Slashdot Mirror
Getting Into Space, One Way Or Another
EccentricAnomaly writes: "David Cash has some interesting
pictures of the International Space Station made with a
Celestron telescope and webcam. This makes me want to get back into
amateur astronomy ... in part, as a fun way to learn image processing." The resolution Cash achieved with consumer-grade equipment (Celestron Ultima 9.25 telescope and Philips Vesta Pro camera) is amazing. Demanding a slightly more visceral approach to space is "Rocket Guy" Brian Walker, who plans in the near future to launch himself to around 30 miles up in a home-brewed rocket. An unnamed reader points out the current feature on Walker over at space.com.
Futher proof people from oregon are a tad crazy :-)
But seriously, I hope he pulls this off. I'll laugh my ass off seeing a man make a rocket with his own cash, blast himself into space and LIVE for fraction of what it would cost NASA to do the same.
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
It would indeed be an incredible feat.
Not to mention the possibility that, having successfully pulled it off, he gets swamped with cash from other space investors who want him to build private rockets just like this for those crazy enough to follow in his footsteps.
If he pulls it off, it's the beginning of a new space race, mark my words. The 'racetrack' this time: our own backyards...
I hope he makes it. I really, really hope he does.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Demanding a slightly more visceral approach to space is "Rocket Guy" Brian Walker, who plans in the near future to launch himself to around 30 miles up in a home-brewed rocket.
All I can think is that this guy is setting himself up the bomb...
Slashdot's getting to me.
Here's a link to his site.
-John
the faa will never let him do it.
i hope he, in the true spirit of Amercia, does it anyway.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I always wanted a nice telescope when I was a kid, I grew up in western South Dakota, where you can get away from everything putting out light about five minutes from home.
So how much for a good telescope and the gear to hook it up to a computer? I have two Mac laptops (iBook 2000 and G4 Titanium) so Mac solutions would be best.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Wan Hu - medieval chinese rocket scientist (who may not have been exactly a rocket scientist).
Hmm, or maybe that was Larry Walters.
--
Why bother taking pictures of space, or trying to rocket into space? I prefer creating rifts in the space-time continuum. That's much more fun.
Who wants to start the betting pool?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Unless Demon Internet have changed their policy, they shunt off any users website that gets too much traffic onto a "high-use" server which runs on a smaller pipe.
Of course it doesn't help when there's several animated gifs on an image-laden page.
Get those mirrors up quick...
--
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
I've got a Logitech and an IBM-the damn thing looks like a miniatire of one of their PS2s, and the image quality in my living room isn't much better. He did good work.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
But, I wonder... can anyone tell me what this "stacking" process is?
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
http://www.perljam.net/misc/iss/www.djcash.demon.c o.uk/astro/webcam/webcam.htm
-ted
Did you guys catch that the ISS was tracked *by hand*? Admittedly, only about twenty frames out of a 50MB AVI actually included the ISS, but hey that's still pretty amazing.
It can be tough enough (as an amateur, at least) to find and track a planet when you already know its precise coordinates. Finding the ISS by hand, I'd imagine, takes some impressive cojones.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
You take ten or twenty pictures right in a row, assign them all a translucency value (20 images, each is only 5% opaque) and stick them on top of each other, lining up some specific feature or by simple edge detection. Minimizes atmospheric effects and effects from the CCD camera.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Proving once again that a single man, with guts, can make a huge impact on the earth.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Yep. We left europe, asia, and africa to get away from the likes of you, and crossing an ocean just want far enough. You followed us. Now we'll try agan.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Try one of these...
. ht ml
http://www.globaldialog.com/~obsessiontscp/OBHP
That thing would make a great lawn ornament, dont you think? Right alongside the pink flamingos.
McDoobie
There are two major problems amateur astronomers have to deal with: sensitivity and atmospheric turbulence.
Often the objects an astronomer is trying to photograph are very faint, and they might not reliably register on the CCD. Stacking up (adding together) a bunch of image frames allows even the faintest readings to show up.
The other problem is turbulence. Temperature differentials in the atmosphere can cause optical distortion. By taking hundreds of frames of the same object, you have the luxury of selecting the least distorted frames for processing.
Basically, integration/stacking lets you extract as much detail as possible out of a large set of imperfect images.
-John
Thanks for the info. I've spent about all I can spend on TVs and computers...so why not spend money on something new ;)
:).
Oh...Mod me down, I'm offttopic
No, we're trying to get still farther from Europe, since we met you coming the other way 'round. (Australia).
Hmmmm. 3 degrees absolute, near-complete vacuum, hella long walk to the corner pharmacy......or Los Angeles and New York City.
It's a no-brainer!
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"... goes to -- Brian 'Rocket Guy' Walker!"
Maybe David Cash can capture the Kodak moment when Brian goes up on Challenger Two.
So should he be building rockets then?!?
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
Do you have any idea what kind of lift capacity this would take?!
The 6 inch had a decent figure but I didn't know I could send it away to be vacuum aluminized, so I chemically deposited silver on it using chemicals I bought at the University of Idaho chemistry stockroom. Take my advice, it's much better to get a mirror aluminized.
I hurried a bit too much on fine grinding the 10 inch and wasn't happy with it, so I tried again with my 8 inch and was much more patient, and got excellent results from it (1/10 wave according to Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop's Paul Zurakowski).
Grinding telescopes and being a sciency kind of guy led me to study astronomy at CalTech where I assisted CalTech astronomer Jeremy Mould in observing the the Palomar 60 inch and 200 inch telescopes - the experience of a lifetime for an amateur astronomer.
It's been about 18 years since I last worked any glass but I just bought an 8 inch plate glass kit from Dan Cassaro. You can buy Pyrex kits and optical glass (suitable for lenses) from Newport Glass.
I'm starting to write about the telescope I'm about to work on here.
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area check out the Eastbay Astronomical Society's Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop (there's an observatory there too, it's in Oakland), Fremont Peak Observatory, which has a 30 inch reflector that's open to the public, with regular gatherings of amateurs who bring their telescopes up there, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers - the Sidewalk Astronomers set up telescopes on city sidewalks and introduce people to astronomy by inviting them to look through their scopes.
You can get books on astronomy, and importantly, the specifics of how to actually grind and polish a telescope from Willman-Bell and Newport Glass.
Check out this guy who made a ribbed mirror blank by cutting out a pattern from one disk of glass with a water jet and fusing it to a solid sheet in a furnace.
Visit Google's index of Amateur Telescope Making, particularly http://www.atmpage.com.
If you want to get into amateur telescope making, take advantage of an immensely valuable resource that wasn't available to me when I was a kid - subscribe to the ATM List - here's the FAQ.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
What's wrong with the idea of simply putting a solid-fuel rocket on the back of, let's say, a LearJet?
Rather funny you should ascribe that quote to Churchil, who was himself half American, and furthur is on record as having great admiration for the US.
Read his bio. Make up your own mind.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Wait, I though it was Europeans who became restless with and roamed away from Europe to the New World? Crud... damn biased history books!
I wonder how long it will be before someone like Rocket Man attaches a GPS system and a accute steering to a rocket and makes an intercontinental missle. It's not illegal to fire a few dozen exploding cans of Spam over to the County of Hampshire, is it?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
See, the majority of GPS chipsets and firmware (and off the shelf units) don't work so hot above certain altitudes and speeds. (as I recall anyway) Reason: Uncle Sam doesn't like people using GPS for ICBM guidance.
Now the RUSSIAN system (called GLONASS) would be a better bet. Only catch is that it isn't quite as accurate as GPS.
However if you are just trying to hit a county it would probably do just fine...
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Almost all the "property?" on earth seems to be owned by someone. But as technology advances, and can see a whole bunch of problems in the future when someone other than a gov. agency wants to settle on the moon- etc. etc. etc.
I can't wait to see how the world governments handles this- but it will probably go through the stages that most gov. invloved legal issues do.... interpretation of the constitution...and so on.
activist groups...protesting...bashing...laywers...money..
I'm looking forward to the streaming video of his burning lawn dart crashing into the Earth, then the '12 Hooters girls' bounce over and pour champagne on his still-smoldering body.Darwin award, indeed.Alex
A winner is you!
However, a pendulum always has a force acting on it that's directed upwards. This is because the pendulum hangs on a wire *attached* to something that's fixed. If the pendulum would be attached to something that makes fairly random movements however (much like Walker's rocket, 'attached' to the athmosphere pretty much), the pendulum would not swing all that well and the point of attachment could easily end up being below his rocket, making the rocket point to the White house for example, and kill that arrogant Texan oilbaron. Now THAT would be funny.
http://utopia.ision.nl/users/rjstek/english/softwa re/
- Amateur Telescope Making by Albert Ingalls
- How to Make a Telescope by Jean Texerau
and one other I can't find anymore. There are other good books.The stubby Celestron and Meade telescopes that are popular with amateur astronomers who prefer to purchase their instruments are of a type called a "schmidt-cassegrain". This has a nearly flat corrector plate in the front, that actually has a shallow fourth-order curve ground into it to correct spherical aberration, a deep prolate spheroidal primary mirror, and a convex secondary mirror mounted on the back of the center of the corrector plate.
It's the convex secondary that makes the telescope a cassegrain. The 200 inch on Palomar is a cassegrain. I don't have a schmidt-cassegrain to show you but here's how an ordinary cassegrain is laid out.
The use of the schmidt corrector plate allows one to make the telescope very short, with a small ratio of focal length of the primary to its diameter, without making images away from the center of the field blurry.
This is an advanced kind of design for an amateur to make oneself, although many amateurs have. Here's how one guy made a schmidt corrector plate.
The typical amateur starter scope is the "newtonian reflector". This has a concave parabolic mirror at the back end of the tube, and a few inches inside its focus is an optically flat mirror at 45 degrees. The optical path shown in the diagram is for the light from a single star, an image is formed from light sources spread across a small angle, and a small image is formed at the focal plane where it's examined by the eyepiece (a high-power magnifier) or photographed with film, a CCD or I guess even a webcam.
If you make a parabolic mirror with too short a ratio of focal length to diameter (the f-number, like the f ratio on a camera lens), then the images away from the center are blurred. This is called "coma". A parabola only focuses light perfectly if it's parallel to its axis and tilting the beam introduces coma. A ratio of 1 to 4 is about the shortest you can make it - f/4. My 6 inch is f/8, my 10 inch is f/3.5, and my 8 inch is f/6.
Having a longer focal length gives you greater magnification. Having a shorter one gives you a wider field of view, within the limits of the coma. Having a shorter focal ratio also makes it easier to fit in a car, an important consideration for making the scope enjoyable. Those Celestrons are nice because they'll easy fit in the trunk of a car or even in airline luggage (with a hard case) but it comes at the expense of a fancier design.
For the first homebuilt scope one usually grinds the primary and buys the flat diagonal mirror from a vendor. More advanced amateurs make their flats too but again optically flat surfaces are hard to make.
Making a primary that doesn't have too short a focal ratio is not too bad because the grinding process naturally makes a sphere. You grind a sphere of the right radius of curvature, fine grind through successively finer grits, then polish. You then use an optical test to get the mirror perfectly spherical, then deepen the center to move from a sphere to a parabola of revolution, testing carefully as you go.
The way I ground my mirrors was with pyrex mirror blanks on plate glass tools. Initially each is flat. They are both pretty thick, my 8 inch is about 1.25 inches thick, to stiffen them so they don't lose their figure. You have to have a figure that is perfect to about 1/8 of a wavelength of visible light in variation across the whole face of the glass, so any bending is disastrous. The 1/8 wave limit is the same for mirrors of all sizes so it's much harder to figure larger ones - best to start small. I would recommend an 8 inch for a first mirror. I have heard of people doing much larger first telescopes though.
What you do is sprinkle some granulated silicon carbide and water on the tool, place the mirror blank face down on it and push it back and forth until the silicon carbide ("carborundum") breaks down. (This is the same abrasive as you find on black wet-or-dry sandpaper, only in free-flowing powdered form). Then you add more abrasive and water and repeat. When too much mud builds up you wash it off and add more abrasive again.
To grind a concave curve into the mirror blank you place it on top, face down, grind with long strokes and have it hanging mostly off the side. Also you put pressure on it, either pushing hard or putting weights on it. This concentrates the grinding action in the middle and a shallow sphere develops.
Every few strokes you rotate the mirror a little, and once a minute or so you rotate the tool a little, with the idea that every part of the mirror gets ground over every part of the tool in every direction.
These days it has become popular to "hog out" a mirror with a metal ring tool, like a pipe cap as I'm about to try, then after rough grinding you make a fine-grinding tool out of small bathroom tiles mounted in dental stone or portland cement. This is in part because it's getting harder to get telescope making kits, unfortunately because it's so easy to buy a Celestron people don't make their own as much anymore. So people conserve the glass just for the mirrors and make the tile tools instead.
Be aware, before you say "well it's easier to buy a Celestron", that the price of a telescope goes up astronomically with increasing diameter - my 8 inch kit was $78 including shipping, I'll probably spend a few hundred to make a nice clock-driven mount, but the 10 meter telescope on Mauna Kea cost $90 million! If you know how to make your own, it is within your reach to grind your own 20 inch, which will have astounding views, but few of us could hope to afford to purchase a twenty inch commercial scope.
I know people who have ground 30 inch scopes and I know of some amateurs who are now figuring a 67 inch mirror!
Anyway it takes several hours of work to rough grind your mirror, more if you're doing a short f/number, less if you have a higher one, also less for smaller mirrors and more for larger ones. My 6" f/8 was about as deep as the thickness of an american dime, I don't know a little more than a millimeter.
Then you fine grind, grinding for a few hours with successively finer grades of abrasive. Usually you rough grind with 80 mesh silicon carbide - it is graded by sieving it through a mesh with 80 wires in it (same as the sandpaper sizes). Then you grind with #120, #220, #320, #400 and then several very fine grades of aluminum oxide whose sizes are given in microns.
The idea is that each finer grade erases the pits left by the previous grade. Between each grade you must scrupulously clean yourself, the mirror and tool and your work environment lest a coarse particle get into a finer stage and cause a scratch.
With each grade the mirror and tool surfaces will become more and more accurately spheres, within the limits of the sizes of the grits. This is because a sphere is the only shape that allows two surfaces to be placed anywhere against each other in any position or rotation (a flat surface is the limit of this as the radius goes to infinity). If there are any high spots, they will get more pressure and grind off quickly; any low spots will miss out on grinding and the surrounding surface will come down to match.
Then you polish. You make a "pitch lap", using either another dental stone base or the glass grinding tool, covered with refined, thickened pine pitch. You cut channels in the pitch with a knife or mold them in with a silicone mold. Then you cover the pitch lap with a suspension of cerium oxide in water, or else ferrous oxide (same as rust but finely powdered - "jeweler's rouge"). Then again you stroke the mirror on the pitch lap.
During fine grinding and polishing you use shorter strokes, and alternate which is on top, the mirror or the tool, to keep the depth constant. You also stroke a little side-to-side, in a W pattern. This evens everything out.
To test the mirror you use the Foucault test or the Ronchi Test. The foucault test appatatus I link to is much fancier than you need, although nicer to use - you can do it all with your naked eye and the tester, you don't need a camera.
In each test you use a light emanating from a pinhole or narror slit just to the side of the center of curvature of the mirror. The image of the pinhole or slit will form an equal distance to the other side, where you can place a knife edge (Foucault) or screen (Ronchi) across it and hold your eye there and look at the mirror.
It's kind of hard to explain but each of these has the effect of dramatically magnifying deviations from spherical surfaces in the mirror. A dramatic demonstration is to have someone hold their hand in the beam - you can see the distortion in the beam caused by the warm air rising from their hand.
You can easily make out a bump or hollow that's a fraction of a wavelength high on the glass.
Then you make your mirror perfectly spherical by preferentially polishing off the high spots. If you did the fine grinding and polishing well you won't have to work hard to do this.
Unfortunately what we want is a parabola, not a sphere. This must have a precisely controlled error in each test. This is a little more than I want to get into, but basically your preferentially polish out the center of the mirror so it's deeper in the middle than appropriate for a sphere by a little bit. Get it just right and you have a parabola, and your mirror will focus perfectly.
Then you package it securely and send it off to one of the people who does vacuum aluminization. They clean the mirror extremely well, place it in a high vacuum, and evaporate aluminum off of tungsten wires. The aluminum vapor sticks to your glass and you have a telescope mirror.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
You've all seen the big blue Meade scopes, the 8", 10" and maybe a 12" down at "Nature Store" and places like that. All those scopes (all these are SCT's, or Schmitt Cassegraine Telescopes) and the Celestron SCT's have a pretty mediocre reputation for quality. However, people say the 9.25" model is a winner. It has a differently designed set of mirrors than the other common SCT's available.
... owns me. Not really, but I admire and respect him massively. His statements on individuality, the nature of role models, and self-determination are rare and precious these days. That, in addition to what he's actually DOING - he amazes me. I wish him the best.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
Let me tell you a little story about history. Once upon a time, there was a country in mainland Europe. They elected a guy to the top job who had a funny mustache and only one testicle. This guy wanted to kill my parents, and a dozen or so million people with last names like my parents'.
There was another country floating just off the coast of Europe. This country elected a guy to the top job who was determined to appease the aforementioned nutless wonder at all costs. And then there were a few more countries which set up puppet governments to do whatever the euunich said for them to do.
So there's something in the American mindset that there's always something better if we just go and actually look for it. That brought us out of Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, etc, saving us and our children from having to live with the likes of you.
Some people are happy with taking a stream of sewage and calling it a river, or are happy with having no power themselves. Some people like living in apartments and being dependent on public transportation for their whole lives. Some people like to fork over two-thirds of their paychecks. Some people can't stand the thought of even the very existence of a wilderness big enough to get lost in. Heh. In my state, they don't last long west of I-25.
So, you're damn right we're restless. There's ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS a better way, if man only has the drive and the imagination to find it and learn it.
I mean, if NASA doesn't really care about Aeronautics or Space, someone has to. It's good to see that this guy is into it enough to actually do something with it.
Yeah, the FAA is going to shit bricks. They're more Administration than Aviation anyway. And he's in the PNW, home of some genuine silliness. Some crystal-wearing posie sniffer is probably going to stumble on this, think "rocket=missile=weapon=nuclear," and go truly apeshit and try to chain herself to the rocket.
But just the same, this needs to be done.
So, where does he want the donations sent? I'm not an engineer, and the only physics I know are the ones involved in firearms and traffic accidents, but I have a few buck to throw in.
That bit at the top would make sense, but you didn't enter the war until 1942 or something stupid like that (when the Japanese performed an excellent raid on Pearl Harbour). We'd already been fighting for 3 years (and beat off the german air force).
Here's a suggestion: Why not actually go and read a history book (not one produced in the US) and see if you get a different perspective.
You mean one spouting some revisionist view of World War 2, the kind that's so popular with many Europeans these days? You people do so love to rewrite history to suit yourselves, especially when there's any sort of humiliation involved....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Oh no, we tolerate our fellow countrymen just fine. It's the fact that we have to share the planet with a bunch of arrogant Europeans that drives us to explore space.
Sadly, moving to a new continent proved only to be a stop-gap measure. By creating the internet we managed, much to our dismay, to bring European hubris and ego right back into our living rooms.
It's no wonder private citizens are looking for a way to leave the planet.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
You could go and buy an expensive telescope, but unless you're really devoted to what you're doing you might find that you don't use it after a few months. You'll probably just find that it's bulky, heavy and awkward to carry around. Especially if you don't have anywhere convenient to set it up.
I'm currently the membership secretary of a local society. We have a deal with a local science shop to sign up new members as they buy telescopes. If we can't get these people and drag them in, they're usually no longer members after a year because they never really got involved enough in astronomy to understand how to find things and enjoy it properly.
They look through it a few times expecting to see a brilliant time-lapsed artificial-colour image out of a book or magazine, then get very dissappointed when it's just a faint, barely visible blur. To really appreciate seeing most things involves lots of time to sit down and observe something, learn what it looks like, and having looked long enough you'll slowly start to see new things.
You can almost never look at a galaxy and see a brilliant image in ten seconds. You have to look at lots of galaxies and understand how to look at them, and then they start to look like brilliant images - but albeit in a way that most people don't see.
It's also a bit offputting that it gets so cold at night and you usually have to be organised and know how to define what you're doing to survive out there for hours without getting bored and cold. There are only so many things you can find without knowing what to look for, and there's only so much that a book can teach.
I'd recommend first finding and joining a local astronomy club or society. Turn up to the meetings, get to know some people, and look through other people's telescopes. Going observing with other people is lots of fun. It's not just a social thing, you also get to learn from other people how to do and enjoy nearly everything. Then you get to show them things afterwards.
Arrange to borrow telescopes if and when you can so you can get a good idea of what sort of thing suits you best. It might sound boring at first, but I reccommend getting a small one to start with. There's heaps of things you can see with small telescopes when someone's there to show you how and where to look. Often there's more to see, because the things you look at are much more common an obvious.
Don't bother with a motor drive and expect to use it much. If you want to just key in positions and let the scope find stuff for you, you're missing out on lots of experience that is valuable for nearly everything else. Learn the constellations and star names, because they're the first part of using a star map to find your way around the sky.
Have fun.
===
Note the sequence of ISS images -- some are blurry, but one in the sequence is sharp.
Ground based telescopes are limited by convection cells that roil the image. Anybody who's looked at a planet through a small telescope pushed to the limits of its usable magnification has seen this.
However, there are brief instnaces where you happen to be looking through a patch of stable atmosphere, as can be clearly seen in the image sequences -- one is much clearer than the others. Ron Dantowitz from the Boston Museum of Science discovered the technique of using individual video frames (actually he used half frames from an NTSC CCTV camera) to get unprecedented resolution images of satellites from small telescopes. For instance he has taken ground based pictures of the shuttle where you can see whether the cargo bay doors are open or closed. He put images of spy satellites on the web and got a prompt visit from some NSA spooks who wanted to know how he got them. The cool thing about this is that works in broad daylight, so you don't have to be up freezing your butt off after midnight.
here are some samples, unfortunately without captions, and here are a few with captions.
The ISS pictures in the article were even better; perhaps the state of the art has advanced, or the observer was lucky.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some people are happy with taking a stream of sewage and calling it a river, or are happy with having no power themselves. Some people like living in apartments and being dependent on public transportation for their whole lives. Some people like to fork over two-thirds of their paychecks.
You're talking about New Yorkers, right?
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
He's only going 30 miles up? What's the point, then? It's not even edge of space. (Space being defined somewhat arbitrarily at 50 miles).
I have recently bought a telescope, a skywatcher newton 130mm F5 on a EQ3 mount and accessories, for the price I paid (392$CAN) I can assure you it is a fantastic piece of equipment! You can see some pictures on my website and links where I bought it.
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I was reading in a recent Sky & Telescope about a German teenager who got some pretty good pictures of the ISS + shuttle with a 4 inch (!) 'scope and a webcam. Found his website here.
in french and english, explain everything on webcam for astronomy, how to setup various model, special driver to allow long exposures, "blackening" the CCD and remove this "black" image from the image you've taken, etc, very very good site here at astrocam http://www.astrocam.org/ (don't know why but i cannot put the link with a A tag)
Another site with special webcam for astronomy is SAC
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I don't know what scares me more - him designing this himself, or a rocket designed by slashdotters...
Just make sure to launch the thing in a *very* remote area.
It's going to take more than 12 bottles of champagne to put him out.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Maybe I should be paranoid.
--
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
hmm, reminds me of a hitch hiker quote... America is a finite space. The universe is infinite Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, therefore America doesnt exist. No wonder they're going to space :)
2001 Darwin awards. I mean, really. Strapping yourself to a rocket that you built in your back yard, anticipating that with a successful launch you're going up 30 miles?
He's going right next the the guy who did tanning with the Microwave transmitter.
you also get to learn from other people how to do and enjoy nearly everything. Then you get to show them things afterwards.
now thats my idea of fun!
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
Oh, yes, quite amusing. Like Brits and Russians claiming they'd still have won the war without American help. Now *that's* to die for. Guess they just plain forgot about Lend-Lease and where they got all the raw (and often finished) goods to continue fighting the good fight. Without Lend-Lease the Brits would've folded from blockade (or eventually the incessant bombing) and the Russians would've been pushed back behind the Urals.
No doubt scholars such as yourself will claim that American aid was inconsequential, and Lend-Lease was just a 'blip' in the conflict.
It's a real laugh to think that Britain would've been able to pursue a ground war against the Germans *by themselves* on the Western Front. Only the most foolish could even think that a real possibility. Dunkirk was a prime example of just how well the Brits did on land.
And don't forget all the countries that rolled over, showed their bellies, and then *contributed* to the German war effort from conquest until liberation. Love to hear those folks go off on how they aided the German, ahem, Allied effort.
Let's not forget about the French - lasted all of 6 weeks, did you? Managed to forget about "Vichy France", eh? Oh, there was the Resistance, yes! Which was so ineffective and littered with German sellouts that American intelligence often required independent confirmation before acting on anything the Resistance told them. The French were complete flakes from beginning to end (Napoleon is rolling over in his grave, I'm sure).
Hell, the Eastern European rebels were far more effective at tying down German troops and supply lines than the French and British combined.
But then, being anti-American seems to be a way of life for some Europeans, so much so they'd rather remember history in a 'different light' - one where they weren't losing WW2 until we Americans decided to lend a hand.
Really - the next time the Germans decide to kick your ass I hope we decide to sit it out. Let Europeans manage their own affairs (which mainly seems to be along the lines of ignoring regional conflicts at all costs, a la the Balkans) and whoever shakes out as the winner, that's who we'll sell to. Who cares who's in charge in Europe so long as they buy from us? It's not like any European power will ever have what it takes to actually threaten the U.S. of A.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Lend-lease was *never* paid for. Or did you forget that the Brits decided that America had a 'moral imperative' to lend a hand, and thus had no right to ask for repayment? The Brits *forgave themselves* the loans. That's an historical fact. Hitler suing for peace! Bah! What nonsense! No doubt along the lines of 'peace in our time' and 'we'll stop with the Sudetenland, honest'. Jesus Christ, what tripe are they teaching in European schools these days? Hitler wanted time to build up a decent fleet so he could kick the shit out of the Brits on the island, which he knew he could easily do given their abysmal performance in the European theater (that is, until they ran like dogs with their tails between their legs). Hmmm...I think I've been taken by a troll. No one with the facts at hand could actually believe the crap you put forward as fact. Time to stop being strung along. max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Lend-lease was *never* paid for. Or did you forget that the Brits decided that America had a 'moral imperative' to lend a hand, and thus had no right to ask for repayment? The Brits *forgave themselves* the loans. That's an historical fact.
Hitler suing for peace! Bah! What nonsense! No doubt along the lines of 'peace in our time' and 'we'll stop with the Sudetenland, honest'. Jesus Christ, what tripe are they teaching in European schools these days? Hitler wanted time to build up a decent fleet so he could kick the shit out of the Brits on the island, which he knew he could easily do given their abysmal performance in the European theater (that is, until they ran like dogs with their tails between their legs).
Hmmm...I think I've been taken by a troll. No one with the facts at hand could actually believe the crap you put forward as fact. Time to stop being strung along.
max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I moved 400 miles away just to get the hell away from my parents and i like them. YOU im tring to get off the damn planet about. ;)
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.