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well, camping this weekend was a bust of sorts. we still had a good time sleeping in the tent, hanging out with people, and seeing some beautiful sites. the state parks in wisconsin are really nice. i’ll admit that i haven’t been camping in a while but the showers were nice, clean, and even the outhouses were well kept and clean. heck they even had toilet paper.


we arrived late on friday after driving through heavy downpours. we set the new tent up with help from some party members. after hanging out and chatting for most of the evening the rain came in around 9:30 pm. about that time we all called it a night, we didn’t think it was going to clear up enough to see stars. the rain came down nonstop until about 5 am and was pretty rough most of the evening. needless to say we didn’t sleep that well. i could hardly sleep at all, my imagination kept wandering to mud slides and rain pouring into our tent. no worries though, we were perfectly dry, it was merely my mind playing tricks on me. we did get a bit wet though as we didn’t seal the seams. nothing a bunch of rags and a towel couldn’t handle though.


after talking it over we called an end to our weekend. we both really wanted to camp, do some astronomy, and we didn’t want to leave but at the same time we didn’t want to endure another evening of rain hell. it wasn’t supposed to clear up until monday night so we chanced missing some clear skies and drove home.


we learned a lot about what we need for future camping expeditions and we had a great time with everyone. next time we’ll have more camping tools (axe, hammer, etc), more tarps, more towels, a nice little stove, rope, and a few other odds and ends. i’m looking forward to doing some other astrocamping later this year. maybe next time we’ll have some clear skies.

i’ve been researching different astronomy star parties to attend for some good observing outside of illinois. while researching i found myself spending a lot of time compiling information i found through search engines and links on the internet. given how painful it was i decided to put it all together into one spot and make it available to others. so here it is:


public star parties — it’s a listing of all known astronomy star parties throughout the united states and canada. the link requires a standards based calendar application like apple ical (mac) or mozilla calendar (windows). you can also view the web version on my .mac account if you want.


if you know of a star party that isn’t in this list and should be, please let me know in the comments.

my astronomy club had another set of observing sessions this weekend and mother nature was kind enough to give us some clear skies. i ended up getting out about 9 pm and was slightly worried because there was a very large cloud front in the west. fortunitly it stayed west and seemed to be a north/south moving front as it stayed clear most of the evening. there were a few straggler clouds but other than that the seeing was great. i had a few things planned for the evening and while i didn’t hit everything on my list i hit most of it.

• jupiter — the staple planet of the early summer sky was out in full bloom tonight. jupiter’s moons were strung out like pearls of varying sizes against the velvet black of the sky. ganymede, callisto, io, and europa were all out tonight. i tried my new 5 mm nagler again but the seeing wasn’t steady enough. i’m beginning to see that this eyepiece is great for those once a year moments of perfect seeing but otherwise it’s pretty much unusable. maybe since i’m planning a few high end trips this year i’ll actually get some nice views out of it. the view in my 9 mm was much more pleasing.
• neat (c/2001 q4) — this was an early point of interest for the club this evening. you can always tell when there is something new and interesting in the sky when you walk up and the field of telescopes (8 - 10) are all pointing at the same object in the sky. i found the comet pretty quickly and really couldn’t take my eyes off it for a while. i had my 35 mm in and the view was amazing. the core was bright and highly visible and the tail was extremely long. this was the first comet that i’ve observed with this telescope or any telescope for that matter. i’ve always looked at them with binoculars but have never had the opportunity to use a telescope. needless to say the views were amazing with my 12.5” light bucket. after watching it for a while i wandered over to a few other club members scopes to see what kinds of views others were getting with their telescopes. it was clear that visual observing really takes center stage with larger aperture telescopes.
• m44 aka beehive cluster — i caught a glimpse of this open cluster on my way to seeing comet neat. the stars in the cluster were bright pin points of light. unfortunately i didn’t linger long as i was comet hunting.
• t lyrae aka hip90883 — this is a bright red carbon star near vega in the constellation lyra. with my wide field 35 mm in, this star pops out of the field of stars. it’s kind of foreboding being bright red in a field of white and blue stars. this is a must see if your in the lyra neighborhood. just center your finder on vega and then scan right a few degrees, you can’t miss it.
• m104 aka the sombrero galaxy — this spiral galaxy was a last minute object that someone wanted to view through my telescope. having not planned how to star hop there it took me a while to find it so i fumbled a bit. i still haven’t mastered the skill of hopping right from a star atlas to the eyepiece. i looked at this in my 35 and 9 mm eyepieces. this is definitely something i want to return to. there was a lot of detail in dust lane around the galaxies halo. a definite must try at high and mid powers when i get an eyepiece to fill my middle range gaps.
• m53 — this globular cluster lies within coma berenices which lies north of virgo and west of leo. this was an amazing globular that had so many stars i was at a loss for words. i dropped in my 35, 9 and 5 mm and the stars were jumping out of the eyepiece. i can see why earlier astronomers cataloged these objects and mistook them for nebula. on a lesser telescope this would definitely look like a single entity. there are few deep space objects in the sky that do their images justice but most globular clusters can do them justice and then some.
• m13 aka hercules cluster — this globular cluster lies within the constellation hercules. this was another amazing globular that had a sea of stars to look at. again i cycled through the array of my eyepieces and each had a better view than the other. there was a binocular viewer in our club who was having trouble finding m13 and asked me where it was. i had printed out a few charts this evening and this was one of the objects i wanted to look at. after telling him where it was i spun the portaball around and in less than 10 seconds had it in my eyepiece. upon telling him this he could believe it and had to see. needless to say the portaball’s versatility and nimble motions were impressive, almost as impressive as the views of m13. nothing truly compares to the blanket of stars that these globular clusters frame.

that was about it for last evening. i spent about 30 minutes fiddling with my collimation. i was having a hard time getting it to collimate regardless of how i placed my laser in the focuser. as long as i always placed it in the same way everything was fine. as soon as i put it in at a different angle or alignment it said that my collimation was out, which made no sense and still doesn’t. it shouldn’t matter how the laser is in the focuser, what matters is the path of the light. anyhow, i’m going to have to send an email off to peter or the yahoo portaball group on this one.


anyhow, it was another great observing session with low temperatures, no bugs, and clear skies. i had a great time and called it a night around midnight.

after the severe public backlash from movabletype weblog authors it seems that sixapart has decided to change their licencing/pricing scheme. they altered the sites and authors limitations in their various tiers to bring it more in line with their user-base. the change that effects me is that the low end personal edition now has 5 weblogs and 5 authors (up from 3 and 1) which brings it in line with my usage model. the pricing is still a bit high considering the feature set but i’m starting to think that i might give them a chance rather than jump. i’m going to look into it more and make sure that it fits my usage and make a decision from there. a few of the things i’m really looking for them to add are photo blogging, email posting support, and easier file uploading. time to think on it …

check out this cool in flight shot of spaceshipone breaking the sound barrier during one of their recent attempts at collecting the xprize.

even google’s getting into blogging by eating their own dogfood, and by that i mean blogger. i used blogger in the not so distant past but prefered hosting my own content management system rather than trusting someone else to “do the right thing” … seems that didn’t work out to well for me ahe?

if your into blogging you likely saw news earlier this week about sixapart changing their usage policy of their movabletype blogging tool. they’re changing the terms from a free usage policy, with donations accepted, to an overpriced tool that hasn’t seen a decent feature added in a few years. they released the news on their (in)appropriately entitled blog, “it’s about time”. lets just say people were less than pleased with the changes. yes, movabletype is one of the most popular blogging tools on the market but i’d be willing to bet that’ll be changing soon.


i personally use movabletype for two blogs, my wife uses it, and i have a few private less known blogs. if i were to go forth and throw sixapart some of my cash i’d owe them around $99.95 for the same exact features that i’m currently receiving for free. i find it very troubling that they’re sticking their hands out without having innovated or added a new feature since i started using movabletype almost two years ago. it would be different if i felt like they were progressing their feature set, but that’s far from the truth. don’t take get me wrong, i’m happy to support software developers that have applications i use and enjoy. i’ve done it with net news wire, unison, omnioutliner, and many others … heck i even donated to sixapart when i first started using movabletype. i just have a certain standard that sixapart hasn’t met with this new 3.0 release or the past few releases for that matter.


thus begins my search for a movable type replacement, stay tuned for all of the fun. maybe i’ll throw a redesign in at the same time.