I’ve always had an interest in astronomy and have dabbled in astrophotography since I got my first digital camera back in the late 1990s. Over the years I’ve got images of all the planets except Neptune and Pluto. The latter of these is never going to be an easy target for the lazy amateur (me), …
Category Archives: geeking
Poor Mickey
Sometimes when you’re looking around for something to scan in your new-ish CT scanner the answer just lands in your lap. I’ve been doing #xraymyadvent again this year, but thought I’d test out the new scanner with an item more in keeping with the scanner’s intended use. Searching around the lab I found no obvious …
Angular resolution of the dome of Planetarium of Majorca from Palma
WOW – what a clickbait title that is… Back from having spent a few days between Christmas and New Year in Palma, Majorca. On the last day there I noticed I could just see the dome of the Planetarium of Majorca (or the telescope dome, I’m not sure which) from the hotel terrace. Seeing conditions …
Continue reading “Angular resolution of the dome of Planetarium of Majorca from Palma”
De-capping ICs for fun and profit, but mostly fun.
Some time back, a friend @codfishcatfish was building a GPS disciplined oscillator for radio measurements. Part of the circuit uses a MAX232 device to interface the low voltage digital signals to a PC serial port. He found his cheap (from eBay) MAX232s got very hot and failed in use. It was obvious the devices were …
Continue reading “De-capping ICs for fun and profit, but mostly fun.”
Eclipse chasing
Can you really be an eclipse chaser if you’ve only actually chased one eclipse? My chased eclipse was August 1999 – south west England. Back in the mid 1980s I had a book of fascinating astronomical facts, it listed the dates of upcoming eclipses until the far-off Year 2000. I decided that I’d see that …