glue, some adhesive cable holders (that never really held very well), and I've got a solution! And now I'm making a bunch more for better cable management in my server room. I stuck a paper sticker on the magnet side to help prevent some of the surface marring these magnets can produce; a felt would probably be a better material.

Geiger Counter back up

2011-03-16T20:08:00.005-05:00

My long-suffering Geiger counter is now back up and running.
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~dean/float.htm.

Now, as has been pointed out, this particular instance of this experiment is really an experiment, and is run only by me, for only experimental purposes. It doesn't represent any opinion or endorsement or opinion of any entity, whether the University of Chicago Library or the University or anything else. It is not a service. It represents nothing, is not calibrated, and should not be relied upon by anyone for anything. Don't email or call anyone but myself about it.

This instance is located in my office on the A-level of the Regenstein Library, the first basement level of a six-story building. The levels average about 8 microrads/hr here. Outside at Ryerson Physical Laboratory on the fifth floor, levels average to about 12 microrads/hr, which indicate the shielding provided by the Regenstein against the cosmic ray flux.

The problem I've been having with this counter was with the associated AW-SRAD software, which runs under DOS, doesn't appear to support virtual COM ports above COM4. On my Windows XP PC I had installed an Arduino which offered a similar USB Serial converter and I theorize at some point there was a conflict and the Geiger counter with its FTDI USB to serial converter took a high COM port at COM5. After removing the Arduino, I then disabled the real serial port at COM1 and forced via Device Manager->Ports->USB Serial Ports the port to go to COM1.

What's in the steam coming from a nuclear reactor

2011-03-15T16:44:00.002-05:00

I've hesitated to comment much on the ongoing Japanese tragedy, but I wish to talk a little about the output coming out from the reactor whenever they open the valves to reduce the pressure inside. In commerical nuclear reactors not using heavy-water for their coolant (aka most non-Canadian western reactors) the pure water coolant is exposed to the intense neutron flux as it passes through the reactor. The neutrons can interact with the oxygen nuclei in the water to form nitrogen-16, a very short lived radioisotope with a half-life of seven seconds. After a few minutes away from the core there is none of it left so the only hazard is near the output pipe, and there are places they store the output for just a little while to let all of the N-16 to decay back into oxygen-16.
The other common isotope coming out is tritium coming from the small amount of deuterium in normal water, leaking through the fuel rod cladding, and other spalling type nuclear reactions in the materials in the core. The tritium is a low radioactive hazard but has a 12-year half-life.

If the reactor is hot, water will decompose into hydrogen and oxygen, especially with the right catalysts.

So if you were to open the output valve on a reactor to relive the steam pressure inside (because the regular cooling is not working), you would get quite a bit of that nitrogen-16. It would be gone by the time a few minutes of wind-time, but it is quite the hazard to the plant. I wonder how much of the periodic bursts of site limit radioactivity is related to that.

The introduction of seawater into the cores introduces the possibility of neutron activation of a number of other elements (sodium, chlorine, etc.) into radioactive isotopes that last longer and can have more of an issue in life time and clean up.

None of this discussion is about the breaking or melting of the cladding and detection of fission products (like what you see when checking people on their clothing for particles), which seems to have occurred in some fashion.

A good primer on what might be going on, without hysteria is over at MIT.

Audio stereo isolation circuit diagram

2011-03-10T17:03:00.004-06:00

Two years I made an audio stereo isolation transformer, suitable for getting rid of ground loop problems in a line-level audio connection. Here's a simple circuit diagram that attempts to match the colors of the physical device.

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~dean/blog/isolation-transformer.dsn
Circuit diagram for TinyCAD.

Evening passes for the ISS (International Space Station) and the Shuttle in Chicago

2011-03-01T11:39:00.003-06:00

A number of visible passes for Chicago this week:

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

Adventures in Large Format Digital Photography: part 6: a new scanner camera

2011-02-21T20:35:00.003-06:00

I am starting anew! After I got a bad back moving my box camera around, I've always wanted to reinvigorate the first generation scanner camera I made. It was built around a Agfa Ansco Viking Anastigmat f/6.3 lens from a medium format camera and a wooden mail inbox. The lens has incredible coverage. Here's a look with little modification to the sensor array plastic:

When I used the lens on the first scanner camera with a highly modified sensor, it had coverage of about a 7 inch diameter circle.

The trick is not breaking the new scanner's firmware checking. As soon as I remove the pinhole lens array it started having issues. I had to add the pinhole lens back anytime a particular error message came back. I hesitated to modify the scanner because of the chance of permanent problem.

The new scanner (a Canon LiDE 90) was very sensitive to the position of the glass cover--it was very important to have the glass precisely in place to keep the initialization target in the right place.

Very, very carefully, I used a sharp x-acto knife to remove the plastic tabs and the two new rivets that go through the center of the CIS sensor board. I removed the LED light pipe by finding the tabs that hold it in.

Putting the sensor back immediately made it 'broke'. But I occasionally got it to work. In the end, it appears that unless there is illumination at the instant you hit the preview button in the TWAIN application, you will get the error 2,7,0. I'm still figuring this out.

The neverending stupidity of astrology and Allstate

2011-01-29T11:16:00.003-06:00

I won't get into the long-recognized shifting of the Sun's position and the calendar with regards to the zodiacal signs--as someone who has done a lot of astronomy astrology is one of those things that is like asking a chemist about alchemy--the rolling-eyes chemist can't believe the general public believes you can turn things into gold.

But Allstate, a statistical insurance companies with many many actuaries and other employees incredibly well-versed in mathematics, put out a press release (no longer available) claiming new Virgos were the worst drivers. The Chicago Tribune then put out a story on the press release. The new Ophiuchus was the best driver.

Now, for the shockingly bad details--whomever at Allstate failed to normalize the fact that the new signs have really different lengths--the Sun being in Virgo for a long time as it's a longer constellation (45 days) versus the short 6 day dip in Scorpio. Neither did the Tribune do its diligence in fact-checking this story, leaving it to an anonymous commenter to point out the utter stupidity of it.

I expected better from Allstate. You should have a few of the statisticians on your payroll take the PR people and their management for a little talk. You've lost the confidence of many customers who might know a little science or math, and it's embarrassing to have a company 1. Give a statement in a press release about astrology and 2. Completely get the numbers wrong. I also expected more from the Tribune press--unfortunately it appears companies can just put advertising up for free, caged as PR, and the newspaper will call it a story straight.

Making Things Talk & Processing projects

2011-01-25T17:01:00.003-06:00

I got Making Things Talk as a gift from a great friend of mine and I just ran two of the projects in the "Identification" chapter.

To start off, you install Processing, a free language for visualization. For me the download for Windows was here. It's a slightly different install process than usual; just make a directory like "C:\Program Files\processing-1.2.1" and dump the contents there, and make a shortcut to processing.exe somewhere convenient for you (or you will forget it's installed).

Then in order to do video things you first need to have quicktime installed; if you have iTunes then you've got quicktime. And, finally, you need a VDIG implementation; for Windows it is WinVDIG. Install version 1.01 from here.

The first project was finding a particular color in a webcam image, reading the color, then putting a pointer on that spot.

Hey it works! See the dot on my nose?
The screenshot misses the dynamic aspect of the little dot following you around.

The second project was using your imager to decode QR Codes--and ha ha, check out the sample from the book. Nice one, Tom Igoe.

Great stuff.

P.S. I just loaded the 'slitscan' example from the Processing examples. Ha!

Aurora in Iceland, 1996

2011-01-13T15:28:00.001-06:00

with the Pleiades and a rising Moon.

Two new trends to keep an eye on in 2011 and beyond: 3D printing and Mobile Security

2011-01-10T13:20:00.002-06:00

3D printing and mobile security are two big trends to watch.

The next big thing will be 3D printing. It's a hobbyist field right now, with rudimentary designs and machines, but it's going to get better. What happens when you can replicate any physical thing? That part that broke on your dishwasher, your bike, or that toy--you will just make (or buy from some third-party) a replacement. You won't buy the part from the manufacturer (even if you could). Those cheap things that break and then you throw out? Why would you if it could be easily fixed for next to nothing from a machine you had under your desk?
The best approach to this emerging market is to keep it open, free from patents and IP, and let it flourish. Many organizations and business interests will attempt to get a stranglehold on the emerging field, and it's important not to let that happen, lest they stifle the innovation an open field offers. The Internet would absolutely not be what it was if large corporations controlled it.
Dan's Data has an interesting post about the future of 3D printing.

Mobile Security needs to be addressed. We sat with cellular phones in a controlled world with little to worry about, as the oligarchy of carriers strongly restricted what could be run on their phones and networks. That worked at the cost of innovation. The new world of open platforms on the smartphone now means maliciousness is around the corner if the native OS isn't correctly applying security features like sandboxing. We need phones; we use them all the time, all day, and we need to be able to summon people in emergencies. We can't let them break because of bad security. We need to be able to prevent mass Denial-Of-Service, worm outbreaks, malicious breaking of phone security, and surveillance on these devices. And it's not just having the carrier control the phone; mobile security is also about You having control and not letting Them (whether they are a cracker or a malicious app or the Carrier) reading your data.

(While mobile security needs to be addressed as an emerging issue, that in no way reduces the disaster of the current free-for-all in web plug-in security holes).

UPDATE: for instance this finding of SMS messages that can kill nearly any phone.

Partial solar eclipse on January 4th

2010-12-26T13:05:00.004-06:00

The eclipse season continues, as the Moon's nodes--the intersection line of the Moon's orbital plane and the Earth's orbital plane--continue to point in the direction of the Sun and anti-Sun. After the winter solstice lunar eclipse Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East will get a partial solar eclipse on January 4th. The maximum eclipse reaches nearly 86% in Scandinavia, although I wouldn't really trust a low-altitude solar eclipse at the Arctic Circle this time of year to be likely visible.

Since we know the Moon's orbital plane right now, we can extrapolate to the appearance of the Moon in upcoming months and phases. We know that the first and third quarter Moons will be either higher or lower away from the ecliptic, since at new the moon was obviously at the ecliptic (to produce the eclipse). So we need one other piece of information to give us the appearance of the Moon in the sky: is the node ascending or descending? Recall the Moon passing Jupiter about two weeks ago.
Was it above or below Jupiter in the sky?

Sadly, I had to check via a planetarium program because I couldn't remember. It passed above Jupiter. So the node is ascending, and the First Quarter Moon in January will be higher than usual in the sky and the Third Quarter Moon lower (but keep in mind only in deviation from the ecliptic, not in absolute elevation in the sky). In three months (aka March-April) the full Moon will be lower in the sky than usual and rise and set further south than normal.

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2011.html

Light Pollution also boosts air pollution

2010-12-15T15:49:00.003-06:00

In addition to causing breast cancer, light pollution has now been shown to affect the atmospheric chemistry at night in urban regions, increasing the next day air pollution by up to 5%. Ignoring any deleterious effect on astronomy, why are we being idiots on this? Why can't people aim lights correctly so they don't miss well over 50% of the thing they want to light? Why can't we understand if you want to light something on the ground, you can't do it by sending light up?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11990737

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/12/urban-light-pollution-boosts-air-pollution.php

Pluto is bigger than Eris

2010-11-08T18:03:00.003-06:00

A rare occultation of a star by the Kuiper Belt Object known as Eris was recorded in several stations in Chile and at first glance the data suggest Eris is in fact smaller than Pluto--the albedo of Eris must be higher than predicted.

Sky & Telescope has a good write-up.

Here's a report from one of the observers.

And here's Mike Brown's take on the observation (An observation of the observation).

Comet Hartley 2 close-up by EPOXI

2010-11-04T10:29:00.004-05:00

Oh man, this is great. The radar images from last week indicated the comet was dog-boned shaped but the close-ups from the former Deep Impact/now EPOXI mission are great and confirmed the nature of this heterogeneous object. In other words, this looks just like some of the asteroids out there.

Credit: NASA / JPL / UMD / Emily Lakdawalla
Click to enlarge

The star next to the moon tonight

2010-10-20T23:15:00.002-05:00

The bright "star" next to the nearly Full Moon tonight was Jupiter, in case you were wondering.

stupid UFO sightings

2010-10-16T21:24:00.003-05:00

Hi. I've spent much of my life outside at night looking up. I've seen some amazing things. I've never seen a UFO. I've seen things that would have easily been confused as an unknown object, until I figured or observed what exactly it was. Things like inbound aircraft to O'Hare, geese lit up by stupid uplights in Chicago, spectacular bolide fireballs, reflections off of Iridium satellites, etc. The general public doesn't really look up very often, and hence doesn't really know what they are seeing. So Venus, or Jupiter, or a series of balloons become a UFO, which despite the name become a ... UFO.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/10/15/nyc-fox-station-reports-jupiter-and-balloons-as-ufos/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+%28Bad+Astronomy%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

small earthquake swarm just north of Death Valley and Scotty's Castle

2010-10-01T23:37:00.002-05:00

This in an interesting swarm of earthquakes just to the north of Scotty's Castle in Death Valley.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/FaultMaps/117-37.html

The Magic numbers

2010-09-30T20:40:00.004-05:00

"The magic numbers, as we know them now are :
2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126
and most importantly, they are the same for neutrons and protons."

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, The Nobel Lecture

The last female Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1963.

fluorescent light runs at 25kHz

2010-09-20T16:23:00.001-05:00

The newish fluorescent light (well, added in 1999 to make up for a lost skylight) fixture in the RAS office must have an electronic ballast that runs at 25kHz, as that is a strong signal that pops up on the oscilloscope & antenna when that light circuit is running. The older fluorescent lights are probably ancient magnetic ballasts.

...I'm sure y'all care.

Pits on the Moon

2010-09-15T16:51:00.002-05:00

Phil Plait points out pits on the Moon!

Click to enlarge. Images via NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/LROC

Notable: the size of the standard AC outlet

2010-09-09T17:48:00.000-05:00

Did you know the distance between the center of the slots in the 120V standard AC outlet is exactly 1/2 inch? And so is the distance between the center of those and the center of the ground pin. 0.5". All of this only came out after I bought an inexpensive digital caliper and started measuring everything I could get my hands on.

Today's sunny and windy weather

2010-09-07T19:25:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge to medium size. The link below goes to the really big image.
Today's weather in Chicago as seen from above via the MODIS imager on the Terra satellite. It was sunny and very windy with winds out of the southwest. It looks like you can see some dust streamers coming out off the lakeshore. Click on the link below for the huge 5200x6000 image with 250m resolution.

http://ge.ssec.wisc.edu/modis-today/index.php?satellite=t1&product=true_color&date=2010_09_07_250&overlay_sector=false&overlay_state=false&overlay_coastline=true§or=USA3&resolution=250m

Credits: http://ge.ssec.wisc.edu/modis-today/credits.html

"The SDSS and e-science archiving at the University of Chicago Library"

2010-09-02T13:08:00.002-05:00

The SDSS and e-science archiving at the University of Chicago Library

Barbara Kern, University of Chicago
Dean Armstrong, University of Chicago
Charles Blair, University of Chicago
David Farley, University of Chicago
Kathleen Feeney, University of Chicago
Eileen Ielmini, University of Chicago
Elisabeth Long, University of Chicago
Daniel Meyer, University of Chicago
Peggy Wilkins, University of Chicago

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a co-operative scientific project involving over 25 institutions worldwide and managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) to map one- quarter of the entire sky in detail, determining the positions and absolute brightness of hundreds of millions of celestial objects. The project was completed in October 2008 and produced over 100 terabytes of data comprised of object catalogs, images, and spectra. While the project remained active, SDSS data was housed at Fermilab. As the project neared completion the SDSS project director (and University of Chicago faculty member) Richard Kron considered options for long term storage and preservation of the data turning to the University of Chicago Library for assistance. In 2007-2008 the University of Chicago Library undertook a pilot project to investigate the feasibility of long term storage and archiving of the project data and providing ongoing access by scientists and educators to the data through the SkyServer user interface. In late 2008 the University of Chicago Library entered into a formal agreement with ARC agreeing to assume responsibility for:

• Archiving of the survey data (long-term scientific data archiving)

• Serving up survey data to the public

• Managing the HelpDesk

• Preserving the SDSS Administrative Record

This paper outlines the various aspects of the project as well as implementation.

Kepler starts releasing smaller planet data: 1.5 Earth Mass transit exoplanet found

2010-08-26T13:19:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/science/space/27planet.html?hp

2009 US Energy use

2010-08-24T23:50:00.003-05:00

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2010/images/energy-flow-annotated.pdf

The latest energy generation/use chart for the US is out. Sinks and source, plus general field of use--it's a fascinating chart, and I hope it gives you a sense of where real solutions to the energy issue lie. Let's work on the efficiency issue.

Via Treehugger

Another impact on Jupiter

2010-08-22T23:16:00.002-05:00

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/101264994.html

My first thought once it was confirmed was "What is the real rate of visible Jovian impacts versus our sampling rate of looking for them?".

Haze and smoke from western Canada

2010-08-04T21:52:00.004-05:00

Haze and smoke visible in on the visible satellite image for this afternoon might give the less humid weather the next few days in Chicago a tinge of non-clarity.

http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/land/hms.html

Saturn visible behind Lutetia during flyby

2010-07-12T15:57:00.002-05:00

Hey, this is pretty cool; I'm always a fan of planetary conjunctions.

Saturn was visible in a few of the images of Lutetia taken by Rosetta as it passed by!

Fly-by of Lutetia is a success

2010-07-10T16:34:00.000-05:00

Another successful asteroid fly-by!
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002577/

Old Mars photos from 2003: No, it's not going to be big in August.

2010-07-07T22:07:00.003-05:00

Inspired by a query regarding the false meme going around about Mars, I took a look at some images I took of Mars during it's big opposition in 2003. That was a great opposition. Here's a couple of those images. The first one is a single image without manipulation, the second and third are Registax processed images from videos, and the last is one of those videos.
Mars at the moment is not approaching one of those awesome 17 year oppositions like 2003 or 1988. It's just fading away from its January opposition and currently visible in Leo in the evening.

nose grease

2010-06-23T15:40:00.000-05:00

In my high school days I had a part-time job at a professional photo lab / studio called "Phillips' Photo Lab". I was hired as the black and white darkroom guy--I manually processed film, printed custom prints, shot copy negatives, and cleaned the color film and print processors. Later I branched into running the shop on Saturdays and once, just once, did a color print job.

I learned a lot from the pros whose lifeblood was photography: the tips and techniques that make life easier.

One of the things that I would not had believed unless I had personally experienced it was the magic of nose grease. The skin on the nose and to a lesser extent the neck near the back of the ears produces a hydrocarbon of about C30H50 called squalene. The only reason this is important was squalene had the same index of refraction as the gelatin used in photographic processes and hence could be used to fill in scratches on negatives and slides. You would acquire some nose grease, rub it gently into the scratch, and rewash the negative. Nearly as good as new, and it allowed prints and reproductions from otherwise damaged negatives.

This particular example is this blog's first mention of a principle I like to call "matching impedances". In the world there are a lot of interesting issues that in the end are solved or mitigated by taking two different systems and making them the same at the point they meet. In electronics, to maximize power transfer between two parts of a circuit, you match their electrical impedances (which is a function of their resistance at all frequencies).

You have encountered this when setting up a TV or stereo system; the speakers have an impedance rating on them, usually 8ohms for a home stereo and 4 for car audio. Your amplifier speaker outputs need to be designed to deal with a particular impedance; stick a 4ohm speaker on an amp designed for 8 and you might mess things up. On your TVs there used to be two terminals for antennas--one was coaxial and had an impedance of 75ohms and is now the de facto standard, and the other was two screws that had an impedance of 300ohms. To get the most signal you'd want all the impedances to match up: the TV, the cable, and the antenna. If they didn't, part of the precious signal would be reflected back towards the antenna and lost. For converting the impedances to match a little transformer was used, of which there may be a hundred million hiding behind the TVs of the world. Again, here the principle of matching the impedances came into play.

In the optical world reflections occur at surfaces that have differing indexes of refraction. The bigger the difference the higher the reflection ( I think it's a square of (n-n2/n+n2). For solar panels, for instance, the high index of refraction of silicon (4) compared to air (1) makes something like 50% of the incident light reflect off unless you use anti-reflective coatings to improve it. So even for something like a renewable energy resource you have to consider such details.

I use nose grease (n=1.45) to also try to fill in scratches in CDs/DVDs (made of polycarbonate, n=1.58). It's not perfect, but sometimes it makes it playable.

So, in the end: Match your impedances!

Hayabusa coming home

2010-06-09T16:55:00.005-05:00

An amazing comeback for the little falcon that could--

Credit: ISAS / JAXA / Øyvind Guldbrandsen / Planetary Society Blog

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa will be returning to Earth with perhaps a sample of the asteroid Itokawa in just four days. This spacecraft has had as many setbacks in the seven years it's been running as you can have without losing the craft completely. When they released the data archive in 2007 I made a color image of Earth made by Hayabusa during a flyby and some more surface close-ups here.

Visible Jovian impact

2010-06-04T00:28:00.001-05:00

Link and run: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/breaking-news-jupiter-hit-by-yet-another-impactor.ars

Eyjafjallajökull eruption: webcam at midnight

2010-05-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

It's midnight in Iceland and nearly midsummer with a volcano erupting, what do you do? Hang out in front of the thermal camera.

Eyjafjallajökull eruption: webcams

2010-05-12T23:30:00.003-05:00

There are several webcams watching the Ejyafjallajökull eruption; and at this time of year the plume is illuminated all the short night long. I watched the sunset at 10:30PM and am now watching the sun rise at 4:30AM. The eruption continues through the Arctic summer night.

http://eldgos.mila.is/english/eyjafjallajokull-fra-hvolsvelli/

http://eldgos.mila.is/english/eyjafjallajokull-fra-thorolfsfelli/
This one is closer and has a thermal IR camera as well; but it's also more often obscured by ash and fog.

Jupiter's SEB has gone pale

2010-05-11T16:56:00.000-05:00

Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt, normally a brown-red, has gone as pale as the cream white zones surrounding it. Check out the report with images at the Planetary Society Blog: http://networkedblogs.com/3Jnoh. This is one of those things that happens every 5-10 years or so.

ISS passes for the next ten days for Chicago

2010-04-29T19:18:00.003-05:00

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

Floyd Dominy

2010-04-25T22:42:00.001-05:00

http://www.hcn.org/hcn/wotr/floyd-dominy-the-colossus-of-dams-dies-at-100

The view from Thorvaldseyri of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption

2010-04-23T19:08:00.001-05:00

The view from Thorvaldseyri of Eyjafjallajökull

You can just pick out the ice sheet from underneath the clouds.

Compare this with the view the farmer had recently:
http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/upload/images/news/almennt/thorvaldseyri_olafur_eggertsson.jpg

From:
http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16539&ew_0_a_id=361234

Eyjafjallajökull eruption: gorgeous video

2010-04-18T16:19:00.005-05:00

The NY Times Lede blog has linked to BBC Channel 4 video of the eruption. From the look of it, the videographer had one of the many excursion drivers take them up Thórsmörk (or Þórsmörk) valley on the north side up high enough to look at the eruption without dealing with the jokulhaup (or glacial flood) in the river. If you have ADD you will miss the active sub-Plinian eruption and great lightning in latter half of the video.

UPDATE: the waterfall at the beginning is Seljalandsfoss. I have a photo of it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwarmstr/4532063271/.

EDIT: calling it sub-Plinian.

Eyjafjallajökull eruption: planes vs. volcano

2010-04-18T12:18:00.002-05:00

An interesting data point about the Eyjafjallajökull eruption: the disruption of the European aviation market reduces the CO2 output by an order of magnitude more than the CO2 released by the volcano itself,

Source: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano/

Moments in spaceflight

2010-04-17T14:01:00.003-05:00

Soichi Noguchi captures a poignant moment as the Shuttle leaves the International Space Station. Click to enlarge to a higher quality image.

Eyjafjallajökull eruption

2010-04-15T09:39:00.004-05:00

I was just reading about the Eyjafjallajökull eruption yesterday and the rather bold tourist enterprise sprung up to visit it, when I see it has erupted in an explosive manner. The new path to the surface for the magma opened under the ice sheet (jokull) instead of bare ground, and water/magma interactions produce copious amounts of gas. Gas is a bad thing when it comes to magma. It makes thing go boom. Instead of a lava fountain and a tourist stop in Iceland, now we have flooding as the glacier melts, and air travel restrictions as the volcano generates large plumes up into the atmosphere from the phreatic eruption. The Icelanders are concerned about the flooding and the fluorine from the ashfall. For the geology, the composition of the magma (how much silica is in it, how much gas is in it), its interaction with the surrounding rock, and how the magma changes in composition as time increases are the interesting things. For the British sitting waiting for the air to clear, realize that ash is just magma pulverized through explosive means. Blame the gas.

Here is some good information on the location and the inflation/deflation data.

Geiger counter problems interfacing with PC

2010-04-01T15:59:00.002-05:00

I've been unable to get the DOS software AW-SRAD to work with the geiger counter for some time, on multiple machines, with Windows XP. It's a bummer. I can input the sound pulses from the clicker unit I made into a sound card, but I have no idea how to then get the PC to do something with that. I'm not a programmer. The original geiger counter set up was really simple: it toggled the RING indicator on the serial port.

For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

2010-03-30T12:55:00.000-05:00

For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: March 29, 2010
Amateur photographers, happy to accept small checks for snapshots, are underpricing professionals.

I made some comments about this issue last year in this post: http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2009/06/intersection-of-onlinesharing-culture.html. Since then, I made that Faustian bargain of getting an image of mine on a book cover without payment save a few copies of the book (although I haven't gotten them yet, CRC Press). The publisher said they had no budget for images, it would likely sell very few copies (a very technical book), etc... should I have done it?

Conversely, if you are a corporation, why shouldn't you find free or cheap photography instead of paying for it? Photography has been freelance for sometime, and never unionized that I am aware of.

Moonrise from the ISS today

2010-03-25T15:34:00.001-05:00

Evening ISS passes for the next few days in Chicago

2010-03-04T00:22:00.002-06:00

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

4 Mar -2.4 19:27:17 10 WSW 19:30:00 44 NW 19:30:00 44 NW
5 Mar -3.3 18:17:05 10 SW 18:19:55 60 SE 18:22:47 10 ENE
6 Mar -2.2 18:42:14 10 WSW 18:45:00 41 NNW 18:47:31 12 NE
7 Mar -1.0 19:08:01 10 WNW 19:10:16 20 NNW 19:11:50 14 NNE
8 Mar -2.1 17:57:05 10 W 17:59:50 39 NNW 18:02:35 10 NE

It might actually be clear!

Live video feed from the International Space Station

2010-02-25T21:22:00.000-06:00

This is great; I've been holding off on sharing this because I felt like it was too special to share widely. But here's the deal--there is a live video feed on the International Space Station. And usually it's pointing out at Earth. So literally you can watch the Earth go by live. You can experience sunrise and sunset in orbit. You can see the biggest cities' light pollution on the dark part of the orbit and sun glints of the Pacific or the swirls in the clouds in the Southern Ocean.

Here's the Live ISS video feed. If you stop the video, reload the page rather than restarting the video; otherwise regular NASA TV will start up.

See where the ISS is via http://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST and http://www.n2yo.com
.

There are some parts of the orbit with no video download. It is also sensitive to the TDRSS capacity.

While writing this, I am watching sunrise on the ISS just south of South Africa. It is beautiful.

Can you stand it? Cloud footage running backwards

2010-02-18T22:28:00.004-06:00

I'm going to be honest:

I can't stand anyone running cloud video footage in reverse. This drives me crazy; whether it's my physics and chemistry of the atmosphere classes or just my sensibilities but whenever I see it it drives me crazy (c.f. Survivor this season). If the cloud droplets are evaporating or condensing the wrong way, anyone with meteorological experience (or someone who has watched Koyaanisqatsi) will call shenanigans. Convection has a distinct look to it; as well as evaporation; and when producers try to reverse the video it shows.

h

Re: Video of the day, rocket destroys sun dog

2010-02-15T13:24:00.001-06:00

Regarding that SDO video, a friend points out another video of the same event:
http://www.spasmsofaccommodation.com/2010/02/sonic-boom-meets-sun-dog.html

Video of the day: rocket destroys a sun dog

2010-02-11T15:27:00.003-06:00

Sun Dogs are bright refractions of the Sun coming from horizontal ice crystals in the atmosphere. The ice crystals are usually oriented horizontally because that it their stable falling pattern. Watch as the rocket carrying the Solar Dynamic Observatory pierces through a cirrus cloud and the sound waves from the rocket completely obliterate the preferred ice crystal orientation.

http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2010/11feb10/anna-herbst1.mov?PHPSESSID=ndlp741nbtasb6f51eloa6dp81

An asteroid collision

2010-02-02T11:06:00.003-06:00

Color me surprised: I did not believe, when this object was first reported, and further debate on the Minor Planet Mailing List, that this was in fact a collision.

The orange object next to the full moon tonight

2010-01-28T11:25:00.004-06:00

The bright orange "star" next to the Full Moon tonight and Friday is the planet Mars, which happens to be closest to Earth tonight (ok last night) during this current cycle (Mars and Earth come close to each other every 2 years and 2 months). And closest in only the sense of currently: it's still 99 million kilometers away.

Joule Thief: a simple DC voltage booster

2010-01-27T17:16:00.000-06:00

A joule thief circuit lit from a 0.5V AAA battery. Click to enlarge.

A Joule thief is a simple circuit that acts as a DC to DC booster, raising a supply voltage by several volts. In this iteration it uses the exhausted voltage of a alkaline battery and boosts it enough to light a blue LED that requires 2.8V to light. With an otherwise dead 0.5V AAA battery, it will light a blue LED and run for days, using (at the moment) just under 2mA of current. It's much much dimmer than using a fresh battery or running the LED with a proper current through it. Giving the Joule thief circuit 3V from two fresh batteries pulls 75mA through the LED, making it very, very bright and probably short-lived.

A schematic is below. The circuit works like this: When first turned on, current flows into the inductor and produces a magnetic field in the toroid. While this is happening, no voltage appears at the base of the transistor, so the transistor remains off. The LED sees at first no voltage and while the inductor fills up, it only sees a maximum voltage of the battery, which is not enough to pass the diode. Once the inductor is charged, the battery voltage appears at the base of the transistor, turning it on. This allows the right side of the inductor to want to dump the energy it has stored in its magnetic field as quickly as possible, and this gives us a high-voltage that appears across the inductor. When that voltage exceeds 2.8V the LED turns on and lights up until the voltage drops below, triggering the sequence to begin again. I measured the frequency of the on/off oscillation and it seems to run at about 34kHz; the multimeter said between 68 and 72kHz but a radio showed there was 34kHz signal as well, which I assume was the fundamental (and the 68kHz one a harmonic). It did change in frequency a bit while on.

Bre Pettis/Windell Oskay

Las Vegas precipitation

2010-01-22T12:40:00.002-06:00

Las Vegas received more rain last week, 1.69 inches, than it did in all of 2009, when it received 1.59 inches. The "average" is about 4 inches annually. If the rains continue into a full El Nino style winter, the area will bloom green in spring with the normally brown/gray mountains turned into green.

Source: http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/Rainfall-expected-to-taper-off-today-82379942.html

2010 AL30 animation

2010-01-20T17:57:00.000-06:00

Patrick Wiggins makes a cool animation of an object passing by the Earth last week:
http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/temp/2010AL30.2.GIF

I liked it better than some of the other animations I've seen of the same object, since he didn't center the object on every frame but let it move to the right. This gives the effect of it speeding up.

Halogen resistance

2009-12-24T15:28:00.000-06:00

If you are curious, the resistance of a 300W type J halogen bulb, the ones you would find in those halogen torchiere lamps, is 3.3 ohms when cold. When it's hot it is 48 ohms, but that's a calculation only based on the wattage.

A warm halogen bulb in the near infrared

Since converting such a torchiere to CFL (but not in this project), I had an extra halogen bulb and debated throwing it out, but I figured they might make a decent power resistor. I used it in a project converting a PC ATX power supply to a benchtop 12V source. It works--but the hassle of cleaning the contacts for soldering, soldering, and placing such a large object in the case was enough to decide buying a power resistor in the first place is probably easier.

Winter Solstice 2009

2009-12-21T12:22:00.001-06:00

Happy Winter Solstice.

From http://buscam.uchicago.edu/ taken on 11:54AM (a few minutes past the solstice time) (on campus only)

Chicago is looking as good as 2006!

Enjoy this graph of the date and time of the solstice over the years.

Image of the day: Tethys

2009-12-18T18:47:00.000-06:00

The saturnian satellite Tethys, imaged on October 14th, 2009. From the viewpoint of Cassini, the Sun was nearly directly behind the spacecraft when this image was taken.

Click to enlarge

Source: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Dark matter rumors

2009-12-16T22:28:00.002-06:00

Cosmic Variance has a rumor about a supposed dark matter detection at the CDMS.

Martian swirly art

2009-12-14T15:40:00.000-06:00

I am sure you've already seen this image from Mars of the swirly traces of dust devils removing the light dust from the darker surface. But here it is.

Click to enlarge to a 2560x1920 version
This is a dune field in a crater just off of Syrtis Major.

Links to other sizes.

Gorgeous rocket failure

2009-12-11T12:32:00.000-06:00

Spaceweather has a photo

Some video

Crescent Earth

2009-12-10T13:59:00.003-06:00

The Earth captured from the Rosetta spacecraft as it passed by Earth.
.
ESA. Taken on 11/12/2009. Click to enlarge.
As seen on the Planetary Society blog.

November ISS sightings in Chicago

2009-11-11T11:24:00.002-06:00

You can see the International Space Station in Chicago in the evening for the rest of the month. If schedules hold, you will also be able to see the Space Shuttle as it docks with the ISS, as the Shuttle should launch on the 16th.
Here's the next 10 days.

Looking at the radio spectrum with an oscilloscope

2009-10-28T14:40:00.000-05:00

One of the things I've always been interested in was radio; and part of that was scanning as much of the radio spectrum as possible to hear what was out there. As a kid, this was my father's shortwave receiver; I spent hours twirling the giant frequency handwheel on that radio absorbing every foreign radio broadcast I heard and wondering what the various weird noises I heard were.

For instance, at times there would be a overwhelmingly loud, rapid "thump-thump-thump" noise that was fairly broadband across a few megahertz. I asked my father about that and he called it the "Russian Woodpecker", an over-the-horizon radar system that used frequencies that were normally used by shortwave broadcasters. If I stayed up long enough at night, I would begin to pick up the European broadcasters waking up at dawn with their early morning news broadcasts.

One thing about most radios is you are only tuned to one frequency at a time. You get a limited amount of bandwidth around that frequency depending on how the radio works. It's hard hence to compare the strengths of two stations simultaneously without resorting to memory tricks or rapid tuning.

With a fancy piece of equipment called a spectrum analyzer, you can see a wide range of frequencies at once and see various radio stations, peaks, etc. To some extent you can do this with a PC sound card hooked up to the audio output of the radio, but again you are limited in bandwidth. See the laptop display below, for instance.

The generalized setup. An antenna, a diode detector, and an oscilloscope. The PC is not being used in this particular example.

What amazes me is a sub-$1000 digital oscilloscope that is advertised as a 40MHz scope, that is, it can display signals up to 40MHz in frequency, can in a FFT mode display the signals up to 500MHz and essentially function as a spectrum analyzer.

An overview of the Chicago radio spectrum
The key things to note here are intensity is the vertical, frequency is the horizontal. Near the upper right corner is "POS:", which notes the frequency at the center of the display. At the center bottom is the horizontal scale, in this case 25MHz per big division. So the bump of stuff to the left of center in this image is at about 125MHz-25MHz= 100MHz, which is in the FM Radio band.

FM Radio band.
In the FM band, you can see that there are plenty of stations filling the available channels. The isolated peak on the left is WHPK-FM, the campus radio station running at 100W, and is about two blocks from my location. It sits in the non-commercial section of the FM band.

AM Radio band
The AM radio band at my location is dominated by WRTO-AM at 1200kHz. This station gets into any cable, any wire, and if you have any rectification from a piece of corrosion, or just input an antenna directly into a PC, you will get La Tremenda.

Looking closer at 1200kHz
If you look closer at WRTO's signal, you see it has a strong carrier and two sidebands further out at about 12.5kHz out. Now, when I originally saved this image, I thought I was seeing the audio sidebands of the AM signal. If the AM radio station broadcasts a single note at 440Hz, for instance, you'd see the strong carrier, and two line peaks on either side at 440Hz away. But here they are all the way out at 12.5kHz, a frequency that is present in "ssss" or a cymbal but little else. And especially not normal AM radio broadcasting, which is limited by the FCC to just a tad over 20kHz bandwidth, so the stations have to drop all their treble sounds.

It appears these outliers are the dreaded "HD radio", a hybrid technique that transmits the audio in two sidebands that exceed the normal width of an AM broadcast. Unfortunately this process violates old technical standards that allowed stations to coexist with each other. It was dropped in favor of a proprietary digital standard that allows big stations to use more bandwidth and clog up the airwaves with digital hash noise.

Below the AM radio band

Just below the AM band is the rest of what is known as Mediumwave or Medium Frequency, which then transitions into LW or longwave; this band is notable for non-directional beacons for aeronavigation, DGPS (or differential GPS), and lots of noise. I will have to take another spin around this band to listen to some of those peaks and see if they are real signals.

VLF Radio spectrum
Once you get down here, you start running into lots and lots of switching mode power supply noise. Various Navies around the world still broadcast on this frequency for radionavigation and uninterruptible worldwide coverage. Two of the stronger signals to the left are probably the Russian radionavigation system at 11.9kHz and 12.6kHz.

I have some other snapshots showing excellent response to the shortwave radio broadcasters of the world. It's amazing to see the whole shortwave spectrum at once instead of moving around frequencies one kilohertz at a time.

ISS at twilight

2009-10-05T22:25:00.002-05:00

The International Space Station on September 11th, 2009, as viewed from Chicago. Click to enlarge.

near-IR Yerkes Observatory

2009-10-02T19:07:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge. Image taken on April 22th, 2007 with Canon S300. Hue/Autolevels modified.

Image of the Day: Mercury

2009-09-30T23:36:00.001-05:00

This image of Mercury was taken yesterday, September 29th, 2009.

credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Here was Messenger flying past Earth in 2005: http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/04/messenger-departing-earth.html

And Mercury transiting across the face of the Sun from Earth: http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/11/mercury-transit.html

Geiger counter current draw

2009-09-24T23:33:00.003-05:00

This circuit connected to my geiger counter uses on average 80uA-- that's 0.08mA. On a click, it will bump up to 0.1mA. On startup just for a second it uses 3mA. At those rates, and with a standard 9V battery (at 650mAh), it would run about 9 months continously.

Geiger counter offline

2009-09-12T11:11:00.001-05:00

I've been having serial port problems with my geiger counter that has been running since December 1st, 2005, and so at the moment there is no reading.

Early September ISS Shuttle passes in Chicago

2009-09-05T22:32:00.002-05:00

See the International Space Shuttle and the Shuttle together in orbit here in Chicago:

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

Kepler

2009-08-04T17:28:00.001-05:00

The Kepler mission is looking at this field of stars in Cygnus and Lyra. One of these stars will have an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star in the habitable zone.

Get this. This is the field. This is the image. Click on this 1000x1000 pixel image. Enjoy. Here is the medium resolution version. Enjoy a little more.

Now,
click on the full resolution. 11000x11000. 28 Megabytes. Now you see all the stars. Kepler is watching each one. All 4.5 million or so.

Kepler first light. Click on the image to make it bigger (and to start seeing the stars).

P.S. I originally wrote up the draft of this post two months ago and sat on it like I sit on everything. There is now a press conference coming up later in the week about early Kepler results.

ISS/Shuttle passes are over in Chicago

2009-07-27T21:56:00.001-05:00

If you are searching for ISS and Shuttle passes over Chicago, tonight's was the last one for a while. If you are an early morning person, mid August will work; if not, early September is the next time you can see the ISS in Chicago.

Image of the day: Enceladus

2009-07-23T21:15:00.003-05:00

Enceladus' north pole.

Click to enlarge to awesome.

via Planetary Society Blog.

Two awesome things you have already heard about

2009-07-21T16:06:00.002-05:00

The LRO imaged most of the Apollo landing site on the Moon. Things will get better as the orbital parameters are modified.

There appears to have been an impact of some sort on Jupiter, first seen by an Australian amateur.

IR clouds

2009-07-10T16:34:00.003-05:00

ISS through a telescope

2009-07-07T00:05:00.003-05:00

I just watched an awesome pass of the International Space Station over Chicago. I was able to catch it and follow* the ISS through a telescope at about 50x: the space station appeared as an eagle with orange solar panel wings, with a white body and a small white point source on the main axis. It was excellent, and that was at low power! Here was Tyrell's approach three years ago.

*follow in the sense of every twenty seconds moving a giant dome, followed by a german equatorial telescope in advance of the ISS and hoping I wasn't too slow.

Evening passes of the ISS visible in Chicago

2009-07-06T00:20:00.000-05:00

There are a number of nice passes of the International Space Station visible in Chicago for the next two weeks. Take a look at Heavens-Above for the set for Chicago.

Here are the highlights for the evening passes, when they begin, how bright they are, and how high in the sky; click on the link above to get the full details. In some cases you will be able to see the ISS on successive orbits.

6 Jul -2.6 21:42:04 31
6 Jul -1.3 23:17:17 29
7 Jul -3.2 22:06:11 76
8 Jul -2.6 20:55:50 32
8 Jul -1.1 22:31:06 29
9 Jul -3.1 21:19:57 72
10 Jul -1.0 21:44:51 28
11 Jul -2.9 20:33:38 69
12 Jul -0.9 20:58:31 27

Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter first images

2009-07-02T15:14:00.001-05:00

The first test images are back from the LRO.

I've annotated a previous image of the moon with the location of the image: The orange markers are at the crater Hell E, which is listed in the press release as being just a few kilometers west of the image site. Hell E is listed as 10km across, so the images are just a touch to the right of that crater. Click on the image for a large original.

Credit for the LRO images are NASA/GSFC/ASU.

The intersection of the online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography

2009-06-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

Seth Anderson at B12 Solipsism has an excellent series of posts (here, here, and here) about the intersection of the new online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography.

The first post is about the issue of copyright and fair use--many people fail to understand that "fair use" means you have already violated copyright, but you have a valid legal excuse. In photography, Seth points out that the ability to take an excerpt is potentially not possible, leaving every use of a photograph without permission a copyright violation.

The second post is a dust-up by a writer for the New York Times, who argued it was okay to print out a copy of any Flickr photograph and put it up in your private residence. This did not go over well with people who create--i.e., the photographers. While it may be ok for certain Creative Commons and Public Domain photographs, it is a violation of copyright to do that to a owned photograph. The legal question is, as I mentioned above, is this use considered Fair? You would be surprised at the muddled mess in the case law. A professor for instance lost a copyright case because he made personal copies of many science papers and kept them in his office. The turning distinction on that case was the amount of papers he made copies of that drove the copyright violation from "fair use" to a civil violation. Is one printed photo fair use? What if you decorate your whole apartment with them? What size can your print fairly? What about your friends' apartments?

The issues are completely muddy and complex--as a photographer, for instance, I feel I should be compensated for my work. Websites like say Chicagoist or Treehugger use flickr CC shared images to illustrate their stories. In the traditional media, the photographer would be compensated for their work, either by being employed or by a fee. This is not being done at all for most of the non-traditional sites on the internet. It is also a truth that these sites probably couldn't afford the going rate for photographs. Getting your image out for people to see for a photographer is a very important thing, but is it driving the image creation business out of a profession and into the hands of casual photographers? (The latin term amateur is perfect for here but misused--these photographers love what they do and are often just as good as a pro, but the amateurs are not paid).

You would be surprised what it costs to get the rights to every photograph in a magazine. Years ago I was paid once for an image covering less than 1/4 of a page in a small publication more than it costs for ten years of Flickr Pro. More recently, if someone can't get the image use for free, they move on to find another CC licensed image. At what point do I give away my images? For specific charity non-profits? For non-profits? The National Geographic Society is a non-profit, should they get images for free? For school textbooks? For medical school textbooks? There are no good answers, except I am sure there will be fewer pro photographers out there in the future.

There is also the new culture driven out of the Free Software/File Sharing culture where the belief is all content is free and the driving force behind creation of works is not the desire to make money; if you make money you have to find a way to do it selling something tangible, whether it be technical support, concerts, or physical items. This belief is moving beyond the software paradigm, is being fought in the music and movie industries (and being lost completely by the industries), and now is moving into books, photography, and other creative markets. Google was asking illustrators to create for free custom themes for the search engine. Google, a company with a 134 Billion market capitalization, was asking artists to work for free.

I benefit from many of these changes. I listen to music online (and I also still buy CDs, old fashioned me). I work in a field that utilizes free software every day. It is conflicting internally to know that somewhere an artisan may end their craft because they cannot afford to continue, because I chose the free option. I also know there are things I cannot do unless the cost is cheap enough for me to afford. For me, much work remains to allow the creative domains and artists the ability to ply their crafts in the future. I do not know how to get there from here.

Venus AND Earth from Mars

2009-06-27T10:44:00.002-05:00

I missed something in the last post--the image is Venus and Earth from Mars. Venus is the bright point in the center, and Earth is the faint object moving to the lower right of Venus.

This is from fredk at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=6042&st=60&start=60

Venus from Mars

2009-06-26T23:53:00.002-05:00

Via Emily Lakdawalla @ facebook.

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=18408

UPDATE: I realize I missed something in this animation--Earth!

The end of analog TV in Chicago

2009-06-12T15:37:00.004-05:00

I watched the end of analog TV at noon today for Channels 2,5, and 7. They unceremoniously just cut the power--one in a commercial and two in soaps. Fox 32 is still broadcasting in analog with a constant scroll, and all the low-power and non-profits are still on, save WTTW.

Kayuga impact and the videos you should watch

2009-06-10T16:49:00.001-05:00

The Japanese Space Agency JAXA just deorbited their lunar orbiting spacecraft Kayuga.

Watch this, this, this (embedded below), or this, turn on the HD for sure, and raise a toast to the mission.

UPDATE: Oh heck, you should see one taken from the ISS while passing over Japan. Again, don't forget to hit the HD version.

Audio isolation transformer

2009-06-08T16:11:00.002-05:00

I used to record audio off my Tivo on my desktop computer--but when I had the cable TV connected, I would get a loud hum. The reason for this is related to the idea of "ground" in electrical systems, which are used as a reference point for zero voltage and/or safety purposes. The kicker was the cable TV cable offered a different path to ground compared to the PC's ground.

For consumer generic audio connections, the audio signal (a varying AC voltage of about one volt) is compared to the ground of the system. Hence the two connectors on an RCA connector, signal and ground, or three connectors on a stereo jack: left, right, and ground. If your ground happens to be varying up and down at 60 times a second (because it's not a good ground, for instance), you will also get that hum on your output.

For some professional audio systems, the reference ground is brought with the signal, so you have three connections for any channel. When both the signal and ground vary up and down in sync, it's easy to subtract the pickup noise and have a clean signal.

In simple, single systems, either approach works fine. The problem is when you start interconnecting equipment.

I made a stereo isolation audio transformer to solve this problem. The left and right channels enter a 1:1 600ohm audio transformer, which transmits the audio signal (which is AC) but blocks any DC connection. This prevents ground loops and currents between the two devices. I got the two transformers from old modems. One of the jacks is a fancy panel mount, the other is from an old sound card, and this old one is actually needed, because it is plastic, isolating it from the case, which is connected to the ground of the panel mount jack. Of course, I put everything in an Altoids tin.

I suppose it would also help if I put some ferrite on the inputs to also reduce RFI/EMI problems, but I haven't yet. Just having this device between a shortwave radio and a PC has reduced interference pickup quite a bit.

You can see more photos of the build at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwarmstr/sets/72157604679420753/. Essentially, 1. Measure and Mark your holes. 2. Make a small punch to keep drill centered. 3. Drill a pilot hole, then the right size. 4. Solder the connections. I used a multimeter to figure out which connection was which on the transformers. 5. Hot glue for stability.

Parts cost: about $2.50 for the 3.5mm stereo panel mount. Everything else I scrounged for from old parts, not counting my time. Here's the equivalent commercial product at $32: http://www.amazon.com/3-5mm-Stereo-Audio-Isolation-Transformer/dp/B001GUS7EO. I do enjoy the look of that commercial case.

What is going on with the Herschel and Planck missions?

2009-05-18T10:32:00.003-05:00

The European Space Agency launched an ambitious set of satellites a few days ago: Herschel is a 3.5m diameter infrared telescope, and Planck is a cosmic microwave background telescope. Both are planned to be placed in one of Earth's Lagrangian points called L2. Upon launch such large objects can be tracked with optical telescope for a while. Upon examining these images, astronomers found not two objects, but at first four, which turned out to be the booster rocket and the structure holding both satellite while launching (see here). But later, they found two more fainter objects. These objects have seemingly moved off of the Herschel/Planck trajectory. What were they? The other more disturbing news came today, when Jean-Claude Pelle of Southern Stars Observatories reported finding dozens of new objects in the same path. This implies a possible failure of one or more of the telescopes and would be a blow to science.

ISS passes for Chicago

2009-05-12T17:45:00.003-05:00

UPDATE 7/06/2009: Here's the current set of passes.

There are another set of convenient evening passes of the International Space Station over Chicago until the end of the month. Last night we watched it streak across the sky in five minutes from Ryerson. Through the telescope at low power it was two blazing white ovoids with two small orange dots on one of the white blobs.

Spy numbers station on shortwave

2009-04-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

I've heard this strong station several times now over the past year, usually later at night. It always broadcasts at 5900 kHz (or now that I think about it, have I picked it up at 9800kHz?). I picked this up Monday night/Tuesday morning, April 21st, just after 00:34 CDT (5:34 UT).

The station is pretty strong here in Chicago, with only occasional fading, and it sends a modified CW signal that can be picked up with any shortwave receiver. It only uses three digit code letters in groups of five: those Morse Code letters that are described by three combinations of dots and dashes, minus S and O, which are dot-dot-dot and dash-dash-dash.

5900-spystation.mp3 audio file, 7.43MB

Decoded, the file yields this:
DAUWN WIWNW GDNWR UTWAT RGAID INWTA NUGIW UIWWA GINRT NRDWI DNRUT RDAUG NNAII TWIIR UDDNA ATDGT NUART DTIWU IUWWI TINUW ADNIT RRRWT DATRA DUWGW NGINI UTDTR IDIRA DRUDD NIDTU IIDRG URWUU GTTNI UIWIR UITND ATTDI WARGR DGTGD DWIRD AIIAI ARDTI TIGDU GRUWI AUTRT NTWNU GRUUU TUGUG AAARI TRRNG TTDAA WUWGU NNATW WNGRN TNRAN DRUTN DWUGU RDAUN RGGNN TNWNN WDGDD WARGA DDGNN DUDTA RRNNN RWTNU RUWTI GRTIA UDAAN ITIUG UIIAR WIUTU IATNT UDNGN ARGNT TAAWU WUADN DAARW INRGR GNNAG ADGRU GNWWR GWGUD WDNNA URRAR WITIN RRDAD AIDRR GUAUG INANU DIWUI WAGAN NRUUN AWRAD DWRNR UTRAU INIDR UITUN ATDUG RUUAA UIGWT DAIUI AIRRD ANAIN IDATI WDIUG WTNAD UNRAI GNDTR ADNNI DUNGR RDWDI UGTUD TDATG GIGUG IAANA DRDTD TGIGN GWUNN GWIII ADWDD

The actual contents of this message are presumbly only known by the intended spy and the agency that sent the one-time pad message to them.

SO2 plume from Galapagos volcanic eruption

2009-04-13T16:54:00.000-05:00

You can see the sulfur dioxide (SO2) plume from the Galapagos volcanic eruption via the OMI on the Aura satellite (which I'm using to watch for hopefully great sunsets here):

NOAA/NESDIS/NASA-Goddard -- Click to enlarge to global view