Urania

Check out this link to the The Astrological Magazine and tell me this isn’t a wee bit ironic (and maybe smelling of a hoax).

Comet 17P/Holmes (Wikipedia) is normally a pretty innocuous short period comet that is invisible except to users of large telescopes. However, around 23 October 2007, it brightened up by a factor of about 1 million in 24 hours, becoming a clearly visible naked eye comet in Perseus (assuming you have dark skies).

Last night, I went out to the Feder Observatory, our campus observatory, to learn how to use the new telescope control system and CCD camera. This new system is a replacement for our old system which became a mouse’s final resting place (details here). This new system is on our old reliable 16″ Dave Weinrich (our planetarium and observatory guru), Jack (a student), and I decided to target Comet 17P/Holmes. Now mind you, there are still collimation issues with this telescope and we haven’t quite worked out the focus vs. temperature function, but this came out pretty good for a first shot of the comet.

I have AppleCare on all my Macs. I used to think it was overkill to have a three year warranty, but since getting it on my intel iMac which summarily ate its own motherboard, I have come to realize its a bargain to get the fast access to Apple’s support. I have since used it with a misbehaving iPod, a blown power supply on a MacBook Pro, and to get replacement boot disks for my iMac.

My only complaint about AppleCare is that Apple doesn’t make the phone number terribly clear on their website, so I am noting it here where I can find it. The AppleCare Support number is
1-800-275-2273
and they are open 6am to 6pm Pacific time.

This is my web blog which I will be using mostly to note things of interest to me. Its not necessarily meant for public consumption and will contain such exciting topics as

• The installation of software of interest to astronomers on MacOS X machines (I’ve had experience getting AIPS, IRAF and Hectospec’s packages to run under MacOS).
• Bugs in the MacOS operating system that need to be crushed in order to run some astronomical software on the Mac.
• Notes on neat command line tricks I discover.
• Musings on other topics such as teaching or academia.

Don’t expect to see anything too daring yet, I don’t have tenure.