There’s something to be said for a night sky with so many stars that Sirius doesn’t stand out quite so much.
Category: Tech
No Comet For You!
I had hoped that the darker skies near San Simeon on the central California coast would have made it easier to spot Comet Lulin, but no such luck. First the clouds rolled in around sunset. I checked around 9:45 and they’d cleared enough to see very clearly out toward the ocean, but the lights of town were directly below Leo, so I drove down the highway a few miles to a scenic viewpoint with a wide parking area, stopped the car, and tried not to let passing traffic ruin my dark adaptation.
Once again, no luck spotting the comet (though I’ve at least determined that the bright spot next to Saturn was just a star), but an excellent view of the stars. And I spotted 4 or 5 meteors during the ~30 minutes I was out there, all in the direction of Orion and Canis Major. (One of them, maddeningly, flashed by just moments before one of my photos started.)
I did manage to catch an airplane as it transited in front of Canis Major and Orion, shown in this photo. (I should have called it a UFO.) And the view was far better than any night sky in suburbia, so the side trip was absolutely worth it!
Leo, Saturn… and Comet Lulin?
I figured I’d try spotting Comet Lulin from my back yard. I found Leo and Saturn easily enough, but just couldn’t see anything that looked like a comet. It should be a little to the right of Saturn, going by Sky & Telescope’s chart.
Too much light pollution, I guess. And unlike the Bad Astronomer, I didn’t have any binoculars to try a closer look.
On the plus side, I did spot a meteor out of the corner of my eye, off to the left of this field.
Figuring the camera might pick up something I missed, I took a few long exposure shots, running 15 seconds with the equivalent of ISO 1600. There’s a dot next to Saturn, but I’m not sure if it’s the comet or a star.
I’ll have to try again in San Simeon. Light should be much less of a problem, though clouds might be an issue.
WordMess
Must remember: No pasting from MS Word into WordPress. It’s faster to paste plain text and redo formatting than clean up Word’s mess.
Reclaiming BlogExplosion
I haven’t written much about BlogExplosion in a long time. I participated a lot for a few months, then kind of left it alone for a while, until I came back to it last year when I launched Speed Force.
Sadly, in the last few months its owners seem to have abandoned the site to let it run on autopilot. Most of it is automated, but there are features that require administration: approving new blogs and banners, moderating the forums, etc. The few volunteers with the ability to approve submissions are swamped, the main page promotes features that no longer exist, and the forums are overrun with spam.
In the past two months the community has attempted to take back the forums by out-posting the spammers, and it seems to be helping, but it’s not enough. The next step is a letter-writing campaign to convince BlogExplosion’s owners to at least delegate some authority to community volunteers who are willing to put in the effort to take care of the site.
Rather than send the form letter, I decided to write my own, and sent the following this morning:
Spamisch
Excerpt from weird mixed German/English comment spam: “Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.”
Reading Comics on the Phone: Hexed on the G1
There’s been a lot of talk about digital distribution of comics lately, what with declining print sales and shrinking distribution channels. In particular, the idea of comics on the iPhone has produced a lot of discussion, with iVerse Media distributing a number of comics from small publishers like IDW and Boom through the iPhone Marketplace. Not having an iPhone, I haven’t been able to check them out, but they’ve just released their first comic for the Android operating system, which runs my current phone, the T-Mobile G1.
I figured, hey, this one’s free, why not check it out?
Finding and Downloading
The first problem I had was finding it. But that’s mostly the fault of the Android Market, which can only be browsed by hierarchy and sorted by date or popularity. Fortunately, there’s a search function, so I just searched for “Hexed” and it turned up immediately.
It took a while to download even over 3G, so I let it sit and came back to it when I had time to take a break.
