DaveL59

2 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

I used to work with an Ng several years back.
The company's IT system insisted that names had to have at least three characters, so he had to make something up.
I've seen a few examples of long names being truncated, but that was the only one I've come across that was too short.

 

yep, similar where I was too in fact

13 minutes ago, Philip R said:

In my local supermarket many years past, one of the cashier's first names was Ng. I politely asked her how she pronounced it.

议员 ...this is the spelling of Ng in 'Chinese Simplified'.

must admit I did ask the rather enchanting YT but she said is easier to just do the same so as not to confuse everyone else in the office.

43 minutes ago, Ags said:

An interior decorator would call the look "honest".

tis patina innit, from the decades of storage of that big unpainted metal cylinder. Guess they're following the USA trend for Rat Rods

ahh you folks woulda loved the names of a few folks from the far east I've worked with in the past then, 2 letter names but no vowel, like YT or NG. We typically just called out as if we were saying the letters which they felt was better than us mangling it all up.

6 minutes ago, Dark Adaptation said:

What's that grey thing beside the capsule?  

Looks like one of my old mouse mats from 20 years back. That was grey and fabric covered, looked just like that after lots of use as it started to wear. Someone must've been dumpster diving and saved it just for a staged pic 😉 

14 minutes ago, Ags said:

They didn't do a very good job - the rockets don't even look the same!

The old ones sure looked more polished didn't they?

These new ones look like they're covered in rust, screams of kwaliti innit 😉 

seems it has arrived

Nasa's Artemis spacecraft arrives at the Moon - BBC News

tho that first pic looks like a model offset from an old mouse mat 😉 

A meteor put on quite the display over Norway on saturday night too

Watch meteor light up night sky in Norway - BBC News

7 minutes ago, DaveS said:

It's what it's made of 

so you gonna be getting the geiger counter out and letting us know what rads its putting out?

Sadly won't be enough to start generating your own leccy with it 😉 

heck it don't matter much what it looks like on the outside, it's a bit like a car, does it matter if it's turd coloured, you can't see that when you are sat inside looking out the windscreen 😉 

7 hours ago, Louis D said:

Smartphone cameras have built in HDR modes.  You'd think they'd have it in "space" cameras by now.  It's not rocket science (it's imaging science) to quickly take multiple images at multiple exposure levels and then use a bit of processing software to quickly combine them into an HDR image.

I expect tho that part of the problem in a scene as that one is that the close extra bright body of the ship is too extreme in the range for them to handle so be able to also pick out the marble. Same for the stars as the marble is too bright. Anything's possible tho but depends how much they could spend on the sensor and processor tech and fit the image into a small data stream. Not too bad an image tho given its limitations, hopefully they'll get better as the mission progresses.

8 minutes ago, Dark Adaptation said:

What moon? You mean that hologram in the sky?   The one that comes up every night and glitches sometimes so that it comes up in the day?

we're all living on a huge stage set I tell you, all roads lead back to here. Truman show on a large scale 😉 

oh dear, this don't sound good for future launches

might solve the starlink issue for our imaging friends tho 😉 

7 minutes ago, Dark Adaptation said:

Not a bad idea. Got any other Artemis conspiracy theories? 😂

was hoping others might chip in tbh. We're bound to be able to think up some more once it gets to the moon 😉 

That'd make things a lot easier than swapping eyepieces about.

I'll get that head into the post tomorrow for you too 🙂 

Just now, Dark Adaptation said:

We haven't had a bite yet...

yeah, fishing can be a right pain huh, bait's been in the water for ages already, maybe the flavour has been washed out and we need to renew it and re-cast?

hopefully she's offloading all her content to shift it elsewhere before that ship succumbs to the huge torpedo the chief tw@t (or is that twerp?) has fired at it 🙂 

22 minutes ago, Alan White said:

I thought they had done rather well with the varied cameras.
When you consider they are not specialist space cameras as well, just adapted or housed for space use.
Amazing and no need for a trip to Kodak as we had in the 60's and 70's ane even 80's.

yeah they have really, we're just having a little fun and perhaps baiting the conspiracy folks who might hit on the post on a web scan 😉 

3 minutes ago, Dark Adaptation said:

You would think that with all the work they put into it, they could at least have put the cameras in a good spot for photography. But then again, maybe they were just like "CAN WE PLEASE FINISH THIS!"

Nah the ESA had those built way ahead of time I think and 6 of them at that. I guess it depends what they were thinking to use them for. Perhaps if they'd used that fancy matt-black-zero type paint to kill reflections and just add some go-faster stripes so we could see the edges of the module it'd have gotten better piccies.

3 minutes ago, Dark Adaptation said:

Well, no, but this image is from now and we do have CGI. Doesn't it look weird to have blackness and then this illuminated metal surface? It looks almost like it was pasted on 😁

hehe yeah, I think a lot of the problem is no WDR, or at least it can't handle the very bright close surface so it's washing out. Lower shutter/exposure but enough to grab Terra in the background wouldn't be long enough to show any stars etc. Getting stars of course, longer exposure, total burn out of the ship in the image and likely flare across a big chunk of the pic too.

Maybe next time they'll fit the cameras in better locations 😉 

Just now, Dark Adaptation said:

Not CGI? That satellite looks a bit fake to me  Also marbles wouldn't be that distorted. 😉

Except I actually looked up the real image and that one's flatter, so.... 

 

we're talking NASA 60's tech here, CGI and supercomputers weren't around then 😉

Just read this which mentions the above account suddenly being restored, big brother is watching apparently

Is this really the end of Twitter? - BBC News

or someone maybe is...

24 minutes ago, Dark Adaptation said:

Ooh, that's nice...does the Earth look a bit distorted to anyone else?

ita a model with a marble sitting on a black velvet cushion 😉 

1 minute ago, Ian McCallum said:

The wooden tripod legs that came with it have an distance of around 27.5mm on the inside, so should be able to take that head.  Do you think it's still doable? If so, I can certainly pay the postage and anything else...

that's spot on for the width of the base segments and checking it could be 63mm on the ring part too. Almost makes me wonder if a scope like yours is what it came from tho I thought most of them were EQ mounted and this was older. Only thing with a long OTA is its a pretty narrow collar, 30mm band, so probably won't be the most stable thing esp compared to a double tube-ring setup, but would get you started till you can find something better.

Probably should take the conversation to PM to sort details, let me know whereabouts you're located and I'll have a look at what it'd be to ship and we can go from there. The head's FOC tho, its just a part sitting around here so if its useful to you I'm happy to send it on.

6 minutes ago, Ian McCallum said:

It's about 63.5mm in diameter. Would that fit at all? 🤔

It may do, is a couple mm over 60. No idea what old scope that came from as it was on an older wood tripod I bought some time back to "upgrade" the handling for the LT70AZ, so I just removed this head and fitted the legs to the Celestron one, which I've also since replaced with a sturdier Y fork type. The celestron won't help you tho as the OTA would need bolts in the sides as well as being a wider tube.

Your finder probably used one of the eyepieces that the scope does, I assume that's a 0.965mm opening/barrel? The one that came attached to my vintage 3-inch the finder has a fixed eyepiece, not managed to dismantle that tho but other 'projects' came along soon after and now back working so even less time.