I went in for my 3 month checkup today and am at 20/20! The right eye’s a little worse than the left, but that was the case even before the surgery. I just can’t put into words how happy I am with the results I’ve gotten. I went from 20/1000 to 20/20. Thank you Dr. Tylock
Monthly Archives: January 2005
The new focuser came in
So after the JMI Motofocus died I ordered a Meade #1244 electric focuser. I just finished installing it and it checks out just fine. The nice thing is that it connects into one of the accessory ports on the ETX-90’s base which allows me to control it from the Autostar handbox instead of having a separate controller. I’m going to send the MotoFocus back for repairs and then will probably sell it off on Astromart.
And in true astronomy fashion, it’s clouded over and raining, so no real sky test until this weekend.
Today I was unprofessional
I just hope that one day I can come up with a zinger of this quality.
Transmission problems
I’ve got a puzzle to solve now. My transmission has started acting up. It won’t downshift to first without a bit of fiddling, it’s like the shifter is being blocked. But if I go from second to neutral and then try it’ll drop right in. I posted a query to the Sportster List and the responses that I’ve gotten so far are pointing me towards the primary chain. So it looks like I’ve got another project for this weekend.
The Passion of the Christ
I just finished watching The Passion of the Christ. Yes, I know, I’m a little late. But I finally got around to watching it to see what all the excitement was about. Well, it’s an OK movie, but certainly takes quite a few liberties with historical accuracy, it was way too violent, and theologically it just doesn’t mesh with what my faith teaches me actually happened.
Lets address the violence first. Yes, I know some of you are going to be all up in arms about what I’ve just said, but hear me out. There is plenty of historical evidence to back this up. The Romans were great bureaucrats and left surprisingly detailed records of their policies and procedures. We have a number of these that detail the torture methods that were employed in that time, and based on all of them, Mr. Gibson went overboard on the scourging.
Also, there are also a number of cultural issues, such as Christ speaking latin when the language of the Roman Empire in that area would have been greek. Here’s a great paper, written by a couple archaeologists that discuss a number of those issues. It’s titled Two Archaeologists comment on The Passion of the Christ and was published by the Archaeological Institute of America.
Now we get to the crucifixion itself. The shots of the Romans driving the nails through Jesus’s palms were completely wrong. The greek word used can mean either hand or wrist, but there’s a bunch of historical evidence that points to the wrist. Here’s an abstract of a paper written by a few doctors and published by the AMA: On the physical death of Jesus Christ. To sum it up, it was a violent, painful, and slow way to die.
And as for the theological issues, here’s a page hosted by Holy Ghost Orthodox Church that has a collection of links that sum it up better than I possibly could.
Saturn images
I went back out tonight and had a go at imaging Saturn. There’s a pretty big learning curve with this stuff, and I definitely need to practice some more. But, once I gave up trying to image with an Alt/Az setup and went back to polar alignment it all started working. I did two takes on Saturn. The first was 500 frames, using the LPI software to track and combine the individual frames. That got saved as a set of FITS files (separate red, green, and blue channels) which I then combined into one full color image. The second was 291 frames, saved as BMPs and then stacked using RegiStax. I used all defaults in RegiStax, but will play around with some of the other options later. Both turned out really well, IMO, but one of the biggest problems I had was focusing, and until the new electric focuser comes in it’s going to be difficult. In addition, the dew was awful and I had to use a hair drier a few times. I’ve got to find a better solution than that.
All frames were taken at 0.354 second exposures, 100 gain, 40 offset, min quality 50.
They’re also in the 09 Jan 2005 album
My first LPI images
Since the weather was so nice today I decided to drag the ETX-90 out and give the LPI a try. It was tough dealing with the glare on the laptop screen, but since most of my photography will be at night that’s not a big deal. I finally got the Sun centered and focused and started shooting. I goofed and left the ‘combine’ option on so I had some bad stacked frames that needed to be deleted. But after shutting that off, going to monochrome, and setting the save every frame option, I got some good shots. They’re over in my Astrophotography Album under LPI Images. I’m trying to organize these by date so go to the 09 Jan 2005 album.
Lebanese food
This evening I got together with a few friends at Byblos Lebanese Restaurant in Ft. Worth, just north of The Fort Worth Stockyards. The company was great, the food is always delicious, and they had live belly dancing. After a little searching I think I’ve found the website of the dancer who was performing, Zahara Raks. If it wasn’t her, I’ll correct it, but please take a look because she was great.
Stupid referrer spam
Grrr… I’ve wasted a good chunk of my time cleaning up a bunch of referrer spammers. They’ve now been banninated inside apache and won’t be getting anything but a 403. In case anyone’s interested, here’s what I’ve used to ban them (I’m obvously changing the domain names so that they don’t get any credit whatsoever).
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.foo.com/.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.bar.com/.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Edit it to suit your needs and then put it in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file.
Cold ride
Since the Jeep is still in the shop (and I really hope it’s done today) I had to ride the Sportster in. I’ve got to say that the new Fieldsheer jacket works well. I’ve got an approximately 21 mile ride to work, with the majority of it being done at over 50 MPH. With the weather being approximately 35 degrees and damp, I had on a light polo shirt, a sweatshirt, longjohns, jeans, chaps, and my winter gauntlets. The only part of me that got cold was the exposed portion of my neck. That I’ll be fixing, but overall that jacket was amazing, it kept me warmer and drier than I’d thought it would.