Spam Poetry

Like all of the great scourges of history, spam has has wreaked untold suffering upon the populace. Apart from obviously clogging up every server and mailbox on this planet, spam is all the more depressing for the fact that it's often a complete and utterwaste of everyone's time, including the wretched spammer. It's a poor reflection on humanity when people out there are sending billions of emails which:

1. Are sent to addresses that don't exist
2. Are regarding products or services of a completely unexplained nature
3. Contain no way whatsover to purchase said products or services, or
4. Often contain no recognisable form of communication whatsoever, as the moronic spammer cannot master simple spamming applications.

It is an example of type 4 that has made my day, bounced back to my address because the one it came from doesn't of course exist and mine's vaguely similar. This one is a rare randomly formed flower in a field of manure, that has formed a delicate, dare I say Vogonesque, form of poetry. Behold!

Allowing, polloution diet iq complex medicinal?

Because travel quezon city lot battley avenue. Illinois, income =

palmdesert, range. Kalau sering bikin pakai dough.

Tricks team xbox xb. An dubh for wilwood calipers forestry tractors, =

carl nohr!

Differ, provinces bars varies different delta nestled quebec?

Panties cartoon reminded, visa gift.

Sitter bestiality fairly, benign earlier reactions bablyonxs babs =

babysitter.

Schools garland isd cart. Steiger mccormick furts ateens, halfway =

Words to live by my friends..

Saturn

It's that time of year again when Saturn makes an appearance late in the evening. Last night I spent an hour or so trying to get a better photo of it than last year. Out of the 112 shots that I didn't immediately delete, this was the best.



Not too bad I thought, the rings are distinct and the banding is visible. I suspect it's about as good as I'm going to get with my current equipment. It's a bit of an elaborate procedure to take these photos, and goes something like this:

1. Get Saturn in the telescope's field of view and focus
2. Line up camera on tripod, get Saturn in camera's field of view
3. Manually focus camera
4. Set shutter release on timer to allow vibration of telescope and camera to dampen out
5. Take as many shots as possible before it wanders out of the field of view
6. Go to 1.

Trying various shutter speeds, I found 1/40th to 1/80th of a second to be about optimum. Any faster is badly underexposed, any slower and you get too much motion blur. Actually, all the shots are underexposed, the camera is already maxed out in terms of aperture (f2.5) and ISO (400) so there's no where else to go. Short of building/buying a bigger telescope with an equatorial or microprocesser controlled mount, I could possibly make a simple powered mount with rollers acting directly on the ball of the telescope. I'm sure this would work, but the programming to achieve true tracking would be a challenge. However, I think for relatively short exposures of a few seconds or so it might be possible to get away with a simple linear drive, rather than one that tracks the correct curved path..

At the other end of the astrophotography spectrum, make sure you have a look at The Most Detailed Image Of The Orion Nebula Ever Taken. Mindblowing.

Comets and Bloodsucking Parasites

I see it's been a year since I last wrote something. This was never intended to be just a collection of astronomical photos, but here's some more anyway.

We were recently very fortunate to get a clear evening in which to see Comet McNaught. I must admit that I hadn't got around to even looking for it as we don't have a clear view of the Western horizon, but Adrian in his enthusiasm dragged us out to go Comet hunting. I'm glad he did. We ended up at Meadowbank Park looking across the Parramatta River to Homebush Bay and Silverwater (Silverwater may sound like a pretty place, but I've always suspected it was named that because of all the mercury dumped in the river in years gone by). Despite the usual light pollution and even fireworks going off at Homebush, we had a pretty clear view.

My ageing yet trusty Canon G2 can only do exposures up to 15 seconds, so you can only just make out the roostertail effect of the tail, but I still got some reasonable pictures.

This 15 second exposure makes the sky look a lot brighter than it was at this point.

This is only a 4 second exposure, which is much closer to how it appeared to the naked eye.

I also took along the Astroscan telescope for a closer look and shot a few pictures through it. Not too bad for a non-tracking mount and short exposures..






It would have been nice to have spent a little longer there but we thought it wise to retreat from the swarms of mosquitoes that descended upon us after sunset. I still wish I'd brought back the evil insect repellent purchased in Alaska in 1996. It could kill mozzies in an instant but it made me dizzy when I used it..

More Lunarcy

Another quick Moon pic. This one from the day after the last one, last Saturday night / Sunday morning (click for big).



I'd love to do one a night for a complete lunar cycle to make an animation, but that would require consistently good weather and the ability to be active throughout a sliding scale of ridiculous times. Both unlikely.

Telescopy

My Darling Suyin has given me a telescope for Christmas, and what a fun toy it is. It’s an Edmund Scientific Astroscan, a very simple and easy to use telescope that’s been in production for ages and is generally well regarded. She’d obviously noticed how many times I’d read this review on Dan’s Data. Smart girl.






It may look funky, but inside that groovy casing is a fairly conventional 102mm (4.25”) Newtonian reflector telescope. This type of scope, which utilises a paraboloid mirror, has a lot going for it so not surprisingly there are a lot of them around. I’m not sure there are a huge number of Astroscans in Australia though, given that until recently the manufacturer didn’t want to sell them overseas, or to distributors who would. This was all too hard for me, but Suyin persisted, tracking down another site, Ward’s Natural Science that did. She even negotiated down the usually ridiculous shipping charges from the U.S. Hooray!

Of course it rained for a week or so after I got it. Not unexpected.

When it did finally clear I had my first ever chance to play with a non-rubbish telescope. First target was the moon, which was quite spectacular. All the main features, big craters, seas etc were very clear, especially around the edge of the shadow (it was gibbous, which is nothing to do with gibbons but was a few days after the full moon). I even tried a few photos, which came out surprisingly well.





The ball and socket type mounting used is not designed for astrophotography as it cannot track celestial objects for long exposures, like a powered equatorial mount can. It’s still possible to take photos of bright objects like the moon or maybe planets using the sophisticated technique of holding the camera up to the eyepiece. I used a tripod mostly, but it was a bit of a juggle to get it lined up, manually focus, set aperture and shutter speed (auto settings don’t work well) and try to get a photo before the moon wandered out of frame.

A few days later I got a chance to try again, and few slightly better shots.





Also on the agenda was looking for planets and the first likely-looking candidate turned out to be Saturn! Seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time was pretty thrilling, although it’s still quite small using the 15mm eyepiece (30x magnification). My best photo doesn’t do it justice so I’ll try again next time. I’m also on the lookout for a good 6 - 8mm orthoscopic eyepiece, which will boost magnification to about as high as this scope will go.




I found Mars too, although it was too distant and small to see any detail on. A bit later I spotted a suspiciously planet-like object rising which turned out to be Jupiter. While the banding wasn't visible at this magnification I could see the disk and four moons all in a row. Very cool..

The Orion Nebula was visible but thanks to the large amount of light pollution here in Sydney (not helped by the streetlight that blasts into our backyard) it wasn’t much more than a faint cloudiness. Looks like we'll have to start planning an overnight trip to somewhere dark... More pics to come.

So, if you're looking at purchasing a telescope there are a number of very useful articles on selecting one. The common theme is "Don't buy a Department Store telescope (or a cheap one on Ebay) as they are rubbish". While not the largest of amateur telescopes (or even a medium sized one) the Astroscan is approximately one billion times better than those crappy ones. As a bonus, it does not require its own observatory dome (not that I wouldn't mind one)..

Summer

There are a few things I like about Summer, which is very nearly upon us.

Here is one.


At least I like the ones that don't have hail in them.

Other things I like include Cricket, tomatoes, holidays and mango. No photos of these things today though.

Music: Response

I think it's bit weird that having bought music online for the first time recently I find that I'm buying very different stuff than usual. An alarming proportion of my modest purchases are classified as Dance, Electronic or Dance/Electronic. The nearest I've ever come to this genre(s) was when I bought a DIG album mistakenly located in the dance section of HMV.

Now I suppose you *could* dance to DIG, but for it to look even slightly cool you'd have to be either a giant sloth or perhaps a 5 year-old on red cordial for the more frantic tracks.

So, I'm now legally in posession of a couple of the works of The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and Daft Punk. Mostly I've been inspired by the latter, and what I believe may well be the coolest video ever made. I'm speaking here of Robot Rock.

Before I jump into the illegal screen shots, let me set the scene..

Robot....Rock. Okay, two concepts of great merit there.

Robots...who Rock. Still good. A logical extension of the above.

The robots in the clip are two guys dressed as robots in a slightly unconvincing manner. That is, they are wearing chrome-plated motorbike helmets, leathers and shiny gloves.

Now the best bits. Part of the stage looks like a bracelet with spikes on it. Good good.
Oh, and one of the "robots" plays a double necked guitar!!! Oh yes!

Now I've prepared you, here are a few poor quality screen grabs:

Robot playing drums. Shiny.

Robot playing world's coolest guitar.

Section of stage shaped like spikey bracelet!!

This is where the guitar says "Robot. Rock." So cool. So, so cool...

Daft Punk are the masters. Take concept, execute, concept nailed.

So I happily paid for the right to look at this clip, a useful remedy for stress and general lethargy.

Around the World: brilliant.

I still don't get that one with the dog guy though.. A few too many Roquefort pizzas before bedtime perhaps.

Only thing left that I don't understand is exactly why people in Australia must pay 25% more than people in the US for the same product delivered in the same manner. Something, people, is not quite right.

More Big Airbus Pics

It seems I only ever get enough sleep on weekends...

More photos!

Having seen the impressive exterior it was now time for our very rapid tour of the inside. As can be seen, this is very much a test aircraft, with no real interior or even sidewalls and ceilings. The large blue bottles are ballast tanks to allow the aircrafts weight and centre of gravity to be easily changed.

On the left is the forward stairway leading to the upper deck. On the right is Phil's arm, and behind that some of the test equipment.

Moving further into the cabin you can get a pretty good idea of the amount of wiring, plumbing and ducting on a large aircraft.


Lighting is improvised by fluorescent tubes stuck to the ceiling. Insulation blankets are thankfully present on the structure, preventing careless personnel from being frozen to the walls during long flights.

Around the middle of the main deck we get to the interesting bit.

The flight test engineers' station looks pretty slick, excepting perhaps the rather quaint paper data plotters. Our guide mentioned that from this station it possible to reprogram the flight control software in flight, an impressive if scary thought.. The screen at top left displays the output from cameras observing the undercarriage, one of the top of the tail, and one on the flightdeck (to make sure the crew haven't fallen asleep).

Moving to the rear of the main deck we find...

...just what you'd expect on a flight test aircraft. Well, I guess if you were flying out from France and had an unlimited baggage allowance... But, to quote a famous Australian chef: "Where's the cheese?"

Up here maybe?

I must say for a test aircraft the stairs are pretty fancy, with stylish LED lighting. Moving to the upper deck we find...

..more ballast tanks. Apart from that it looks a lot like the inside of an A330/340. That and the walls curving inwards more steeply. Not surprisingly it's a lot like a 747 upper deck only bigger.

Up the front of the uper deck is a rather rough passenger zone, obviously intended just to carry a few people, not as a showcase for the latest in interior technology. It looks a bit like it was nicked from on old A340 and doesn't quite fit properly, but I guess it does the job.

The main stairway looks far more grand than the pokey one on the 747. The bright orange bars in the centre are to assist the crew in moving around the cabin during unusual manoeuvers or attitudes, or to help get to a door if things go horribly wrong. Obscured by my two colleagues are a few steps leading up to the flightdeck.

And that's about it for the inside really. I took a few more exterior shots the next morning when the light was better. The panoramas worked ok, a bit of distortion where the frames join but not too bad. Click on them for larger versions..

As big as it looks on the ground, it's not until it flies over that you realise just how big the thing is. That wing is simply huge. Hopefully we'll get to see another in the not too distant future, next year one should be out here for route proving flights which will entail a longer stay and the possibility of getting to actually fly on one..

Fun with Big Aircraft

On occasion I'm lucky enough to see some interesting aircraft in my job. Not long back I got a good look through the prototype 777-200LR, an early 777-300ER and before that joyflights on an Embraer 170 and Bombardier Dash8 Q400. Yesterday however, I got to see something really impressive, none other than the very first Airbus A380. This is the Boss Monster of commercial jets and I can tell you is mighty impressive to look at. Anyway, to the photos!

This is the beastie. Big, isn't it?

Note hastily applied Qantas decals.

















Here's another view, showing a big blunt nose and tall crown. The crown incidentally, is made from GLARE, a glass and aluminium reinforced epoxy.

















Now to my eye if this were all polished aluminium it would look like a futuristic airliner of the 1930s..

So what's it like inside this big white whale? Is it a luxo-barge of kazillionaires or flying geeklab? And what is the mysterious cargo it's carrying? Well, I need sleep now, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow. But here's a sneak preview, to prove that I did in fact get on board. Yours truly in the big seat.


















More later.

Further Zig Adventures

More rocket fun cominatcha!

A few more evenings in the garage this week resulted in two new rockets in need of testing. Saturday just happened to yield perfect conditions; clear blue skies and very little wind. Let's go!

Rocket 1, designed with reliability rather than outright performance in mind, I'll refer to as the Orange Flaming Thing (OFT) due to it's excellent colour scheme created by Syn. The design was quite similar to last week's long rocket which flew very well.



Rocket 2 was a bit more adventurous, with a minimum diameter body and highly swept fins, which I'll call Dart-Like Object (DLO). The position of the fins further forward resulted in the need for a little weight in the nose to make it stable unfortunately. With recovery streamer in place it weighed in at 48 grams, 1 gram heavier than OFT. I don't have a "before" photo of DLO.

First off I decided to launch the DLO, leaving the more conservative OFT in reserve in case DLO went funny. I needn't have worried, liftoff was perfect and the flight spectacular. See sequence below or download the video. A big thanks to Adrian for again acting as cameraman.













The recovery streamer popped out and the rocket eventually came to Earth in the middle of the creek, fortunately dry. Thanks to Chris for recovering it from a very scary, evil spider infested place.

Next up was OFT. This time I handed over launch button duties to Adrian and manned the camera in an attempt to shoot continuous still frames of the launch. Liftoff was good, unfortunately occuring between frames, but the flight did not go to plan. A few hundred feet up while still under power the rocket made a violent left turn and broke up. By sheer luck I managed to capture this on camera..





Soon after it started to rain small rocket parts. We managed to recover most of it, except for the streamer, one and a half fins and a piece of the body.

I'm still not certain what went wrong, I've been examining the pictures closely but can't conclusively identify the first part to break off. It's either:

-A section of body near the nose that's split and lifted, then been torn off by the airstream. The rocket then yawed, pulling off the nosecone, dragging out the streamer and causing two fins to fail.

OR

- A fin has failed at the root, causing the same yaw and subsequent breakup as mentioned above.

The first piece to break off looks white, indicating a section of the body, but I can't see where the other fin went either, so it could be the fin as seen from end on, with bare balsa showing.. In any case it was a quite spectacular failure. Thanks again Chris for venturing into the Planet of the Spiders to retrieve bits.

A minor repair was made to DLO before readying it for another launch. Again, liftoff was excellent but the streamer failed to deploy. It seemed to have jammed on the way out, so the rocket came down at great speed, through a tree canopy and stuck into the grass, still smouldering.



It was pretty smashed up, the engine having gone for a walk to the nose cone, splitting the body lengthwise, but I'll probably repair it.

Anyway, despite the carnage it was a pretty successful outing. And yes, I'm afraid there will be more to come. The next challenge (apart from improving durability and reliability) is to cram a baby digital camera in one and shoot the liftoff from the rocket's perspective.. Stay tuned..

Move Zig, For Great Justice

Friday saw our first games day for some time, having skipped the Christmas break due to overseasedness and lack of interest. Anyway, as a lunchtime diversion and uncle duty I thought it time to introduce my young nephews to the ..erm... educational and scientific applications of pyrotechnic devices. Actually, the fun of firing model rockets into the sky. Having recently established that such devices are still, surprisingly, legal I bought half a dozen of the more powerful mid-sized C6 series motors. Actually, by today's standards it seems these are now baby motors, with some very serious pieces of kit out there..

Anyway, both rockets lifted off successfully (ie: no scary looping at ground level this time) with the first (long) rocket reaching a decent altitude. Unfortunately it was overcast, making the pale balsa rocket hard to see against the cloud. It was also rather windy, meaning that we got a faint glimpse of it drifting off into the next suburb once it's streamer had deployed. Just like old times. The second (short) rocket appears to have suffered a failure during the boost phase, probably fin flutter. A few bits floated downwind but again nothing was recovered. Oh well, I suppose I get to keep the remaining engnes for another day. It's been a slow Easter, so I've done a post-flight report, which some of you have already seen. I've included it below:

Some observations from Friday's inaugural Games Day Lunchtime Launching. Firstly, it was interesting to note the different survival tactics used by observers when faced with an unguided and untested high-speed projectile..





The approaches seen in frame 1 from left to right appear to be:

1. See what Mum does.
2. Leg it.
3. Cover your head and hope for the best.
4. See and avoid.

From frame 2:

- Connor and Chris stick with their original plans.
- Matthew and Ja find something large to hide under, in this case Chris.

As for the actual rocket flight, analysis of the video footage for the 2nd launch and application of high school physics reveals the following:

- Time to estimated 2m height = 0.2 seconds (3 frames @ 15 fps)
- Average acceleration at launch = 10.2 G (100 m/s^2)
- For the C6 series engine used, thrust is approximately linear from 0 at t = 0 to 14 N at t = 0.2 secs. This means that peak acceleration at t = 0.2 would have been around double the average, or 20.4 G (200 m/s^2) - it would actually have been greater than this but I've assumed constant mass for simplicity..
- Velocity at 2m height = 20 m/s (72 km/h)



C6 Series Engine Thrust vs Time Plot

The launch sequence for the short rocket follows:


Igniter Fires


Engine Start


Liftoff


We Have Liftoff!


Cleared Tower


Gone!

The video does not capture the breakup of the vehicle, however analyses of the audio track was conducted. It was found to correspond nicely to the thrust curve and revealed:

- An initial structural failure appears to be recorded, followed by the distinctive sound of the vehicle tumbling.
- Failure occurred 1.55 seconds after launch during the constant (4.5 N) thrust phase.
- Vehicle was within 0.25 seconds of burnout.

The audio track analysis was a little big to fit on this page, but you can still look at it if you like.

To sum up, lessons learned from this experiment were:
- Don't launch in too much wind.
- The 1.6mm thick balsa I used for the fins were probably of insufficient stiffness for use with these engines - I'll try to find some stiffer quarter grain next time.
- You really need a clear sky in order to see the thing.
- Long rockets good, short rockets bad, or at least harder to get right.
- 50% of recorded observers chose to hide behind someone.
- Rockets are fun, we'll do it again soon while it's still legal.

Yes, I think we will..

Ants

I think someone's been doing this at our place. It worries me that even the nastiest looking surface spray, which I hate using, keeps them out for about 2 days.. We tried bribing them with sugar outside, but they still came in to steal the rattie's food and wander around everywhere including my desk on which there is no food! Maybe they're just going through my stuff.

Favorite Foe-Toes

Been lazy about writing stuff lately so I thought I'd stick some photos up instead.