On the corner of Rossio with Rua do Ouro, March 10th 2010

Based on minimalist “headless” theme by Ozan Onay.

The main reason behind this restyling was to make the site easier to read, with dark text on white background, and at the same time to make it standards compliant. I had to tweak a javascript snippet, and modify all the flash objects included on the posts, but with some help it wasn’t a big deal.

Captured last night, at Astrovide 2009, with my little TMB 80 and a Atik 314L, guided by a Skywatcher 70/700 with a Atik 16ICS loaned by Rui Tripa. Everything was monted on a Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro.

Exposures:

• Luminance: 150 minutes (6×300s + 12×600s)
• Red: 30 minutes (6×300s binned 2×2)
• Green: 30 minutes (6×300s binned 2×2)
• Blue: 42 minutes (6×420s) binned 2×2)

No darks, no flats.

When I found that Maria was preparing her first CD, I offered to do some pictures of her. I asked a common friend if he would let us use his studio, and he immediately agreed. We spent a Sunday afternoon on the studio trying several ideas, and this was one of the images that surfaced from that session, but it’s not going to be used on the CD.
In this picture, Maria is directly beneath a softbox placed high, and tilted at a 45 degree angle. A white reflector is being held by “Mr. Veneno” to fill in the shadows.
This was my first “commercial” assignment, and the first time I photographed on a studio. It was a hot moist Sunday in Lisbon, and I was in a lot of stress for trying to do a portrait of someone (and Maria was only slightly less than me) and I forgot to check the camera settings. Maybe because of this, every single exposure was made at ISO 400… I almost collapsed that night when I downloaded the pictures to my computer, but they’re good enough for a CD cover.
My thanks to Maria for posing for me, and to Ricardo and Margarida for letting us use their studio

This dull image was captured July 5, 2009 at 22h31m58s UT, and is the first image obtained remotely from the observatory. The star is Cor Caroli, the brightest in the constellation Canes Venatici, a small patch of sky near Ursa Major. The star also know an Alpha Canum Venaticorum, was named Cor Caroli Regis Martyris by Sir Charles Scarborough in honour of Charles I.

For this first test, I connected remotely to the observatory’s computers and commanded the roof to open, unparked the mount, pointed at the target and took test exposures, while a friend was on location reporting on the events and making sure that no catastrophic event would ruin the evening that was a complete success. The weather wasn’t great, with some clouds rolling in, but in the 45 minutes the roof was open I managed to point the telescope at 4 targets, and somewhat successfully image the sky.

I got a short exposure of M3, the globular cluster in the constellation Boötes before the clouds rolled in:

Mizar, one of the components of the famous double in Ursa Major:

And the last, probably the worst image of M51 that I ever made, but the one that I will keep for a long time:

The test was a success, and a major milestone was completed in our little observatory. We expect to be fully operational in a few months, and by the winter the telescopes should be looking at the sky every clear night. With a little luck, it’s going to be one of the best Christmas presents ever !

A few months back while searching for solutions to automate the observatory’s roof, I came across a small shop on Bulgary that sells USB and Serial relay boards, in various configurations. At the time I bought a couple of USB One Channel Relay Units and they sitted around for a while, while I finished some other small projects.

Today I finished the assembly of the board. I got a small plastic box, that turned out to be a tiny bit smaller that it should, forcing me to chop off a few millimeters at the corners of the PCB, cut a slot on one end for the USB port and power cable, and got a cheap triple extension cord from the local hardware store to make the thing useful.

The final result was this, with a unused board on the side:

To control it, I made a small C# application (.NET 2.0, Windows only), that presents a simple form with a button, and can be controlled from the command line. You can download it here (zip, 5Kb) if it’s useful for something.

To change the COM Port, you should edit HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SigmaPower\COMPort on your registry (the key is created on first run)

To use it from the command line, you should pass it a single parameter: “ON” / “OFF”, or “1″ / “0″. Ex:

c:bin>SigmaPower ON

This one should be installed on the observatory by tomorrow!

Last week I visited with some friends a abandoned building in Lisbon, to explore the photographic possibilities of the place (old, decadent, industrial). There, I asked Joost if he would help me with my first assignment for the Strobist Boot Camp II.

Joost is a freelance photographer that has walked half the world (actually, half of Europe, Asia and Africa) shooting for magazines, newspapers and for himself, and he’s much better qualified than me to run the controls of a DSLR. Even so, he kindly agreed to place himself on front of the lens, and with the help of two strobes, a small umbrella, and a Lumiquest Big Bounce, I managed to get my first real portrait:

My thanks for Joost, and Sonia, my assistant for the shoot

O Hubblecast é um videocast produzido pela ESA e pela NASA, com novidades e imagens do Telescópio Espacial Hubble. O video é uma produção de alta qualidade de divulgação cientifica, e já há algum tempo que o acompanho.
Hoje decidi traduzir o Episódio 28 para português, e construir legendas para o filme, para as pessoas que possam ter dificuldade em perceber inglês.

As legendas estão em formato SRT e devem funcionar sem problemas (na verdade, no meu Mac o Quicktime com o Perian não conseguiu ler as legendas) num qualquer leitor multimédia que suporte este formato. O VLC é gratuito, Open Source, funciona em Linux, Windows, e Mac OS X, e reproduz sem problemas o filme, e as legendas.

Links

• As legendas: heic0907a.srt 16Kb
• Os filmes: em vários formatos do site do Hubble

From code.flickr via kottke.

Interesting analysis of client-side processing and data transmission…