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Domain: brucegary.net

Stories and comments across the archive that link to brucegary.net.

Comments · 4

  1. Could I do that? by braindrainbahrain · · Score: 1 · on Who Needs NASA? Exoplanet Detected Using a DSLR

    That question was asked by Bruce L. Gary and the answer is what he wrote in his free book: EXOPLANET OBSERVING
    FOR AMATEURS

  2. Journal Articles by braindrainbahrain · · Score: 1 · on Ask Slashdot: How To Pick Up Astronomy and Physics As an Adult?

    I am late to the party here, but want to leave one last tidbit: read astronomy journal articles. Many you will not understand, many, you will understand the language, but not the math (especially articles, they omit many many steps since they are so short), but ultimately, you will understand some, and understand the data they took to arrive at a conclusion, and maybe even question the data, the measurement, or the data processing. Maybe even enough to contact the authors and ask for clarification, or suggest alternate methods. At this point, you are doing astronomy. One added bonus to being a college student: Awesome libraries that can access all these journals at no cost to you (except your tuition of course).

    Some suggestions for more hands on stuff:

    Kewl book: Exoplanet Observing For Amateurs, by Bruce Gary (free! courtesy of the author)

    edX Courses: They actually teach from journal articles! Math is at the high school level.

    Citizen Science projects:

    Find Exoplanets
    Dicover and measure KBOs

    Age? Phooey on that. Upon completing my 2nd M.S. degree in my mid 50's, I got letters of recommendation for PhD school (which I chose not to pursue).

  3. ISON places exclamation mark: is in outburst! by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1 · on Comet ISON Nears Date With Sun

    See this link for some stunning imaging by amateurs: http://www.cometisonnews.com/

    and this one for some serious work by 'just' an amateur: http://brucegary.net/ISON/

    and this one which was one of the earliest to plot data (that I knew of): http://www.aerith.net/comet/catalog/2012S1/2012S1.html

    Personally, from its outburst a couple of days ago, I expect it to become negative magnitude easily (the more negative, the brighter).

  4. Re:This will never work by barawn · · Score: 4, Insightful · on HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone

    1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.

    Why does this myth persist? I have no idea. Whenever it pops up, someone points out that it's not true. But it still persists. It doesn't even make sense, after all - microwaves heat dry things (like... plates) as well as wet things.

    Microwaves work via dielectric heating, which is just the vibration of any electric dipole due to any electromagnetic radiation. Radiation in the gigahertz band is typical, but it's a wide band. Microwave ovens use 2450 MHz because it's in the ISM band.

    Water does heat best, but that's because it's one of the strongest dipoles known to exist.

    Water vapor has a resonant frequency at 22.235 GHz and 183 GHz. You can see the 22 GHz line in the graph on the linked page. Also of interest is the fact that clouds don't have that absorption feature because liquid water droplets are small compared to microwave wavelengths.

    Note that if water's resonant frequency was 2450 MHz, absolutely no one would use that band, as you couldn't transmit anything on it, because water vapor in the air would be opaque to it.