Dreams Deferred

Hi all,

The plan has been on indefinite hold for awhile now, my wants were bigger than my stomach and as a result I need to pay down some debt. I have also started to work on a new venture, as a result I am unable to acquire the things that I need to go on the first expedition.

Stay tuned though, hopefully I will be announcing a trip to Alamo Lake soon.

-Aaron

Updates

Hi all,

I feel as if I owe the world an update, I know that sounds weird since I am under no obligation to write this blog regularlly. Anyways a few things have happened since my last post (in May) my car burnt to a cinder. So now I have my expedition vehicle  a 2014 Jeep Wrangler unlimited, the good news is this will eventually serve all my purposes, including going to Death Valley and Baja, however it will not be built out until I can pay it off, which is 72 months away. Until then we will have to plan to go to more hospitable locations.

The good news is that I have not been busy which means that I am building out my capacity to do astrophotography. Behold my latest creation:

This is the F/3.9 8" newt on a Orion Atlas EQ-G mount. Sitting in my brothers bedroom. It is not fully operational yet. I have done one iteration of balancing it and I have done a quick look at the colimation along with a first pass at collimating it:

The process is slow, I have been building some cables one which will allow me to control the mount directly via a USB interface using EQMOD. The other which is a serial release cable for my Canon SL1 camera. All in all progress is moving forward and we should at this rate be on track for Alamo Lake in Fall. (fingers crossed)

Busy

Hi Folks,

Its been awhile but mostly what I have been doing is working. If your a facebook friend you already know that I am below 300lbs. A lot has changed in these past few months, now that I have shrunk I have much more energy! This has lead to me becoming a Doer, the result is that I am currently working with a new laptop.

Now we are moving into the Plan. I am ordering a new telescope optical tube tomorrow, and updating my pinboard. The next month will be spent trying to secure the GEM for my mount. Along with birthday money I will hopefully have the telescope and mount in late June, then the fun begins.

My plan is to start in my back yard, setting up and tearing down the scope, using eyepieces to split doubles and star testing. I have found my old DSI Pro II not only works, but works in linux as well. I hope to turn it into a guide camera on my setup.

Once the mount and Telescope have been setup I am going to try and figure out how to start my camping setups, more than likely I am going to purchase a tent, after I have some of the big ticket astro imaging items done. I plan on doing a trip to Mt.Lemmon or something of the like in August, but we will have to see. In the fall though expedition one may go off.

In the mean time Stay tuned to the pinboard as Items are purchased they will go off the list.

A couple of more items, this saturday 5/04/2014 I would like to get a group together to talk about projects they are working on. I hope to make it an ongoing thing, which may become a club.

Also I have started a wiki, Exemplar Astronomiae its latin for a book of astronomy which is meant to be copied. I hope to put up tidbits of knowledge as well as some experiments people can do with telescopes from 5-42inches. Hopefully the experiments will be detailed enough that people can repeat them. There is a section for equipment as well, with instructions for various calibration and testing strategies. My hope is that others will eventually contribute but we will see.

Next Steps

So I am almost to the point of purchasing my laptop. My next purchase is going to be the OTA for my next telescope. Why the OTA first, because its on back order until June, so I need to order it now and get it while the getting is good. Next is the mount, followed by my camera modification. Then comes the fun part, each of the little individual components necissary to make my telescope work properly.

These range for the coma corrector to the laser collimator to reticle eyepieces to autoguiding setups. Not to mention I have to go to a wedding in August. Hopefully we are on track to do our first expedition next October, but we will have to see. I will post pics of my laptop when it comes in hopefully in a couple of weeks.

In the mean time I have created a website for the two aspects of my business, tutoring and computer repairs. It can be found at twedgec.com.

Running Behind

So the plan is proceeding, sort of. Right now I am saving up some money but unfortunately I am not prepping to buy a scope. The first thing I need to get is a new laptop. My current beast of burden has served me well, but its been worked too hard for too long. As a result my acquisitions are behind. My initial goal was to purchase the telescope and mount first followed by some camping gear so that I would be ready for the Grand Canyon Star party, now it looks like nothing will be happening until next fall.

If you are interested in what I am planning for a new laptop its a rather funny story, I am planning on getting a bare-bones kit and building it up myself. You can get them at rjtech.com with some $10 spudgers you can make yourself a laptop, it will be pretty heavy, however I am not noticing the girth of my old laptop as much now that I am getting healthier. I am hoping to order the laptop by mid April, once that is done I will hopefully have enough by mid-May to buy my scope, which may take a few months to get here.

Be the Change

The plan is still on, I am attempting to ramp up my business in order to get to the point where I can purchase everything that I will need. But I am restless, the problem is that I have a need to tinker. To this end I have bought an Aurduino Uno board as a platform for building a Temperature compensating focuser. The focuser software will run under Linux Mint.

The thing that has always bothered me about Amateur astronomy is that the tools we need for our hobby cost so much. Software which should not be expensive is either hundreds or thousands of dollars. This needs to change, which is why I started OpenAIP. However this project will never get finished as long as all of the tools needed to go around it are gestating. The good news is that there are good hardware platforms on Windows and Linux, ASCOM and INDI respectively. The next step is to build the tools on top of these platforms for image processing.

GIMP should do the job of Photoshop, and to a certain extent it does.  But we have no equivalent for Maxim DL (hence OpenAIP). My personal opinion is that a version of linux dedicated to astronomy should exist. One where you can simply boot your computer up and try it or install it and make it work for you. But this is a goal far off in the future, for now I will start with my focuser and eventually get back to OpenAIP.

Look forward to tutorials for installing INDI on Linux Mint/Ubuntu.

Ed. 
Of course after I wrote this Cinnamon inexplicably crashed so hard I had to re-image the machine overnight.

Beginnings

Hi all,

I am one month out (from surgery) as of today. The funny thing is that things have started to happen. First there was this blog, until now it was a way to keep all of you who were interested updated about my journey and plans and now it has grown to actually planning for expeditions. There are also pages for photography and astrophotography which will hopefully be coming soon.

This week I also spent some time on the weekend playing with some old equipment seeing what if anything still worked. It turns out quite a bit. The interesting thing is that I now have the beginnings of some gear, an old set of Pössil eyepieces (the entire Meade 4000 series) which seem to be in mint condition. On top of that my Meade DSI Pro II mono seems to work, in Windows 8! I was also able to find a working GPS receiver with a USB output.

So it looks like I am on my way with my next imaging setup, but I have learned that the main OTA that I want is going to go up in price as of next year, and so I am wondering if with these next couple of Paychecks I should purchase it. That would be the start of my imaging setup however the danger in that is that I would end up with something that I could not easily test until I have a mound to go look at (and take pictures of?) unfocused stars.

Things will be getting interesting over the next few weeks folks. If you know anyone with $85 an hour who needs computer help let me know. I am also tutoring for $35 if you know anyone who needs it.

P.S. Something that will definitely be happening with my next couple of paychecks will be me fabing a cable for EQMOD.

Problem Solving

Hi all,

You may have noticed a new Pinboard, labeled Perpetual Sleep. As you may or may not know I was diagnosed this summer with sleep apnea, as a result I now need a CPAP machine in order to get a restful night sleep, the two things that are needed to operate a CPAP are distilled water and electricity.

Distilled water is an easy enough problem, as a gallon last me for about a week so two gallons of distilled water will last the length of a typical expedition. (~10-11 days) At home power is not an issue, however out in the wild I need to have a solution that will allow me to sleep for 10-11 days without plugging the battery into the grid. Hence, I have designed a system where the CPAP can run for a day or two without recharging.

It starts with a battery package designed for telescopes. (Hey, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.)  This gives me 2 nights of sleep for up-to 11 hours. Now in order to charge it you need a power source, something that outputs 12v at a reasonable amperage to charge a 17AH battery. So basically I want 12v at about 2 amps, which is 24W. Since you can get a 50W solar panel for less than $100 why not get more power than you need.

This gives me a system where I can sleep at night as long as there is not a couple of days without any sunlight. Now I can sleep the question is how are we going to carry along enough food and water to be in the back country for that long.

More generally, the abundance of cheap solar panels is an amazing boon for the end user, as it allows camp sights to be self sustaining, including powering electronics such as laptops and telephones. I hope to have about 400W of solar panels on hand for charging batteries and the like, along with this object which uses a Peltier to turn fire into electricity.

Additions to the Blog

The expedition preparation page now has some prose on there, along with links to some pin boards which might be of interest to people planning to go on expeditions.

Also I have added new recommendations for first scopes, some more reasonable than others. All in all I added reasonable quality GOTO and non-GOTO scopes for the most part 8" is too large for a non-Dobsonian telescope. I personally think that 6" is pushing it, as far as usability is concerned.

ACA and Me (Along with blog updates)

Hi all,

So here it is, part of the reason for my travails at the beginning of the semester was an attempt to keep my health insurance. Now that the Affordable Care Act exchanges are up I have decided to buy health insurance from Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Arizona.  The result being that I hope to no longer be afraid of loosing my job or my status as a student for fear that I will loose my health insurance.

This is a tremendous burden lifted off of me. Now its time to concentrate on moving forward. I have gone back to work which should allow me to begin saving money shortly, right now I am eating less than ten dollars worth of food a day. The next step is to increase my income so I can begin making purchases to go on expeditions. This has led to a couple of site redesigns, the tabs at the top will show my progress as I loose weight. I have even begun walking my dog further when my hands are not frostbitten.

The good news is that my weight is coming down nicely, also at the top you will find links to pinboards as well as expedition planing ideas and guides. Those will be under construction as time goes on. Right now its looking like I will be ready for the Grand Canyon Star Party next fall if I can just put together enough money for the scope and the camping gear.

Speaking of the scope, I have decided to re-purpose my DSI II mono as a guide camera since I don't really feel like paying $300 for one. I have also purchased Photoshop since it was on sale for 50% off, which is a great deal that is still going on, hence if you want Photoshop CC I suggest you get on it right now.

Order of Operations

Hi all,

Now that I am a week into my liquid diet, I think its time to admit that this is happening. If you want tips for surviving a liquid diet I would be more than happy to help. However, its time to talk about The plan again. So the goal is to be able to go to the Grand Canyon Star Party as our first expedition this will happen next summer assuming all goes well. However I need a road map for my acquisitions. Things have been made more complicated by my insistence on a Losmadny G11 for my mount.

It suffices to say that the first purchases need to be the laptop and the telescope, these will be the biggest expenses next to the purchase of a new SUV at some point in the next year, probably next fall. But we can break it down even further, the main problem with building a telescope from scratch is that you will inevitably mess things up. You can have all the wishlists and planning that you want but your going to inevitably meet with the fact that Murphy's law goes double in Astronomy.

Your main enemy is the complexity of open loop tracking systems. Everyone solves this with a guide camera, however there is something much more insidious. I have often said I will never buy a used telescope mount and here is why,

This is as close to a precision mechanical instrument as you can get in our hobby, it requires knowledge of mechanical and electrical repair and it is very sensitive to the weight that you put on it. There is no way you can just flip a switch and let it do its work. It has to be coaxed and finessed into doing its job. You cannot loose patients with it, you cannot try to reason with it. You can only be patient and work with it. If you try to take it out of the box put weight on it and get it to track and point, you are probably going to destroy it. 

This is the problem with mounts, they are a lot like cars, and this leads people to treat them like cars. That is to say that for the most part people treat there cars like shit. They assume that its going to work and when it does not they get frustrated and/or irate, when a car is a mechanical object and hence it must be maintained and taken care of, it does not need near the coaxing as an astronomical mount but the point is that you should not just abuse it and then expect me to purchase it. 

So I am going to buy the mount first, take my time assembling it, powering it on learning to balances it, getting to know its nooks and crannies and when I am done I will buy a telescope and put it on the mount, but not before I have taken the time to understand this object. After the mount then I will probably by a Camera, then the telescope and guide scope package. The laptop will also go in there somewhere since it is just a very useful object to have around. And once that is all acquired there will be test runs in my back yard then maybe in Tucson. The reason not to just get into my truck with a new scope and take it to a dark site is simple, it won't work. The scope won't work, the trip will probably be a disaster. 

Consuming

Hi All,

Its been awhile, as most of you know by now I have been cleared for surgery! So my gastric bypass will happen, baring me smoking or drinking a bunch of water the night before on November 18, 2013. After that it will be 6 months to a year of recovery. The good news is if all goes well I will be working again by week 2.

The Plan is back on, delayed by a month, and this delay has wreaked havoc on my finances. But enough about that, this post is about my proclivities as a consumer.

While I don't particularly want to argue about the nature of consumerism, I do want to expound on my distaste for used items.

The problem is the illusion of a good deal.

For certain items, purchase of a used item is a completely decidable problem, does the item work or not? This goes for things like various media, books, etc. However after the items whose operational modes are working or not working things get a little tricky.

I don't like used text books because inevitably they come marked up resulting in information being highlighted that I don't necessarily need, the result is a book that is less useful to me than a new one. For personal items, like clothing or dishes, I cannot get beyond the question of who wore this item before me, maybe that is a little OCD but the result is that used clothes, pots and pans, and mattresses are a no go for me.

Then we come to my personal favorites, complex items, cars, computers, telescopes, mounts. These items can be purchased used, but only after careful inspection, typically this only applies to cars. The issue is not just who used it before but how well did they maintain the item. Refurbished electronic items are a no go for me since they have a higher probability of failure maybe even a lower Mean Time Between Failures. Unless I can inspect the item, I am not going to purchase it, simple as that.

For telescopes they problem is that there are mechanical mechanisms that need to be properly used an maintained otherwise they must be replaced. As far as I can tell almost no one in our society is mechanically inclined anymore hence I do not trust used mechanisms. If I buy a scope on the cheap and have to immediately replace the focuser what is the point, I probably am not coming out ahead. Now if I know the person I am buying from that is another matter entirely but buying something off ebay or astromart, fuggetaboutit.

Mounts are a no go period. The issue is that the guts of the mount are usually garbage at the time of sale. This is because there are many more people who don't know how to maintain there mounts than do know how to maintain there mounts. The result is usually stripped worm gears, bad firmwares and all around terrible tracking from used mounts.

Some may say that I am too picky about what I am willing to buy, but hey to each his own, I am just never going to put anything on my skin that I don't know has come from a factory or further purchase something where the previous owner/manufacturer messed it up.

The Plan

So as you all know big changes will be coming over the next year. I will be undergoing weight loss surgery, the result of which will be an unusual diet for the foreseeable future. Another side effect will be increased energy and the ability to save money to do new and exciting things. The one thing that I want to do is have a vacation.

What is a vacation, is it traveling to some place that you have never seen taking a bunch of pictures and posting them on Facebook. Is that what we do to recharge our batteries? I think that when we go someplace we should disconnect from our lives in a meaningful way. The result is that my vacation plans have now become slightly elaborate.

First, I need a new telescope for deep sky astrophotography, hence the posts I have been making. If you want to see the current setup I have created a pin board for it here.  This setup is optimized for wide field deep sky objects. It utilizes a digital rebel modified to allow the full visual spectrum to be recorded by the chip. It can still be used as a photographic camera, thus multiple batteries may be needed.

Second some upgrades to my computer for processing large raw images, a bigger monitor and some more ram. Also a Macbook air, for capturing images at a remote site. With these things acquired we move on to the question of where to go.

Third, we need camping supplies. I have compiled another board on Pinterest here.

Once all three components are acquired there will be a local shakedown, learning how to assemble components in a useful way. Not everyone will be required to attend the shakedown events, just be willing to be told what to do when we arrive at our expedition end points.

Initially I thought the north rim of the grand canyon would be a good place to go, but unfortunately there are few clearings. The optimal place would be someplace dry and flat. Hence, the ultimate goal would be a winter trip to Death Valley, but before that we need a few expeditions to fine tune our approach. Our initial expedition would be to the Grand Canyon Star Party on the South Rim in early to mid June for 5-6 days. With a trip to the north rim to see which sight is better. Eventually however we will move to Alamo State Park for our first solo astrophotography expedition (AE1). The date for this expedition is to be determined, probably in the spring of 2014. Finally in the fall of 2014 we will try for another location, possibly in the Coronado National Forest (AE2).

Finally some time in the winter of 2014 we will attempt our expedition to Death Valley. (AE3) The solo expeditions will allow us more freedom to shoot the shit while engaging in behaviors that are frowned upon at some star parties. I would like 3-4 guests to join me for these expeditions, hopefully they will be enjoyable.

My motivation for this type of vacationing is simple. I sometimes wish to disconnect from the modern world and do something purely for enjoyment (or frustration) and this type of vacation seems to do the trick for me in my head.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.