Well, not quite, but if you're in NYC and reading this tonight (Oct 3) go outside! I spent a few minutes on our front stoop around 7:15 pm and noticed how clear the sky seemed to be. Then using my hand to block out the street light at the end our our cul-de-sac, I let my eyes adjust as was surprised to notice that I could see all four stars in the "body" of Delphinus. The faintest of these is delta Dephini, is listed as magnitude 4.43. And this was from my front stoop with just my hand blocking the street light while it had not even reached the meridian.

There's an interesting article on the solar wind on Science News today. For those of you too young to remember (and, ahem, those of us old enough to start having trouble remembering), the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched back in the 1970s are still plugging away returning interesting data on the nature of the solar wind from way past Pluto.

I finally had time to try reprocess this image using data from the August 31 outing. Much better, but I still need some practice.

I was asked to look into groupware for a grant project. Okay, I know there are several freebies out there that shouldn't be too hard to set up. So I looked around and did a little reading and saw that really, it was hard to choose. I mean, there are some that are not well developed, but beyond some threshold, its hard to choose without actually using the thing just to see how it behaves. So, I started installing them on my laptop to play around with.

We spent the long weekend in upstate New York at a friends house on the Delaware River. Naturally, I couldn't resist taking the astrophotography equipment. I took the AstroTrac, the laptop, and everything needed to shoot with my Canon 350D. Friday night was a wash-out, but that was expected. Sunday night looked like it might work, so I set up everything. But by the time I got the boys settled into bed, the fog rolled down the river bed and sent me in. Sunday night looked much better and I ended up setting up then catnapping while the computer took pictures.

In my quest to build a Linux replacment for DSLRFocus, I'm hitting a steep learning curve with Glade, Gtk, and gPhoto. I'm making progress, but it is slow. I've also come to realize that sometimes "best practices" can get in the way. What do I mean?