Two physics colloquia and back to plan for measuring and duplicating the determination of the orbits of moons of Jupiter

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

This week I've been busy trying to turn images of Jupiter moons into real data about their positions and orbits.  To that end, I'll show a couple of images taken 1 day apart and the analysis used to determine how the moons positions with respect to Jupiter was determined.  But first, I wanted to offer some brief comments about the weekly physics colloquiums that I attended this past week.  Both colloquiums presented topics of interest to

Busy with physics colloquia and the smudge was not a comet, but M81 instead, OCA author Bob suggests website for star field identification and auto alighn tool fails as resident astronomer see his shadow and teenage amateur attempts duplication of Roemer's determination of speed of light

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well, this has been a pretty busy week, what with physics colloquiums at UCI and CSULB, trying out a new self aligning tripod for a camera and trying to resolve whether the image shown last week was really the Comet Catalina or not.  So along that line of activity, I have some good news and some bad news.  The first good news is it is always good to get back on campus, especially during this summer like warm spell and the colloquiums have been very interesting too.

Another piece of good news, is that the new self aligning tripod for light weight cameras mostly worked.  This new tool will simplify the taking of photo metric stellar light curve data with just the tripod and camera.  Setting up the telescope for these types of measurements is just too time consuming.  The new tripod is so

Two drawings from first LIGO public released paper showing gravity waves and new auto alignment tool might have pointed to a comet? -- we will see next time

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

First thing this week I wanted to share a couple of images from the paper announcing the detection of gravity waves from the merging of two black holes.  As an APS member, I get the paper as part of my membership as a physicist wannabe, but you can probably still find

First public LIGO announcement, bike with built in bar and some more Jupiter position measurements and IPAD app for gas giants locations

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,

First thing we need to do is pass on this LIGO announcement heads up from Searching for Gravity Waves, Dr. Gary.  Thank you Gary.

http://www.ligo.org/news/media-advisory.php

The LIGO Collaboration will make a status announcement, tomorrow, Thursday regarding the possible detection of gravity waves.  Check out the reference above.  Also, we heard from Science Squad member, Ken, that the rumor