Quick night sky test with new camera

The sky is relatively clear tonight, so in prep for having the new camera at Berzerker, I took a few long exposure frames. An 8 minute exposure was just silly, the sky was completely white, and the corner of the frame with the garage in it looked like a badly overexposed image taken in daylight.

I tried to do some star trails, but even at 2 minutes the sky glow was getting bad so I won't be able to do any good star trails from this location (unless I get a lucky break and the power goes out over a wide area and the skies are clear at the same time - this unfortunately rarely happens - power failures are usually associated with cloudy skies).

So anyway, here's a 10 second exposure at ISO 1600, f/4.5. First, a 300% crop of Alcor/Mizar - yes, I can see some elongation of Mizar indicating the close double, and even a bit of a blob between the two and to one side, closer to Alcor, which is Sidus. Pretty impressive considering I took a wild, half-blind attempt at manual focusing by pointing at a neighbor's porch light. These are with the 18-55 kit lens, btw.



Here's the full frame. Click on it to go to the album for a larger version.

Very interesting insights into the health care reform debate

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.

36 minutes, but worth the time to watch.

Berzerker prep

Tom and I spent the day messing with PVC. We've got a workable breach-loading spud gun design and will have enough parts to make another 3 of them; I plan to help kids build their own if they want to.

Now we're messing with a couple of water bottle launch systems. I have a wire release system head built, we'll test that tomorrow after buying a few more PVC parts. That one uses #9 O rings in a filed groove, and the release is like what was in Make Magazine. It looks OK but I am not real sure the firing mechanism will work every time, though it will release very easily. The old system requires a very hard yank to get it to fire, and little kids couldn't manage it.

Tomorrow I'm going to build a wire-tie + slip ring release system on a tube with #94 O rings in a PVC/CPVC 5/8 x 7/8 system - that's what I've used in the past, I just couldn't find any CPVC in 5/8 OD at Lowes. I'm going to head to Jackson tomorrow and look there. I'm also going to try one of the zip tie/slip ring releases.

I'm not planning on putting the treb together this year. I'm not abandoning it, but I just didn't have the time to do any work on improving it and I don't think it's worth putting together in the same configuration as last year. So hopefully this will be more of a year for lounging around talking, helping other people on their projects, standing around taking pictures and kibitzing, and shooting off little Estes rockets and spud guns.