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Tag Archives: astronomy

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Today I choose to offer astronomy training (TIC00029c)

The PolyBlog
August 18 2020

As readers of my blog know, I am an amateur astronomer. And my road into astronomy has not been paved with the remains of rainbows or yesterday’s sunbeams. I have struggled mightily over the last 7 years, including some epic battles with my scope to get aligned.

In the end, two people in the club really helped me nail down my wayward astro gremlins, and now I try to pay it back whenever I can. I have a couple of posts that get a lot of foot traffic about the “proper” way to do alignment of a Celestron GoTo scope, and I’m of the firm belief that users of the SE series of scopes fall into very set categories:

  • 75% of owners will use their scopes right out of the box without any trouble, it will work as intended, no gremlins;
  • 10% will not get it to work, but it is more user error than anything else, and they will never get ANY scope to work, because it just doesn’t make sense to them;
  • 10% will struggle mightily but will learn how to make it work; and,
  • 5% will have serious gremlins that they won’t be able to banish, or even know what gremlins they face.

So I know that my type of scopes are popular, and I want to make sure no one is left dangling. It’s a horrible feeling. And since I have experience with it, I tried to do some training tonight for 4 intrepid souls looking for some assistance. Three made it out, betting the fourth might not of expected us to go ahead as it was looking almost like a thunderstorm was coming

One of the three has had a scope before, relatively understanding of the stars, just new to goto scopes; another was relatively new to astronomy but had set up a couple of times; and the third was brand new and had no idea how to get his scope going.

Unfortunately, both the last one I listed and me were not prepared properly for tonight. I started to set up my scope, and after a little bit of time, realized that I totally forgot my diagonal. I normally have it attached, but I did some stuff awhile ago and there was no joy in Mudville tonight. It wasn’t attached and I didn’t think to bring it, thinking the old one was still on there. Nope, removed it some time ago. Sigh. So I didn’t get very far. For the other fellow, the battery on his Red Dot Finder died. For the more experienced guy, something is off with his handset or scope, not sure which. So his worked, but not as well as it should have.

And honestly? That’s the type of thing that can drive you crazy…you think it isn’t quite right, but start to doubt yourself, so having an experienced person say, “No, you’re right, it isn’t supposed to do THAT!” is helpful, if not a solution. We’ll work on fixing that over time though.

I was surprised though about the training. I expected to run through pretty quick, and everybody would be able to replicate my steps. But it didn’t take long for that plan to fall by the wayside. One had problems with his red dot finder, another had problems understanding what he had to do, third was having equipment problems. Each of these meant stopping to help JUST that person. A fourth person would have messed that up.

Others had suggested only doing 1:1 but that seemed SO inefficient. I’m going to do some videos at some point, so this was a bit of a test, and as a test, I would say we’re going to be in beta mode for a long time. But one went away “solved”, more or less.

Today I choose to offer some astro training.

What choices are you making?

Posted in Goals | Tagged astronomy, goals, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

Today I choose to start a long-term astro project (TIC00028c)

The PolyBlog
August 18 2020

About two years ago, a member of our astronomy club was helping the widow of another astronomy club member who had passed away. Like many of the survivors of astro lovers, the widow inherited a bunch of astro equipment, digital remnants and a bunch of accumulated reference material. To wit, he had left behind a large collection of issues of Sky & Telescope. For those of you who don’t immediately know (and why would you?), S&T started publication way back in 1942 and has been going strong ever since. Almost immediately, even during WW II, it moved to 12 issues … Continue reading →

Posted in Goals | Tagged astronomy, goals, magazines, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

Today I choose to play with my glasses (TIC00022c)

The PolyBlog
August 11 2020

Admit it…that subject line was weird enough to grab your interest. 🙂 So here’s the deal. I need my glasses for distance and for reading, and rather than do bifocals, I do progressives. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I have had progressives since I was 19, and for 33 years, I’ve had no optical issues. I’m not a candidate for laser surgery to fix my eyes and I probably wouldn’t even if I could. I have no real problems with my glasses, and even when I can take them off, I just leave them on. They don’t bother me, and I … Continue reading →

Posted in Goals, To Be Updated | Tagged astronomy, glasses, goals, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

Today I choose to learn about astronomy (TIC00009b)

The PolyBlog
July 16 2020

About two weeks ago, I started a new challenge for myself — to blog each day about forward-looking choices I was making. Things that involved some extra effort to “create my reality” beyond drifting through the day. I went for the Seinfeld method — how many days in a row could I keep the chain going — and I crashed at 8 days. On the ninth day, I made poor choices or let my scripts push me through the day. So what do I do with a broken chain? Start a new chain. That new chain starts today, and I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in Goals | Tagged astronomy, goals, today I choose | Leave a reply

Converting Zoom recordings into presentation videos

The PolyBlog
May 16 2020

Back in April, our local astronomy club decided to use Zoom to hold our monthly meetings for members as a virtual meeting and they did it again in May. It is working well and a side-benefit is that in addition to being able to see it on Zoom, the video can be automatically streamed to YouTube (with about a 15s delay) and saved there when the meeting ends. Our group isn’t alone in this, lots of organizations are doing the same thing for virtual conferences. However, one downside to the final saved video is that you get the entire raw … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, To Be Updated | Tagged astronomy, video, VideoPad, zoom | Leave a reply

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My Latest Posts

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