Posts Made By: James Brown

I thought Obama did a good job yesterday. He focused on honoring and remembering the Arizona victims and healing. I don't recall any partisan finger pointing. This was a refreshingly good and useful speech.

Jim

I just read Peggy Noonan's latest WSJ op/ed. She was as impressed with Obama's speech as many of us Astromart righties were.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703583404576080303941795040.html

A turn toward the center by Obama is very predictable in view of the annihilation of the Democratic Party this November. The question is whether Obama can legitimately and credibly turn toward the center. According to Noonan; (and for what its worth she speaks with the authority of a god in my view), maybe he can.

Jim

[COLOR="Blue"]"One speech can't change everything, and shouldn't. But one speech can begin something new, or boost a certain momentum. After the strategic bow to the Republicans on taxes, and the appointment of a more moderate and business-friendly chief of staff, the Tucson speech marks the third time since the election that the president has in effect reached toward the center. The question in the coming year will be whether he can gain some purchase on that ground, whether he can begin to hold it, as he did in 2008.

Mr. Obama is attempting to come back as a real force, and as a potentially effective thwarter of Republican intentions, especially on health care. You can see the sweet reason and rope-a-dope coming: If there's a specific part of the program you have problems with please tell me, let's work together to make it better.

Republicans will have to meet him with dignity and good faith, and go toe to toe on one thing, the facts. For the facts on this are on their side.

But they should know their adversary. Something is going on with him. He's showing the signs of someone who has learned from two solid years of embarrassment and unpopularity. Maybe he has "not come back from hell with empty hands." Maybe he is going to be formidable."[/COLOR]

Hi all:

Here is an LRGB image of M31 and its satellites. This is a 4 panel mosaic. This is my first mosaic ever, and I must say processing this was a challenge! North is to the right. If this image is properly oriented, the foreground dust lanes make M31 look "upside down" to my eye, like an inverted bowl.

This image was taken with the following equipment:

TEC APO 140
Astro-Physics Mach 1
FLI ML 11002M camera
FLI PDF focuser and Filter Wheel
AstroDon LRGB 2” filters
Maxim DL
CCD Commander
Registar
Photoshop CS2

The final 16 bit tiff image is an enormous 158M. A somewhat compressed 8 bit jpeg at full scale may be found here:

http://home.comcast.net/~jameslbrown/pwpimages/M31%20LRGB%20big.jpg

I like the L channel quite a bit as a black and white image. It may be found here, at full scale:

http://home.comcast.net/~jameslbrown/pwpimages/M31%20L%20Big.jpg

Thanks for any comments!

Jim

Tony Kim said:

Anybody know where I can get a tube for a 12.5" F/4.5 mirror, preferably aluminum? Not interested in sonotube, and I've tried both Protostar and Hastings, but their max size is for 10" mirrors.

Hi Tony:

Frank at Public Missiles can make you a beautiful 14" OD tube from carbon fiber cloth, but it is going to be expensive. I priced one out for my 12.5" f5 and it was going to be about $1500.00 shipped, so I balked. It would have been beautiful though!

http://www.carbonscopetubes.com/Home_Page.html

Joe at Parallax Instruments could roll you a tube with machined aluminum end pieces. They make large Newts. I'm not sure what the cost would be. Based upon their web page, I think it would be a fine tube.

http://www.parallaxinstruments.com/tube.htm

Jim

Hi all:

I'm in the process of re-building my 12.5" f5 Dob. With the Televue sale going on, I'm thinking of buying a new top-shelf premium wide field eyepiece. Something that provides a field of view greater than 1 degree with an exit pupil of about 6 mm or less.

The primary candidates are the Televue Panoptic 35, Nagler Type V 31 and Ethos 21. If you think I am missing any worthy contenders let me know, but I would not go with Explore scientific even though I am sure they perform well.

Also, for any eyepiece, I doubt my eyes are young enough to use something that delivers a full 7mm exit pupil.

My technical goal is to have the best wide angle view possible in a 12.5" dob. I have a paracorr. My non-technical goal is comfort. I need the eyepiece to be user friendly. I hate kidney beans and such, and more importantly I rapidly lose my family's interest if the exit pupil is tough to locate (e.g. super long eye relief) or the eyepiece is otherwise hard to use. No one in my family wears glasses.

I've attached a spreadsheet showing cost, magnification, eye relief, exit pupil and true field for these eyepieces compared to the Pan 24 that I already own.

Lots of you must have f5 Dobs. Which would you pick?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Jim

p.s. I've been bino-viewing with my refractor and a set of Panoptic 24 mm's for the past few seasons and I love them. But to properly couple the light cone of the f5 dob to the binos I will be using a 1.7x Baader Newtonian Glaspath Compensator. I expect to use the binos a lot for medium and higher power. It is difficult to do extreme low power viewing with an f5 light cone and binos without vignetting though.

Here is an RGB + Ha rendering of Orion and Eastern Monocerous. I captured some of the Ha data last year. The rest of the Ha and RGB frames were taken about a week ago. I used eight 30 minute Ha frames and about the same number of five minute RGB subs. All were taken with a 55 mm Pentax 67 lens attached to a Finger Lakes Instruments CFW-7 wheel, PDF focuser and Microline ML 110002M camera.

I personally like the contrast of the brilliant golden Betelgeuse with icy blue Rigel in this shot. I pushed the Ha pretty hard to bring out the faint nebulosity between Barnard's Loop and M42 and in other areas. There is plenty of distortion in the corners, but what the heck, it's a 36 x 24 degree field!

A full size jpeg version is here:

http://home.comcast.net/~jameslbrown/pwpimages/Orion%20RGB%2BHa%20Wide%20Final.jpg

Unfortunately, the full size image seems to lose some snap when converting from the huge 16 bit tiff to a fairly compressed jpeg. My ISP only supports 8M uploads and the original is 60M!

Anyway, I hope you like it.

Jim

Pentax 55mm 67 lens
FLI camera system
Astro-Physics Mach 1
Lodestar Autoguider and Miniborg guidescope
Maxim DL
CCD Commander
Photoshop CS2

These are two of the 70 or so California Condors flying free in the Grand Canyon. In particular, this is #23, a fifteen year old male and #97 a seven year old female. According to the condor tag chart, #23 has been unpaired since his mate died in 2008. As of December 2010, #97 was unpaired too. Maybe love is in the air? I sure hope so.

I took these pictures with a 24-105 mm Canon zoom lens and a Canon T1i camera. They are cropped some. It would have been great to have a 300 or 400 mm lens though...

Jim

http://www.nps.gov/grca/naturescience/california-condors.htm

We visited the Grand Canyon this March. As I'm sure you know it is tough to take a bad picture in that glorious setting.

These two pictures are panoramas stitched together from 4 or 5 sub-shots taken with a Canon T1i held vertically and a Canon Zoom 24-105 mm lens. The lens is new and I really like it a lot. The increase in sharpness and color fidelity over my old Tamron lens is remarkable and unmistakable.

The Grand Canyon vistas are so extremely wide angle that these multi-image panoramas (taken at the 24mm zoom setting) really seem to be necessary to do the view justice. Each one is approximately 45 degrees by 120 degrees. Maybe a little less.

I have three possible programs for assembling panorama shots - Canon Photo Stitch that comes with the camera, Photoshop CS2 and the "Create a Panoramic Photo" function that comes as a freebie with the Windows 7 Photo Gallery. Amazingly, the freebie Windows program was the only one I could get to do a decent job with such wide angle assemblies. With CS2 and the Canon programs I had obvious registration errors. With the Windows utility it was one click and done.

Go figure.

Anyway, I like these a lot, I hope you enjoy them too.

Jim

William Paolini said in the Religion Forum:

Yes, cute post. However, wrong. Bad mouthing anything is off limits. Take bad mouths to the No Holds Barred forum or risk your account.

Done.

The problem with this standard is that "bad mouthing" is poorly defined and entirely personal/subjective. The back and forth between Doug and me for example, (a dialog I have enjoyed quite a bit over the years), actually contains a lot of what most reasonable people would perceive as "bad-mouthing." I've mocked Doug's most profound fundamentalist/literalist beliefs and he's noted that I and other Catholics are damned to hell for following a non-Christian path.

Usually Doug and I don't get too offended by each other. From a moderator's perspective however, we have undeniably bad-mouthed each other's faiths over the years - countless times

Sometimes I'll apply a thin veneer of civility to a post that Clyde (for example) might have dispensed with but the underlying bad-mouthing is still there.

So; as suggested, I'll take any and all religion discussions I might participate in to NHB. The rules in the Religion forum are way too strict and capricious. I like the NHB premise. Also, I personally don't want to hang out in any forum where a group of people (A/A's) are prohibited access based upon a belief classification. That strikes me as un-American.

Jim

Is there anyone in the room who can present a good argument not based in religious doctrine or myth why consenting adult homosexuals should not be allowed to be married to each other by their home State?

Please assume that the participants promise to support each other until death, they are willing to accept the legal benefits of marriage and they are willing to undertake the huge legal obligations of marriage too.

Jim

[SIZE="Small"]* I'm not talking about sacramental church marriage here. I'm talking about the legal institution of matrimony as conferred by the state government.[/SIZE]