Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Maybe Tony Abbott and the Tea-party have it right. If we remove the socialist aspects of society, like Medicare and Centrelink, these people and their ideas will eventually be removed from the gene pool by social Darwinism.

Die Hoffnung stirbt zu letzt.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/messages-from-creationists-to-people-who-believe-in-evolutio

Friday, January 31, 2014

Long German sentences:

From a Uni email:
"Das Universitätsgesetz schreibt für den Beginn eines Lehramtsstudiums ab dem Studienjahr 2014/15 vor, dass eine "Überprüfung der für die Ausbildungserfordernisse für das Lehramt an Schulen entsprechenden leistungsbezogenen, persönlichen, fachlichen und pädagogischen Eignung gemäß der für den Beruf der Pädagoginnen und Pädagogen notwendigen Kompetenzen" bei den StudienwerberInnen vorzunehmen ist (§ 63 Abs. 12 UG iVm § 143 Abs. 35 UG)."

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Micro-Astrophotography

My setup includes a mini-dobsonian (76mm mirror, 350mm focal length) and a MS Lifecam that I pulled apart and stuffed inside a old 35mm film cannister. The webcam is attached to a tiny netbook with SharpCap installed. All in all, the whole setup fits inside a thick briefcase. While it's pretty much useless for deep sky astrophotography, bright deep sky objects like Orion and the Pleiades are easily visible with the eye piece. Closer to home though, the webcam is great for picking up details on the moon as well as Jupiter's moons. Here's a shot of the moon take from a window in the stair well of our apartment in Vienna. The whole moon fits in the field of view of the mini-dob.


And here's an animated GIF of the moons of Jupiter moving over a period of 4 hours. (19:30 to 22:58 on the 10.01.2014). The frames are about 30 minutes apart.From Left to right we have Callisto, Io Jupiter and Ganymede. Io was unfortunately at it's farthest point from Jupiter from our point of view and so was at it's slowest.