Yeah, about that coding problem. More of the same. This one is about generating temperature and humidity estimates with a single latitude / longitude input using the point measurements of the National Weather Service nearest the point of interest, and interpolating in a useful and hopefully likely manner. As a project, it gets its own static page, right here.
Archive for category Meta-Fyngyrz
Astrotron
May 29
Aw, man, I got this… this… coding problem. I keep finding myself writing things that only I would have a use for. So on my iPad, I found this App called “Emerald Observatory”, and I was so, so impressed. First, it’s pretty. Really pretty. Second, it’s full of astronomical data, useful stuff. And I thought to myself, wow… I really like some of this.
Then (oh, no…) I began to think about what parts of it I would like to use, that is, have directly available to me. So I wrote those nice folks, complementing them sincerely on what a nice App they had come up with (check it out, you won’t regret it), and suggesting they write what I had in mind, because actually, they sort of had the data in the app already, it was just a matter of organizing it differently. I got a nice reply, thanking me for the suggestion, but allowing as to how they had a lot to do, and so it would be “on their list.”
Trying to figure out if there is an aurora, and if it can be photographed, really requires looking at some different kinds of data. One is the earth’s magnetosphere; how disturbed is it? That’s what causes auroras. That information has to be obtained from the GOES satellites, or magnetometers on the ground (I find the satellites to be a better indicator.) Another is the weather – if it’s cloudy, give up now. Then visibility comes into play – fog will kill the opportunity just as quickly as clouds. You can get that from NOAA (or whoever is your local weather provider if you’re not in the US.) But what if the moon is above the horizon? That’ll kill it too, at least, if the moon is showing any significant crescent. And of course, along those same lines, the sun has to be below the horizon. The moon and sun information can be calculated.
After repeatedly looking all this stuff up, and occasionally forgetting an important issue (like, is it cloudy?) before I drove out to my dark viewing area with my camera gear, I finally decided to pull all the information together into one handy place. And here it is, sized to fit on my iPod’s display, too. Further, since all the data is in one place, I have the underlying engine SMS me if conditions are right for an aurora; also, as long as I keep a browser open to the page, the page auto-refreshes.
The underlying processes keep an eye on things for me, updating their snapshots of satellite data and weather and lunar and solar states every five minutes. So I can be out and about, and if things look hot, I’ll get a text message on my cellphone. How cool is that?
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My camera is back!
Oct 16
Here’s a shot I took with it today. The RAW image is definitely very pinkish-red, but as I was told, it’s not a rough job to correct for the additional red sensitivity. I think, because the red is so hot, I’m losing a little dynamic range in the normal regime as well, but as you can see here, it’s not a severe problem. Now if the weather will give me a break, I’ll give the camera a real workout on some emission nebulae!
Southern Pacific number 4449
I’ve been watching more movies, saw a couple of good ones. “Monsters vs. Aliens”… that was just awesome from start to finish. Then there was this mashup blackertainment/martial arts movie, “Blood and Bone”, with Michael Jai White… he makes a great action star. Put him in some movies where you can understand the dialog, and there’s no telling how far he could go. Then there was “State of Play”, a movie about dirty politics and corporate maneuvering… I’m sure it’s less dangerous, and more corrupt, than the movie portrays it, but it’s always enjoyable to have a director plug a script into your preconceptions and not miss by much.
I cleaned my salt tank, moved the surface skimmer around and restored it to initial working conditions… man, that thing does a dirty job. We were going to build the frame for another stained glass window, but the weather didn’t cooperate, can’t use silicone when it keeps dipping below freezing. I came up with some new tee shirt designs, which you may see if the community at tee virus likes ‘em… even turned on the ham radio and listened to the empty airwaves for a few minutes – no sunspots means no radio communications.
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…for hydrogen-alpha infrared. This mod will give it about 3.5 times the sensitivity to the glow of emission nebulas, and so enhance my ability to shoot astro photos.
![fyngyrz posted a photo: The map location here shows where I was when I took the photo, rather than the photo itself. I was looking west (obviously) from the north end of the church parking lot which itself is north of Bonnie Street, and south of Airport Road. I jockeyed around until I had the sun completely behind the radar housing, and then shot a few shots at different exposures, hoping that the 50D's dynamic range would catch the gradation in the sky; it did ok, but I still wish we had another couple of high quality bits of dynamic range. Maybe the next camera generation will go there. Canon EOS 50D [modified IR response in Hα range], hooded Sigma EF-S 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM prime [ø62mm] w/B&W 62mm IR/UV cut filter #65-014691; RAW to JPEG conversion and editing in Aperture 3.](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4078/4912161604_6cd46bace2_m.jpg "fyngyrz posted a photo: The map location here shows where I was when I took the photo, rather than the photo itself. I was looking west (obviously) from the north end of the church parking lot which itself is north of Bonnie Street, and south of Airport Road. I jockeyed around until I had the sun completely behind the radar housing, and then shot a few shots at different exposures, hoping that the 50D's dynamic range would catch the gradation in the sky; it did ok, but I still wish we had another couple of high quality bits of dynamic range. Maybe the next camera generation will go there. Canon EOS 50D [modified IR response in Hα range], hooded Sigma EF-S 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM prime [ø62mm] w/B&W 62mm IR/UV cut filter #65-014691; RAW to JPEG conversion and editing in Aperture 3.")
