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This table shows my stats for BOINC. SO far I have donated CPU time to the following projects: SETI@Home, Rosetta@Home, Einstein@Home, Simap, MalariaControl.net and Proteins@Home.

My BOINC Stats - http://starcrosser.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-boinc-stats.html

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Math Heijen, based in the Netherlands, has posted a couple of first light images, which he captured his brand new DMK 21AF04.AS. (We love first light images - send us yours!)

In his blog, Matt writes:

At the moment I’m testing my new camera, the DMK 21AF04.AS. I first tried the camera on the Coronado PST, and I was surprised by the result. The first image is a typical frame I selected from the 1-minute movie I shot from a prominence. The second image shows the stacked (600 frames) and processed version.

I will inform you about the equipment set-up and the stacking/processing software in the near future. Right now I’m busy reading the software manuals and experimenting with the few movies I recorded. In the end this monochrome camera will be used to shoot detailed images of the Moon, the Sun in combination with the Baader Herschel Prism/Continuum filter and the Sun in H-Alpha with the Coronado PST. I will keep you updated!

Below are the images (click to zoom):

For a first attempt, those are really great little images. Keep up the good work. Feel free to send us some more of your images, as you take them!

Math Heijen’s First Light With DMK 21AF04.AS - http://www.astronomycamerasblog.com/2008/08/28/math-heijens-first-light-with-dmk-21af04as/

[-] No doubt you have seen the new Meade LIGHTBRIDGE scope advertised in a lot of the astronomy reading rags. This scope has received very good reviews and now Orion has a similar product ready for the public to buy and use. And there are other lesser known (at least to me) companies or individuals that are jumping on the bandwagon. It appears that the scope is well received but I haven't actually seen or touched one of them. When Meade first came out with the Lightbridge, I thought to myself---why don't I just cut a section out of my 12.5 inch Meade tube type scope , add some trusses and presto, I would have a Lightbridge. Well, I may be a bit gullible but I knew that wasn't a possibility but I also wondered what the fuss was all about. On the surface, all of these new type dobs are basically the same. They have a base, a lower mirror cage, a set of truss poles, a upper cage, and then all the usual accessories to make looking thru the contraption possible. My old Meade had a upper cage and lower mirror cage joined together by some extra permanent sona tubing. It had a base and all the other accessories that the Lightbridge has. Basically, it was a two piece scope that any six foot weight lifter could manage. Just set the base on the ground and put the tube on the base and you were ready to go. Now I will admit that it took the entire width of my pickups back seat to transport the tube but what the heck---I could load and unload it by myself. Even if it did look like I was carrying a large hot water heater.
Now don't misunderstand me--I'm all for new telescope progress. And I not picking on Meade. All the manufactures that are featuring this new scope are also making it available with computer assisted setting circles which makes them even more attractive to the new scope buyer (not to mention a few of us older scope owners).
But in all reality, the original truss type dobsons hardly had a limit on mirror size until the mirror got so big and heavy that it took a small crane to lift it. Some are even semi permanently mounted on trailers. These new split tube/truss types will likely be limited to about 16 inches in mirror diameter but even at that limit, the single heaviest piece is about 58 lbs. The total combined weight of all assembled parts is 128 lbs.
     So what then is the advantage over a solid tube dobson or a regular truss dobson? THE PRICE!!!!   All of these newer types cost considerably less than a custom made truss dobson with the same mirror size. The mass production types have found a way to give us an easily transportable truss scope without the cost of a custom scope.  And I suspect, without the long delays from order placement until final delivery.  I expect to start seeing more of these types around star parties and back yards in the near future.  Especially in the 10 inch and above sizes. 

A NEWER DOBSON?? - http://bigadd.blogspot.com/2008/08/newer-dobson.html

[-] Photometry. Back to the basics! Read manuals and commented manuals ... thanks to a good text from Caitlin Casey about "Optimizing SExtractor parameters for Subaru MACS fields" I've got some good hints and managed to get to a set of parameters that works well in our case. 

Now it works! - http://astroandcoffee.blogspot.com/2008/08/now-it-works.html

[-] yes, i'm still here, alive and enjoying nottingham... er, nottn'm. i havent had my laptop online yet, so i'm waiting to write lots until i can also share pictures. there arent a buhzillion internet cafe around these parts, so it might have to wait until i go to work. mostly i've just been organizing, exploring, and relaxing before i officially start work on monday. i will say that the crosswords here are a bit different, and decidedly more difficult due to their subtlety. i'll keep trying though.

in the meantime, here's another gem from indexed:



things you know you dont know - http://amandabauer.blogspot.com/2008/08/things-you-know-you-dont-know.html

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The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope has been renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi.  Paul Hertz, chief scientist for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters: “Enrico Fermi was the first person to suggest how cosmic particles could be accelerated to high speeds, his theory provides the foundation of understanding the new phenomena his namesake telescope will discover.”

FERMI has now collected some 95 hours of first light images as shown above (click it for a much larger annotated version ~66k).

From the NASA press release:

The LAT team today unveiled an all-sky image showing the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars, and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away. The map combines 95 hours of the instrument’s “first light” observations. A similar image, produced by NASA’s now-defunct Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, took years of observations to produce.

The image shows gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way glowing in gamma rays due to collisions with accelerated nuclei called cosmic rays. The famous Crab Nebula and Vela pulsars also shine brightly at these wavelengths. These fast-spinning neutron stars, which form when massive stars die, were originally discovered by their radio emissions. The image’s third pulsar, named Geminga and located in Gemini, is not a radio source. It was discovered by an earlier gamma-ray satellite. Fermi is expected to discover many more radio-quiet pulsars, providing key information about how these exotic objects work.

A fourth bright spot in the LAT image lies some 7.1 billion light-years away, far beyond our galaxy. This is 3C 454.3 in Pegasus, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. It’s now undergoing a flaring episode that makes it especially bright.

The LAT scans the entire sky every three hours when operating in survey mode, which will occupy most of the telescope’s observing time during the first year of operations. These fast snapshots will let scientists monitor rapidly changing sources.

The instrument detects photons with energies ranging from 20 million electron volts to over 300 billion electron volts. The high end of this range, which corresponds to energies more than 5 million times greater than dental X-rays, is little explored.

The spacecraft’s secondary instrument, the GBM, spotted 31 gamma-ray bursts in its first month of operations. These high-energy blasts occur when massive stars die or when orbiting neutron stars spiral together and merge.

The GBM is sensitive to less energetic gamma rays than the LAT. Bursts seen by both instruments will provide an unprecedented look across a broad gamma-ray spectrum, enabling scientists to peer into the processes powering these events.

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

GLAST is Now FERMI - http://tomsastroblog.com/?p=1829

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We realized today that we were slightly mis-using the SDSS Southern Stripe Coadd Catalog, and the parent sample for our faint-source proper motion paper went from 1500 sources to less than 100. But that's good, because now some of our statistics make much more sense.

SDSS Southern Coadd Catalog - http://hoggresearch.blogspot.com/2008/08/sdss-southern-coadd-catalog.html

[-] Another clear night, I got out the binoculars at astronomical twilight and scanned for comet 2008 A1 McNaught. Found it right away, it's a small fuzzy dot, and I estimate its magnitude to be around 6.7-6.6. Sadly, a whole house of drawing obsessed people, I could not find one pencil with a point, or a sharpener (my special astrosketching pencil has gone awol) so no sketch. McNaught is moving fast, so this should be fun to watch over the next few days.

I saw 2008 A1 McNaught - http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-saw-2008-a1-mcnaught.html

[-]

Andy Schlei has just sent in the following image:

Accompanying his image, Andy wrote:

[Above] is an image of the Moon taken on August 09, 2008, with a DMK USB color USB camera on an NP-101. This is a mosaic of three images, captured with IC Capture, stacked in Registax, mosaic created in Photoshop, and then processed in PixInsight [...] I doubled the pixel size, as that allows deconvolution to work better.

To the end of his e-mail, he adds:

Efrain Morales’ Jupiter animation is great, by the way.

If you would like to see some more of his work, please take a look at the following web site:

http://www.obsballona.org

A great thanks goes out to Andy for this excellent image.

New Lunar Mosaic By Andy Schlei - http://www.astronomycamerasblog.com/2008/08/27/new-lunar-mosaic-by-andy-schlei/

[-] I think that Jupiter must be smiling on me because the last three times out I have seen transits, occultations. and shadows of tiny moons on the surface of the big planet.  Last evening I was just sitting in the back yard cooling off after trimming some tree limbs and dragging off the scraps. It wasn't dark enough to see Jupiter yet but I got out the binoculars and sure enough, I could see that bright object high in the southeastern sky.  It's so easy to roll out the big scope so that's exactly what I decided to do.  It took about 5 minutes to get the finder scope and tel-rad mounted and aligned and I was ready to go.  It still wasn't very dark but Jupiter was really bright so I set in to see what there was to see tonight.  Almost instantly after I sighted the planet in the eyepiece, a satellite whizzed through the field of view.  I looked for the satellite visually but it was still to light to see anything like that.  As soon as I settled down after seeing the satellite, I noticed that one of the moons was very close to Jupiter and a little closer observation showed it's tiny shadow almost in one of the red bands that encircle the planet.  I checked it out against my Starry Night program and sure enough, Europa was just completing a circuit across the face of Jupiter and it's little shadow was trailing faithfully behind.  I remembered that I had not tried the light blue filter the other night so that's what I decide to do next.  The improvement in seeing the shadow was amazing. I suppose that I observed Jupiter for about an hour with ever eyepiece I own.  It still wasn't really dark yet but I sneaked in a few quick glances of some of the southern Messier objects.   Looking for deep sky objects in the early evening twilight must be exactly like trying to see something in light polluted skies. Sometimes you can't even make the object out in the finder scope but you can see it in the eyepiece. That is if you can put the eyepiece right on target without the aid of accompanying guide stars etc.  I really sympathize with all my city dwelling friends who can't just move a scope outside on a moments notice and be able to see something.. 

JUPITER ONCE AGAIN - http://bigadd.blogspot.com/2008/08/jupiter-once-again.html