The Huygens probe lives! According to the Cassini-Huygens mission site, data has been flowing from the Titan probe and some images have been released:
I’m sure bookies had been taking bets for a while whether Huygens would encounter a liquid or solid surface. Now we know. Hope whoever took the odds on solid ground is happy.
It’s the holidays, so it must be time for Zoo Lights at Lincoln Park Zoo!
More pictures are available in the gallery.
A hearty congratulations to my long-time friend Kathy on her wedding over this past weekend
Liz and I also took more pictures
Thanks to Eric for bringing this little amusement to our attention (you must click on the hyperlink for this to make any sense).
What struck me about this wasn’t, surprisingly, seeing a crashed Windows box. No, I’m wondering, why are they running a garden-variety, general-purpose OS there in the first place? For one thing, a video display is a fairly single-purpose device, no need for the full-blown capabilities of Windows. For another, given that a major reason to have such video boards is to generate advertising revenue–which doesn’t flow if there are no ads playing!–wouldn’t it make sense to have an OS that is optimized for fault-tolerance, such as something used in military or space applications?
A unified image is also available. All images were taken outside my apartment using only a tripod and a 200-mm f/4.5 lens with my Pentax *ist D operating at ISO 800, with exposure times ranging from 1/180 to 1/4 second. The images were composited using The GIMP; they were adjusted slightly for intensity variations but no processing was performed beyond that done by the camera itself.
What’s sad is that we carved this, tonight, one night after seeingthe first Christmas commercial of the season….
A digital camera is great! It’s not only a precision optical gadget, with its own quirks and terminology…it’s also a small computer! Fun for several facets of my geekiness.
Hey, I can even use it to record the goings on in my life, maybe I should try that now…
After my earlier trials and tribulations with my recently acquired Pentax *ist D, I finally received it back today and in working order. Hooray! So nice to be able to test out various things rather than simply reading the manual. The funny thing is that I believe I will need to unlearn much that I took for granted with my old K-1000: the new camera has lots of buttons and settings that either take care of exposure settings automatically or allow me to tweak them with fingertip controls.
I especially like the ability to not only ratchet up the detector sensitivity (all the way to ISO 3200, if I’m willing to deal with extra noise) but also automatically adjust the color balance, for that allows me to actually take some decent indoor photos where a flash would be bad:
As an added bonus, it was almost trivial to set things up to get the images off the camera…on Linux! Why not go the easy route and use Liz’s Windoze box and the software that came with the camera? Well, the two-processor Linux machine in the closet is the only one that has USB connectors on the front. So, that machine is now set up to automount the camera CF drive when it’s plugged in (thanks to the mass storage driver hich appears to work flawlessly), and a few more minutes of configuration set up my other Linux box to automount that partition. Then, a quick munge of the Samba configuration and voila! Plug the camera in, access the files from anywhere on my network.
Finally, I took a quick set of test photos of the night sky using the camera’s RAW image format and was able to convert them to FITS format using Dave Coffin’s dcraw program and ImageMagick. Gotta love open source! And, while the camera’s on-board processing of images is quite good, especially for general-purpose photography, it’s nice to know that when I want to do some fancier processing–especially for astrophotography–I can manipulate the pixel values however I see fit.
Saw this picture while reading
Sky & Telescope on the El this week, and it just seemed too cool not to share:
It’s also worth checking out some of the other images of this object to see how it has evolved over the course of many months. Seeing extra-solar-system events evolve so dramatically on such short timescales is a rare treat.
Normally I’m not overly impressed with the Sun, the inner planets, or spacecraft in Earth orbit–my astronomical focus is on galaxies and larger structures, after all–but this image from APOD is just way cool:
