Comet Lulin from Chicago

The RAS observed Comet Lulin in Chicago yesterday. Unforunately it wasn't 100% clear, with some sort of high cirrus haze up, and with all the light pollution, only two of us saw the blob that was the comet. For proof of where it was, I took a quick snapshot through the eyepiece to confirm the location for others looking.

astronomical acronym

A cute acronym. It would only be better if the project was one of those requiring exquisite precision in their measurements and error-handling.

Title: The HYPERMUCHFUSS Campaign -- an undiscovered high velocity population
Authors: Alfred Tillich, Stephan Geier, Uli Heber, Heiko Hirsch, Pierre Maxted,
Boris Gaensicke, Tom Marsh, Ralf Napiwotzki, Roy Østensen and Chris
Copperwheat
Categories: astro-ph
Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures, to appear in the Journal of Physics Conference
Proceedings (JPCS) for the 16th European White Dwarf Workshop, Barcelona,
Spain, June 30 - July 11, 2008

We present an overview and a status report of HYPERMUCHFUSS (HYPER velocity
or Massive Unseen Companions of Hot Faint Underluminious Stars Survey) aiming
at the detection of a population of high velocity subluminous B stars and white
dwarfs. The first class of targets consists of hot subdwarf binaries with
massive compact companions, which are expected to show huge radial velocity
variations. The second class is formed by the recently discovered
hyper-velocity stars, which are moving so fast that the dynamical ejection by a
supermassive black hole seems to be the only explanation for their origin.
Until now only one old hyper-velocity star has been found, but we expect a
larger population. We applied an efficient selection technique for hot
subdwarfs and white dwarfs with high galactic restframe velocities from the
SDSS spectral data base, which serve as first epoch observations for our
campaign with the ESO VLT and NTT in Chile, the 3.5 m telescope at DSAZ
observatory (Calar Alto) in Spain and the WHT on La Palma. The survey is
nearing completion and provides us with promising candidates which will be
followed up to measure their RV-curves to uncover massive companions or prove
their nature as HVS.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.1030 , 1617kb)

IR focus test: Regenstein Bartlett Quad

Combo visible / near IR image with a Canon S300.
I can't remember if I posted this in the past or not.

IR focus test: Agave

IR focus test: Palo Verde

An old focus test. As you can see, the right side is not doing so well.

Happy 1234567890 seconds!

Unix time just went past 1234567890; here's a screen shot of a little script I wrote.

Giant's Causeway on Mars

Much like the original Giant's Causeway, the universality of basalt lava exists elsewhere in the inner solar system--including Mars. Here is a very reasonable interpretation of a basalt flow on Mars.
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I still need to scan my Iceland crazy basalt cooling images.

Satellite collision: story to watch for future complications

Two satellites collided in orbit two days ago, creating a spray of debris that will have to be closely watched to avoid further collisions. One satellite was an Iridium, one of the 88 or so in orbit (I see it was #33), and the other was a non-functioning Russian Cosmos satellite. I hope the Cosmos had either ejected the nuclear reactor that some of them use or was non-nuclear. I see another nuclear Cosmos had a problem recently. What's interesting about this collision was the height: at 490 miles, the debris is fairly high enough to have some significant lifetime. As debris densities increase, chances of collision greatly increase, greatly increasing debris densities, increasing collisions, which... you get the idea. These sort of things are really bad for our near Earth environment.

Here's a graph of the two orbits. It was a bad high energy collision.

UPDATE: Animation of the two satellites colliding (in a virtual sense).

A gorgeous galactic grauve

Actually not a grauve, but an image:


Make sure you look at the largest image you can comfortably download, and enjoy the relation of the size of the background galaxies to the foreground one. A true sense of the Universe.

From Bad Astronomy.

Another moon mosaic

This was taken on Thursday.

Click to enlarge. 2427x2599. A composite of 6 sets of images. Each set is approximately 30 subexposures of 1/1000 seconds. Processed with Registax, Autostitch, and Photoshop.

Science Press Releases

Sometimes I feel for the fellows working the Science press racket. They have to distill the complicated nature of research science into a tidbit that the mainstream media will be able to digest and regurgitate into yet another tidbit.

But sometimes I am annoyed. I feel the words "strange", "mysterious", "hidden", and "stunning" have no place in a science press release. The best ones use direct references to the science, do not declare commonly known principles or phenomena as "mysterious", and work their best to educate the reader about the science being done. They do not use poor analogies. I know a few of the writers, and sometimes problems like these develop not from them but from their employers.

This is not that. And the Register called him out on it. It is in no way the worst example of the science press release. I would be more sympathetic if the writer would take the Register's criticism to heart about that analogy.

Moon mosaic

A moon mosaic from last night. I didn't take the images or process them; Will did all that. The only thing I've done is run it through Autolevel in Photoshop. For processing, we took about thirty images each of each section of the Moon with the SXV-H9 camera at 1/1000s, and then ran each set through Registax to get the sharpest ones, then used Autostitch to put the sets together.


Click to enlarge.

The radio electromagnetic spectrum

This is a great chart of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. If you interested in the more organized allocations of the radio region, see this very detailed PDF chart.

Microwave meter videos

I made a few videos of the simple microwave / 2.4GHz meter dealing with work office's microwave oven--woe be unto whomever hangs around the hinge.

The first is a full examination of the space of the microwave oven, and is entirely inappropriate for those with short attention spans (stick to the second video, you).



This one is a short proof the detection is when the microwave oven is busily heating my hot water for tea.



The other amazing news is there is a very strong microwave signal that the northwest corner of the roof of Ryerson intercepts that appears to be coming from either the Admin building or the hospital: it strongly peaks in the southwest direction, almost pegs the meter on the 200mV scale, and when I added a headphone to the meter I could audibly hear some sort of signal that reminded me of a TV video sync noise.
What is this signal? Am I hearing a horizontal sync? Or is there some other signal that has a repetitive sync noise that runs at 12-18 kilohertz?

Chicago FM radio band scan

Here's a band scan of all FM radio stations heard Wednesday night in Chicago with a Degen 1103. I attached it to two random length wire dipoles, oriented north/south and east/west and could switch between the two.

I used V-Soft's signal strength database to ID the strongest stations. This helps when not all stations are in Chicago.

For medium and low strength stations, I used the FCC database for various queries:
for all stations within 100km of me, for instance, click here.

You can get radio coverage maps from the FCC, or more refined maps from Radio Locator that show how likely it is to pick up the station.

Antenna is the orientation of the dipole; so the note "east/west" means the wire is strung east/west and sensitive to signals coming from the north or south.
Station IDs were either heard, inferred from strength, music type, from the list of Chicago stations, or best guess from distant station lists.

Frequency Call sign Strength Antenna notes  
87.7 WLFM-LP   spanish news (tv carrier) 
88.1 WCRX  east/west dance mono 
88.1 WSSD  north/south R&B / announcer talking over song 
88.5 WHPK-FM strong  "very local, college" 
88.9 WIIT weak east/west college 
89.3 WKKC   smooth music 
89.5    hip-hop 
89.7 WONU   Christian 
90.1 WMBI-FM strong  Christian 
90.5 WRTW?   rap 
90.7 WAUS weak  classical 
90.9 WDCB  north/south  
91.1 WGSI weak  focus on the family / fox news / faint music  
91.5 WBEZ strong   
91.9 WJCH   piano music 
92.3 WPWX   rap 
92.5  clear (trace)   
92.7 WCPT    
93.1 WXRT-FM    
93.3  clear (trace) north/south  
93.5 WVIX   spanish 
93.9 WLIT-FM   talk 
93.7 WTRX-FM or WBCT  north/south country 
94.1  clear (trace)   
94.3 WJKL   christian 
94.7 WLS-FM   rock 
94.9  clear (trace)   
95.1 WIIL    
95.5 WNUA   jazz 
95.7  clear (trace)   
95.9 WEFM or WERV-FM  east/west jazz 
96.3 WBBM-FM   rock? 
96.5  clear   
96.7 WSSR    
97.1 WDRV    
97.3 WQBW? faint  "Milwaukee, WI 104mi" 
97.5 WHMS   lite 
97.9 WLUP-FM   MISSING? 
98.1 WIBN or WZOE  north/south "seeger, classic hits radio online" 
98.3  strong  local CPU 
98.7 WFMT   classical 
98.9 WBYR   "fort wayne, IN ""The Bear"" 153mi range" 
99.1 WXTT  east/west "Extra rock Danville, IL 114mi" 
99.5 WUSN   country 
99.9 WCPQ strong   
100.3 WILV   70's  
100.5  clear (trace)   
100.7 W264BF  east/west Christian 
101.1 WKQX   alt 
101.3  clear   
101.5 WBCH? WBNQ? WNSN?   modern WBCH? WBNQ? WNSN?
101.9 WTMX   R&B 
102.1  clear (trace)   
102.3 WYCA  east/west gospel 
102.7 WVAZ   love or Christian 
102.9  clear (trace)   
103.1 WVIV-FM   spanish 
103.5 WKSC-FM   modern/dance 
103.7  clear (trace)   
103.9 WXRD  east/west rock (political) 
104.3 WJMK   rock 
104.5  clear (trace)   
104.7 WCFL  east/west christian 
105.1 WOJO   spanish 
105.5 WJLE   country 
105.9 WCFS-FM   country 
106.3 WSRB   hip-hop 
106.7 WPPN   spanish 
106.9 WXXC   Marion, Indiana!
107.1 WZVN   rock 
107.5 WGCI-FM   hip-hop 
107.9 WLEY-FM   spanish 

Since formatting is horrible, here is the Excel spreadsheet.

If a frequency is not listed, it was a channel subject to bad interference from a neighboring station.

The idea of finding the clear channels is to find one suitable for meteor scatter work: a normally too-distant station (because it is over the horizon) can suddenly boom in because the signal is reflected from a ionized meteor trail halfway between the listener and broadcaster.

Some interesting results: WXXC and WBYR, located in Marion and Fort Wayne, IN, at 150 miles away.