I do like a good eclipse, but not enough to be awake at 3am to photograph it. So, I set up a camera to take one picture every 30 seconds, pointed it roughly where I expected the moon to be at the time of maximum eclipse and set it recording. Stacking the images with StarStaX …
Category Archives: science
Perseids meteor shower
I watched the meteor shower from the field at the Secret Nuclear Bunker where a group of us were camped doing radio stuff including bouncing signals off the ionized gas trail left by burned up meteors (meteor scatter). I captured this time-lapse video which does include a few meteors as well as a pass by …
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 …
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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 …
RTLSDR + MatLab 2014b
Horribly geeky post, more for my own information than anything. Might help others. After installing MatLab 2014b on OSX, I thought it might be fun to see if it’ll work with an RTLSDR dongle – if you’ve a license you can download a driver package for the MatLab communication toolbox from Mathworks (No, I’ll not …