I was at an Instruments and Imaging section meeting of the BAA this weekend and two of the talks were about Robotic Telescopes. The Bradford scope is actually, on Mt Teide and is free to use. Nick James talked about the Faulkes North scope which the BAA has had very bad results with - not the scope - the weather and the infrastructure. When it works however, it is utterly awesome.

These are two results I've had with the Bradford scope ( www.telescope.org ) - I'm really not an observational astronomer, and I think there are bugs within the system up at Teide, it's tracking isn't great over exposures > 60 seconds on the scopes camera - but these are two results I've had - NGC2903 and Comet Lovejoy. The first is with the 'galaxy' camera (the 14" scope) and the second with the 'cluster' camera (a 200mm Nikon lens)

NGC2903 is a combo of 2 minute exposures in R, G, B and clear - and Lovejoy is a 60sec exposure in R, G and B.


Both are Copyright © University of Bradford. (it's free to use, so I think that's fair enogh!)

I'm going to give myself $100's worth of time at Global Rent A Scope and try and get something better of Lovejoy, see how it goes

Doug

Certainly not enough difference in those sundial images to say if there was any sort of event. With the major cleaning events near Larrys Lookout it was obvious - streaks of blown dust behind objects and half the magnet blown clear.

Doug

I'm really looking forward to a ramp-up of info about the Phoenix payload before launch ( the typical Science briefing etc etc ) as I think some people - even people here - will be suprised just how much they've got going on in there.

Doug

I think it's been multiple modest events - 800 is astonishing really.

Doug

Are you sure you're talking about small thermal driven DD's STP? It's the heat of the early afternoon that triggers them.

Maybe you're right - but until I hear differently, I'm going on the science teams words.

Doug

It's not packed solid cloud though - it's bitty, hazy perhaps -not full on blanket covering. Certainly enough to let the reflection through

Doug

It's a specular reflection off a lake in Uraguay or Argentina I think - if you run through all the images you can see it very very clearly.(when I say all, I mean every image, i.e. r, ir, g, ir, v..etc etc)

Just guessing - but my initial thoughts were that rough oceans with large amplitude waves dont produce a pin sharp specular reflection from the sun. A small lake - which could be almost totally flat - would produce a sharp specular highlight.

APOD - Sweet - I had no idea

Doug

Someone's spent a lot at Realspacemodels


Doug

tall and big are different things

If you've got deposition for long enough, at some point, perhaps helped by a gust of wind - there will be that one bit of sand that just tips the balance and off you go

Doug

Ahh - way over there - got it - thanks Mike.

Doug

JunoCam is a MARDI rip off isn't it? 1600 x 1200 RGB framing camera.

Doug

Phone directory : Seal, D



On a serious note - I've looked for something similar in the past purely for fun and not come across anything really.

Doug

I can't see Mardi? It must be there - I thought it was bolted onto the side of the bus, looking a bit like an extra thruster. Has it been moved inboard to look thru that circular cut in the bottom of the bus?

Pictures of spin testing minus the heatshield. I'm hoping the de-stack the lander from the backshell so that the excellent KSC photo guys can get some great shots of the lander before August. I'm guessing they do a spin balanace of the stack minus the heatshield now to get an idea of what balance ballast needs to be fitted to the heatshield so that when they do a spin test of the stack again before launch - all should be spot on.


Doug

No ISIS for windows...it's one of the reasons I just bought a MacBook

Which, hopefully, I'll be attending.

The problem with Oportunity is of course that stuck arm heater, which will pull, I think, 150Whrs in a night. Were it not for that, 800Whrs is the sort of figure where you could stay up every night to do at least two Odyssey passes every Sol. When much of the science campaign is pancam intensive, bandwidth is the constraint DAMN YOU STUCK HEATER!

Doug

I plan to do to NEAR what I've done to the Galileo E1 flyby - but I think there might be something a bit broken with NEAR MSI FITS and img2png - and I'm not even going to attempt it if I have to load each frame individually

As with the Galileo flybys, I've only really seen them put together as a movie at low res. The reason I did the Galileo one was to see it at the full res - and I think the effort was worth it.

Doug

I think the main place were this could be usefull is watching updates come down the pipe, on my new shiny MB, its only 1280 x 800 or something, so I'd quite like to wach the updates come down at, say, 50%.

Oh, and the rover model's crap. Who made that? I'd take it out

The only other thing I can't spot is the more verbose image generation options of 1.x - I didn't have anaglyph generation turned on, but I wanted Colour images to be made - but it seems 2.x just has "generate images" with a tick box option.

It's crap - go fix it



It even had people rubber-necking on the train today muttering to one another in a "what the hell is that...that's cool" sort of way.

DougBook

Well Mastcam is something like 1280 x 720 up to, I think, 5fps. To be honest, I can't imagine 30fps on Mars being THAT usefull. Be it your rover moving, or something happening on the surface of Mars, not much happens in a 30th of a second

Not saying it wouldn't be awesome - but 5fps HDTV res is enough for me for now (and enough for MRO relay as well I'd guess )

Doug

I'd love to know what the very first pancam - the rotating push-broom affair first proposed by Sqyures et.al. for Pathfinder - was really like - what the results might have been like.

Doug

The page has been updated with my Galileo efforts

That Earth 1 flyby I've only ever seen as a tiny .mov or .mpg - so I had a hack at it - every 4th(ish) frame - at full res. Quite pleased with the results.

While doing that, I also found an Earth-Moon conjunction observation from the Earth 2 flyby that is very Cassini-esque

The Earth 2 flyby data is, on the whole, ruined by dropouts for some reason - truely tragic as it would have been spectacular !!

Alan stood at the bottom of the Atlas V was one of the most interesting pieces of footage I've ever seen. I always thought "Shuttle Big...Atlas V small...Delta 2 tiny"...Ooooooo No.

Doug

I used to live in the Cotswolds, quite a long way from the Sea
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&...&iwloc=addr

We were a few hundred metres above sea level - and when you dug in the garden you would find massive limestone rocks full of fossil shells. A symptom of the fact that the whole area used to be underwater when sealevels were much much higher. I found hundreds and hundreds of things like this - http://www.mii.org/Minerals/Minpics1/FossilLimestone.jpg

I don't imagine there would be any danger in some science being lost by a housing development - but there would be no harm in colllecting a few, noting where they came from and visiting a local museum or university to ask them about it.

Doug

Sounds like a symptom of a sluggish machine that can't play a big anim-gif - I can make a .mov of it tonight now if I'm a bit cheaky at work waiting for videos to render that should solve the problem for you as long as you can play quicktime movies. One option - save the gif and load it in Quicktime. Other option - just load the attached quicktime movie instead

Doug