15 minutes ago, dobblob said:

Also try Rent-A-Bat.com  .....

Oddly enough there were some droppings on the outer edge of the roof rails that looked like they could have been from bats.

James

11 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

You need an observatory spider (one specifically trained not to spin webs across tempting metal tubes)

I've had several of the variety that do :(

Next autumn it may be tempting to move the fly zapper from the beer shack into the observatory for a month or two.

James

I had to nip out to the observatory in daylight for the first time in a while and was shocked to find that what wasn't visible in the dark were the hundreds upon hundreds (literally) of flies that have decided to make it their winter home, mostly clustered together in the joins and corners of the roof.  So I took the hoover out and have just spent the last hour or so getting rid of as many of them as possible.  Not at all a pleasant job as once a cluster is disturbed it tends to drop off the roof and fall on one's head :(  I also discovered about half a dozen queen wasps that had decided it would be a good place to over-winter.

After a number of restarts when I thought I'd got them all only to uncover a load more I think I'm now done.

I've also discovered that I may have a leak into the warm room :(  I think it's where the coach screws holding down one of the roof rails has (intentionally) pierced the EPDM roofing and I haven't got it sealed up again properly.  I did fill all the screw holes with silicone sealant, but it looks like one of them didn't seal properly, so that's something I need to get sorted soon.

James

17 minutes ago, saac said:

I think it is  intuitive that the reach of a model must surely  be limited by the boundary conditions in which it was framed.

I'm sure this is not limited merely to physics.  But I bet it's quite often what has happened when you hear a scientist say: "Oh!  That's odd." :D

James

7 minutes ago, John said:

Supper consumed, the seeing is much, much better tonight

Here too.  Shockingly cold though.  Barely above freezing here now (by barely, I mean perhaps half a degree at most and still falling).  The weather has changed so rapidly that my body hasn't had time to acclimatise.  Event more of a shock having spent the last of this afternoon's daylight with the chainsaw, cutting a large trailer load of logs.  I was visibly "steaming" when I finished :D

Have to be grateful to see a clear sky lately though, whatever the circumstances.

James

I suspect there may be a fair bit of moisture in the air tonight.  We have a clear forecast for tomorrow night too.  As it looks like it's going to be quite chilly all day I wonder if conditions might be better tomorrow when the air has had time to dry out a bit.  I'm certainly expecting a fair dew and some frost in the morning given that it's below 1C here already.

James

It now says:

Oops!

AstroBin is momentarily unavailable.

This is most likely due to a quick service restart or a small maintenance window. Please refresh the page to try again!

Sorry about the inconvenience!

James

Indeed.  Quite a smart idea.

James

I'd suggest that you're looking at things the wrong way.  The mathematical models we build to describe the universe are exactly that: models.  That means they may not be a perfect fit for every possible situation, but it doesn't mean they're not useful.  Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its head, but that doesn't mean Newtonian physics was then useless; it was just "incomplete".  But for an awful lot of situations it was also absolutely good enough.  Perhaps it will turn out that Einsteinian physics is the same -- good enough to do even more stuff, but not good enough to explain every single thing we can measure.

Personally I've never really put "truth" and "science" in the same box.  Science is all about building models of the world we perceive that allow us to understand it and do useful stuff with it.  When science models nature so accurately that it isn't possible to tell the difference between the two then perhaps one might consider it "truth", but truth is very much in the eye of the beholder.

So relax, don't worry, have a beer   If Newtonian physics works for what you need, use it and be happy.  If Einsteinian physics does the job, dive right in and get on with it.  If neither is a perfect explanation of the universe yet still means your satellite doesn't fall out of the sky then it has achieved something even if it isn't a perfect description of the universe in which we exist.

James

I think PHD can help do drift alignment by getting you to make repeated corrections to the alt and az adjusters after tracking stars to the east or west, and south.  The better view you have to either east or west and to the south, the easier it is.

James

That is all, really.  There is still a fair bit of cloud around, but the way things have been of late it still feels like a success :)  If people hadn't been talking about the Lunar X yesterday I'd not even have an idea what phase it was.

James

On 16/08/2020 at 06:00, Rusted said:

Swarf collection should be attended to.

Just noticed this post.  You mean like this?

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/303133-thats-not-a-workstation-this-is-a-etc/page/3/?tab=comments#comment-3320492

James

19 minutes ago, markse68 said:

Mars had reached its highest elevation (is there a name for that?)

Zenith, I believe.

And a good sketch.  Well done.

James

16 minutes ago, Deadlake said:

Apparently this winter is go to as cold as the ones 10 years ago.

There's little sign of that over this side of the country.  We did have frosts three days in a row back at the start of the month which is quite uncommon, but I'm currently seeing fairly consistent daytime temperatures of over 10C which seems unusually warm given that we're barely a week from December.  As I have posted elsewhere, I was working outside in a t-shirt this weekend.  No jacket required, to quote, err, someone from the 80s :)

Wasps are still flying here too.  They should be well gone by now.  And whilst most of the trees have lost their leaves thanks to the last storm that blew through, the peppers and chile plants in my polytunnel are still hanging on to theirs.

It could all change of course, and to do so rapidly would be pretty consistent with the way the weather has been for the last few years.  The northerly winds  that often bring cold weather can also bring clear skies because the cold air can't hold so much moisture, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

James

(Yes, I know it was Phil Collins, by the way.)

10 minutes ago, DaveL59 said:

Looks like this here down south

And that's good seeing

James

Oddly, when I read the email of vlaiv's post (which doesn't contain the graphic when sent), at this point:

15 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

What are the odds for example that this imaginary unit that we "invented" fits perfectly within this identity:

I was certain that it was going to be the equation he posted :D

James

2 minutes ago, Ags said:

@vlaiv That's the best equation I have seen this decade! Does it have a name?

It's called Euler's Identity, if I recall correctly.

James

6 minutes ago, Paul M said:

But I maintain, without an ounce of evidence, that while every physical property of the Universe can be modelled, described and even predicted by mathematics, not everything that is theorised by maths need be a reality. In that vein I would offer String Theory; an esoteric construct with no physical counterpart.

Perhaps you don't even need to go as far as "String Theory".  Consider for example the square root of -1.  In the physical world it has no obvious meaning, but it's still a very useful concept in maths (and indeed in using maths to describe the physical world).  Those numbers involving the square root of -1 are perhaps more usually known as "complex" numbers, but are also sometimes called "imaginary" numbers.

James

1 hour ago, Jm1973 said:

Fearl0rd? Isn't that the guy who coded SharpCap?

I really don't think so.  That was/is Dr Robin Glover.  Though he could of course be "Fearl0rd" at the weekends.

James

Not to mention that it starred in a Bond film :)

James

That's such a shame.  I hope they can decommission it safely to allow the rest of the facilities to continue to be used.

James

Ah, right.  If you're running it from the GUI then yes, I can see that you might not get any errors.  I sometimes forget that people don't use the command line any more

As I say though, if @brown_rb is happy to give me access to the sources then I'll try to build an ARM version using cross-compilation as soon as I have time and donate the executables back to his project.  It's been quite some time (about 35 years!) since I last wrote any Pascal, but actually it may well not be required just to build and I still have a copy of Clancy & Cooper's "Oh! Pascal!" on my bookshelves.  Right between "Programming the Z80" and "Writing UNIX device drivers in C"

James

1 hour ago, fozzybear said:

James,

Robert has a Linux version written for Ubuntu. It was compiled in Lazarus Pascal v2.02

https://sourceforge.net/projects/arduinonanodewcontrollerpro/files/myDewControllerPro v300 3channel/CODE LINUX/

When I try and run the executable nothing happens on my RPi

That does appear only to be compiled into an Intel 64-bit executable though, not the ARM 32-bit executable you'd need for the RPi.  I'd guess there's no RPi executable because Lazarus Pascal doesn't appear to be available for the RPi.  Unless I've completely missed something.

However, it does look to be possible to cross-compile for ARM processors (ie. use an Intel-based system to generate ARM executables).  If Robert doesn't have the resources to do that himself and is willing to give me access to the source then I'm happy to have a crack at it once I've got the next release of oacapture out (hopefully that will happen before the end of the first week of December) and contribute the results back to his project.

It does seem odd to me that the executable just fails silently when you try to run it though.  I'd expect some sort of error along the lines of "this executable is for a different CPU".  What output do you get if you run "file X" where X is the name of the executable in question?

James

I used Dupont connectors for all of them so I could easily remove the board if I needed to.  I'm not 100% sure about the wire gauge, but I suspect it is 20AWG.

James

3 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

Has anyone got the Linux app working on Astroberry Debian. As it is Ubuntu version. I downloaded onto my Rpi Astroberry yet cannot for the life of me get it to work. Any ideas

I've not looked since I built mine, but at that time I think the controller application was only available for 64-bit Intel environments.  On the assumption that it is an ARM executable that you're trying to run, what error(s) are you getting?

James