2009 We look so forward to weekends to escape the mind numbing stressful workplace… and then are so busy trying to do some of the items we want to do and the things that we are doing for others, that come Monday morning you look around and say.. what happened?
Case in point:
Finished modifying the display case shelving.. now have to find the meteorites to display.
Got the images from past Kingston IYA events posted and looking for more to add.
Got the Roboscope systems back up and running and communicating with the dome, the telescope, the webcam and the CCD camera. Even updated the Digital Domeworks software from v4 to v5.1. Tried out an hour or so of operational testing and failed 🙁 Need more time in the daylight with warmer weather.
Set up wordpress as the default web content manager for the KHSS (Kingston Heirloom Seeds Savers).. now all we need are some members to start posting.
spent the better part of 8 hours over the weekend at work, upgrading the 8 year old hardware (Intel Pentium 4’s running at 1.8GHz, 512mb SDRAM, 20gb IDE Boot drives) running two of the servers over to five year old hardware (AMD Athlon XP2500+ at 1.83GHz, 1024mb DDRAM, 80gb IDE boot drives).
Performance is noticeably faster as is the heat output. The Kill-a-Watt power meter shows these starting up at 165 watts and settling down to 125 watts running.
Comet Lulin … it cleared just enough this morning around 05:30, that we were able to go out and convince ourselves that we saw Comet Lulin in binoculars amongst the cloud and haze. Look for closest approach on Tuesday Feb 23rd near the planet Saturn in Leo.
Battlestar Galactica… managed to stay awake after another very long day on Friday and watch the whole episode.. very good. So long “old” Apollo.. it was good to see you again.
Friday February 13th 7:30pm RASC-Kingston Centre Regular Meeting
at Stirling Hall Theatre A, Bader Lane, Queen’s University Dr Gregg Wade (RMC) will speak on recent “Large Programs” that have been established at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
These are really exciting, and range from a census of the Virgo cluster to
detailed mapping of individual stars. One of the four Large Programs is his own project called MiMeS, which is about stellar magnetism.
Saturday February 14 2009, 7:30pm: The KAON (Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network) Public Observing Session Queen’s University Ellis Hall Observatory
Feature IYA Talk by Susan Gagnon “How Has Galileo’s Scope Evolved?”
If the weather permits there will be telescopes out on the Observing Deck.