Tag Archives: astronomy

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.
… Read the rest

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 per year.… Read the rest

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 feel I look weird with them off.… Read the rest

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 maintaining my numerical sequence (so today is #9) but I’ve added a “b” after it for my second series.… Read the rest

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 footage from the time you press RECORD to the time you press STOP.… Read the rest