seanwillson.com

after waiting a few days the clouds finally broke so amy and i took the portaball out to the deck for our first star party. the conditions were less that perfect with slightly overcast clouds and less than ideal transparency but rather than wait for perfect conditions we were anxious to use our new toy.


the first object we trained the telescope on was the moon. the craters were popping out and the detail was amazing. the small craterlets and the craters within a crater were stunning. the views were light years better than the rental scope we used last year. i can’t wait until we can use the telescope on a clear night at a less light polluted observing site.


we also trained the telescope on mars, saturn, the orion nebula, a double star, and some other random stuff. the observing session wasn’t planned so we didn’t have a list of objects ready, we really just wanted to look at something. i’m going to start putting together some objects to observe from our light polluted back deck as well as our club observing sites. the first thing we really need to do is learn our way around the sky with the scope. i know my way around a bit but haven’t used those skills since earlier this year when i was supposed to receive the telescope. i have a lot to relearn.


we took a few pictures on the right just to commemorate the event.

the final step in securing my website was to install the movabletype blacklist module that allows me to block and easily remove and rebuild my web pages when someone posts spam to my blog. i didn’t think it was going to be as easy as it was to install, but i was wrong. i installed it, added the latest master blacklist file, and filtered my entire website in under 10 minutes.


i noticed that my rebuild mod is listed as a potential incompatibility with mt blacklist. i am looking into the problem and hope to resolve it shortly, if it is in fact a problem.


update — i updated my rebuild mod to now also include the changes needed for mt blacklist integration. i have created a zip that contains all of my changes for mt v2.65 and mt blacklist v1.62. if your interested in this release you can download it here or get more information on my rebuild mod page.

i upgraded the mt rebuild type mod that i wrote a while back to work with movable type 2.65. i haven’t created the patches yet but i do have the downloadable zip file up there ready for use.

i’m in the process of upgrading movabletype to version 2.65. if the site misbehaves for a bit i do apologize. i’m upgrading so i can make some changes to stop all of the spammers from posting in my comments. they’re really starting to anger me.

seems that the beagle 2 lander may have run into some bad luck and landed behind a crater at it’s landing site. it’s amazing that we can fly a probe to another planet let alone hit a target within 1 km of a location we’ve never really seen before. i still have to wonder though how we can put a probe in orbit light hours from earth (insert galileo and cassini), for months on end, without hitting any moons or asteroids yet we can’t choose a landing site without craters that block communications to earth.

once you know your latitude and longitude you should check out the interactive web planetarium software. you can get customized sky maps for use in your observing sessions or just to mess around with if your not into astronomy.

i was messing around with a bunch of astronomy planetarium and mapping software this evening and most of them needed exact latitude and longitude of your home to accurately map out the night sky. since i don’t own a gps unit i googled around and after forever and a day i found map o rama. you would think that most mapping sites would simply display the latitude and longitude of the source and destination but that would make to much sense. anyhow, just enter your address into map o rama and bam, you get the maps like the rest of the sites along with your latitude and longitude, enjoy.