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Today I received a package with two Kokusai Kohku eyepieces. No sky over there, so no tests yet.
It was sent to me one month ago from Moscow, on December 12; within four days it was delivered to Novosibirsk (3000 km), but because of New Year fuss it was delivered from Novosibirsk to Berdsk (50 km) only after yet another 20 days. Russian Post is like that.
fgh repository has been moved to bitbucket.
New address is https://bitbucket.org/monoid/fgh/.
I’m bit late with my greetings, but I wish you all clear sky, crystal air and sturdy mount 🙂
New year locally started with partial moon eclipse. Maximal phase was at 1:22 (or something like that), so after celebrating we walked out to burn Bengal lights and watch the Moon 🙂 Outside temperature was about -30C. My friends in Bratsk watched it at -37C.
I’ve got 16mm tubes for my telescope. 16 mm with 1 mm wall should be enough.
And I also managed to register on CloudyNights — my registration was approved this time 🙂
Today I detached primary and secondary mirrors and their cells from the tube and measured their parameters.
Minor axis of secondary is 66mm, that means I can use normal focuser and get reasonable field.
Weight of secondary and spider is 470 g, but perhaps, I will rework it.
Weight of sitall primary mirror and cell is 4.6 kg. Primary mirror is 260mm, 27 mm thick, focal length is about 1175 (F/4.5), cell is 6-point.
I have completed my web-based twilight calendar written in JavaScript. It should work in any modern browser, but due to nature of application, something more advanced than Internet Explorer is highly recommended.
So, look at Twilight calendar.
I’m also working on drawing Moon rise and set (critical for deepsky observers), but my astronomical library currently doesn’t calculate it correctly.
We installed Geoserver 2.0 at work and found that it is ignores charset field for shapefile layers (to be exact, it reads DBF files in every single-byte encoding as Latin-1, be it windows-1251 or iso-88859-2). The problem is that geotools-2.6.0 that new Geoserver uses for reading shapefiles and DBF, was broken in attempt to optimize file reading.
My patch fixes it, and it seems that geotools-2.6.1 will be unaffected.
Almost month ago I ordered on Ebay book a by Kriege and Berry “The Dobsonian Telescope”, and today Russian Snail Mail finally delivered that package.
I was impressed by size of the tome — I expected it to be twice thinner. I decided to by this book after skimming through low-quality pirated e-book (yet another proof that pirated content is not an absolute evil), but I paid no attention to total page number (and of course, I couldn’t know that book is printed on very good paper).
Surprisingly, this “second-hand” book smells of fresh-printed paper 🙂
I bought this book for reason: I’m going to rebuild my “new” dob from scratch, using only mirrors, mirror cell and some parts of spider. While it has “mere” 10″ mirror, I’m going to use truss design for sake of mobility, as I have no car and will move telescope from room to balcony and back.
It was very successful event; I’ll write later — I’m just after journey…
Two days ago I returned from Omsk, center of Omsk region that is adjacent to Novosibirsk region where I live.
I took my small (8×30) binocular. When I arrived at morning 11 Sep, I watched Moon on morning sky.
Next day it was overcast, but when next night I went out at 4:00, I saw clear sky, Moon and good old Orion constellation! 🙂 Despite moon glow, it seemed to be more clear than last winter.
Next days it was overcast again.
Random notes about 42
