Posts Made By: Brett Wylie

Could someone please post a few of their best images using the C14-Hyperstar system at full resolution. I'd like to see firsthand what the system is capable of. What I've seen on the net isn't that impressive. They look as if the arc second/per pixel, even with the 10xme, is a bit stretched. I just don't know if it's the system or the "net" that makes them look so. Any comments would be appreciated(before I buy).

Wondering how well Meade's new primary mirror lock down feature works; as tied with their improved mirror cell design(quote), and 4 speed baffle tube focuser?

Not the best, transparency so so with high clouds and some wind. @50% size. You can see the effect of the extended field reducer corrector (Meade 3.3 reducer 10" f6.3 SC + t-adapter = f1.9 focal length scope). It is fast. This is a single 4 min. exposure w/only ala Richarson-Lucy algorithim being run on it.

I get to spend 10k this coming year on a new mount with the following considerations...USED if I can find something..
1. @ least 100lb weight carrying capacity imaging
2. still portable (no part weighing more then 125 lbs.)
3. superb accuracy and ease of use(polar aligning, setup)
4. built to last
5. goto not required, but optical encoder digital setting circles are a must
6. interface with software(Maxim,The Sky, CCDSOFT etc.)
Could I have a top 5 list of favorites...?
Paramount me
AP 1200
Parallax
Losmandy GM Titan
Byers

Who armed Iraq? (excerpts from a Chronicle story)
Paul Rockwell Sunday, March 2, 2003
Iraq's Weapons Declaration underscores a tragic irony: The United States, the world's leading arms supplier, is taking the world to war to stop arms proliferation in the very country to which it shipped chemicals, biological seed stock and weapons for more than 10 years.
According to the December declaration, treated with much derision from the Bush administration, U.S. and Western companies played a key role in building Hussein's war machine. The 1,200-page document contains a list of Western corporations and countries -- as well as individuals -- that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades.
Embarrassed, no doubt, by revelations of their own complicity in Mideast arms proliferation, the U.S.-led Security Council censored the entire dossier, deleting more than 100 names of companies and groups that profited from Iraq's crimes and aggression. The censorship came too late, however. The long list -- including names of large U.S. corporations -- Dupont, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell -- was leaked to a German daily, Die Tageszeitung. Despite the Security Council coverup, the truth came out.
A German company, for example, exported 1,000 ignition systems for Styx and Scud missiles capable of carrying biological and nuclear warheads.
Alcolac International, a Maryland company, transported thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, to Iraq. A Tennessee manufacturer contributed large amounts of a chemical used to make sarin, a nerve gas implicated in Gulf War diseases.
Phyllis Bennis, author of "Before and After," notes that "the highest quality seed-stock for anthrax germs (along with those of botulism, E. coli, and a host of other deadly diseases) were shipped to Iraq by U.S. companies, legally, under an official U.S. Department of Commerce license throughout the 1980s." A Senate Banking subcommittee report in 1994 confirmed that shipments of biological germ stock continued well into 1989.
According to Judith Miller in "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War," Iraq purchased its seed stock -- its "starter germs" -- from "The American Type Culture Collection," a supply company in a Washington, D.C., suburb.
We tend to forget that the Reagan-Bush administration maintained cordial relations with Hussein in the '80s, promoting Iraq's eight-year war against Iran. Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and materials to Baghdad. France also sent Hussein 200 AMX medium tanks, Mirage bombers and Gazelle helicopter gunships. As Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage testified in 1987:
"We cannot stand to see Iraq defeated." The CIA, State Department, the central military command directing Middle East operations, were well aware of Iraq's biological-weapons efforts. Nevertheless, Iraq's applications were seldom denied.

In a direct line, my family since arriving in the "New World" in 1627 has fought in every major war that they've been asked to serve in, except for the Mexican War. From the "French/Indian" wars, Table Top, Civil War(on the wrong side, great greatgrandfather csa)..My father volunteered and got in illegally at 16 to serve in WWII and survived the Pacific War. My brother served his time in Nam, I lucked out and spent my time in Panama.
We can listen to an argument that runs like a 10 year olds complaint, that nobody else "got" better then c's in school, so why should we try and do better. If we truly are patriots and truly love and are proud of our country and the ideals it stands for, we'd want us to do as we preach, instead of talking out of the side of our mouth, which is what it's coming to. While our head politician is going on and on about wmd's in Iraq..our name, along with others, shows up on the long list of contributors to Iraq's weapons accumulation. We SHOULD be concerned about this.
The article I posted was not critical soley of the U.S. but of the arms trade as a whole and is worthwhile reading in my opinion. Criticism may be tougher to swallow, but it keeps the country in better shape and more honest in it's dealing with others.
If we are to have a valid voice in international politics, on the issues of democracy, justice, wmd's, economics, environment..then we should have a concern about what we practice on others, in other countries with far less resources then ours.
My big concern, is that we are approaching a disaster..that all our military might will not and cannot stop. If the hate continues and is stoked by us as well as others, we are going to suffer. Someday, somebody, who has some good reasons to hate us, is going to show up with a suitcase nuke of our design, or Russia's, or the French, or? Then the bite is going to be horrific. Think about one of our cities joining Nagasaki/Hiroshima on the short list of nuclear victims.

These were sent to me by a friend...supposedly taken by an Israeli satelite..looks to Hollywood...if these are real..well..God Bless and God Speed...

http://www.clausing.com/Coatings.html

quoted me $385 + shipping/insurance..17.5" mirror..diamond brite coating..

Tomás de Torquemada
At his birth (1420, Torquemada, Castile, Spain) Tomás already had something to hide: his grandmother was a converso; a converted Jew; a New Christian.
Spain had more converted Jews than any other country; some had converted by choice, many more by force, but they were all regarded with suspicion and mistrust by the Old Christians. Some, called Marranos, were only nominally converted, and continued their Jewish customs in secret.

The result was the Spanish cult of sangre limpia, "pure blood", that is, pure white Christian blood. Actually, since Spain had the largest Jewish population in medieval Europe and conversion and intermarriage were common, hardly anyone had sangre limpia, but many claimed to, and it was a constant preoccupation of the nobility. Torquemada's life work was an attempts to achieve sangre limpia for Spain.

By 1479, when Spain was unified under Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada was a Dominican priest and Isabella's confessor. Four years later he had established himself as the head of the Spanish Inquisition.

The purpose of the Inquisition was to root out heresy, and for Torquemada this meant destroying the Marranos. The Inquisition published a set of guidelines so that Catholics could inform on their Marrano neighbors:


If you see that your neighbors are wearing clean and fancy clothes
on Saturdays, they are Jews.
If they clean their houses on Fridays and light candles earlier than
usual on that night, they are Jews.
If they eat unleavened bread and begin their meal with celery and
lettuce during Holy Week, they are Jews.
If they say prayers facing a wall, bowing back and forth,
they are Jews.
The mildest penalty imposed on Marranos began with the forfeiture of their property, which proved to be a convenient fund-raising technique for the war against the Moors. This was followed by the public humiliation of being paraded through the streets wearing the sambenito, a sulfur-yellow shirt emblazoned with crosses that came only to the waist, leaving the lower body uncovered. They were then flogged at the church door. This was the punishment suffered by Juan Sánchez de Cepeda, the grandfather of Teresa de Avila.

The punishments and tortures used to gain confessions are the most famous parts of the Inquisition. Because the trials were for spiritual matters, the Church handled them. However, the punishments were usually very much physical, so they were handled by the state. There were many means of this physical torture for confession. The two most famous or infamous were the strappado or pulley, and the aselli or water torment. The strappado was a device that used ropes to strap a person in by their arms and legs, and then weights were attached to the ends of these ropes. The person was raised to a certain level and then the ropes were released. This created a situation where the body would be stretched
painfully, sometimes enough to produce death (see Figure 1). The aselli was accomplished as a person was brought to lay down on a trestle with sharp-edged rungs and secured with an iron band. Their feet would be elevated above their heads. The accused then had a small piece of linen forced into the gullet. Using a jar (jarra), water would be poured into the mouth and nose producing a state of semi-suffocation. The process would be done repeatedly. While doing that process, the cords binding the limbs would be tightened until it would seem the very veins would explode (Roth, 1964). The torture would not be stopped, but a break could be taken. The difference is that if the torture were stopped, it could not be started again according to church law. But, if the torture was only suspended, it could be resumed at a later time.

The tortures were used on old and young alike to get confessions and to learn of accomplices. In this way, the Spanish tried to ensure they would be pure. Once a confession was reached, if it was heinous enough, the perpetrator would be sentenced to death.

The sentence of death was carried out as the accused was thrown into a fire as an auto de fe (act of faith). The fire was reserved for those who would not admit their heresy, those who relapsed in their heresies, and to other dissenters. The guilty were burned because the church believed they (the church) should not be a direct party in the shedding of blood. To remain free of blood, the church "relaxed" or handed over the guilty to the secular arm. Once handed over, the church would recommend mercy with the qualifier that if the accused was guilty, they be punished by death. It was understood that the secular authorities would immediately condemn those with "relaxed" status to death (Roth, 1964). If the guilty were fortunate enough to die in the prisons instead, they and their families were still not safe. Their dead bodies, along with effigies of those that had escaped to other lands, would be taken along with the living and thrown into the fire. This allowed the lands of all of those people to be confiscated, if that had not already been done. There truly was no escape from the fanaticism of the Spanish Inquisition.