Observing with Street Lights

Observing with Street Lights
Dark sky sites not always necessary to see the Milky Way (This image was taken ouside of a B&B in Julian, CA)

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Physics colloquia and Lie Algebra and orbits of moons and dark matter and how it might lose angular momentum to sprial inward

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well this week started off with just one physics colloquium and no Lie Algebra class.  So it's been a pretty quiet week and next week is spring break at CSULB so I should have even more time to work on the orbit calculations.  Hey, wait a minute now, why should I do some work on orbit calculations while the rest of physicist wannabes are off from school?  Ok, ok, maybe just a little work and a little break.

Anyway, before discussing what little bit I did getting ready to do

Monday, March 21, 2016

General Relativity at 100 Celebration in Pasadena, Eddington's measurement of the bending of light during an eclipse, Collecting images of Jupiter's moons and measuring locations to plot orbits

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well, this week has been a busy one with collecting images of Jupiter's moons as part of my interest in collecting real data in order to calculate and predict the orbits of the moons and more generally, orbits of other planets or asteroids.  There are plenty of data sources on the Internet and even apps for your phone which can identify the orbital and observational parameters, but

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Physics colloquia and General Relativity Celebration at 100 at the Huntington Library and personal recollection of the events in Huntington Gardens

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,

This is the first blog delivered from my new gmail email address.  Hope all goes well.

Again this week the weather has been a little cold with a bit of rain, so this week's activity has been mostly inside.  I started the week with the CSULB physics colloquium where Professor Long, UCR, described the search for supersymmetry at the LHC.  Later in the week, Nobel laureate Steven Chu described the science of climate change and mitigation at the UCI lecture series.  Finally, there was the weekend series of

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Observing clouded out for the week and Astronomer Assistant chews computer power cord and just for fun, a video of Wintergatan Marble driven music machine

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,

This week has been clouded out and rained out.  The Blackstar Canyon star party was cancelled and we couldn't get any astronomical observing done this week, so I elected to tackle one of the most difficult tasks that I've postponed for years.  That difficult task is to change email providers.  Have you stopped and considered how many services that you use that are web based and are tied to your email address?  I have over 90 sites so far and am still