Posts Made By: James McSheehy

Both scopes are air spaced designs so there probably isn't much difference in the time required to stabilize. The Petzval is better for imaging "out of the box" because you won't need a field flattener.

From my experience temperatures below 5F are hard on mechanical and electronic equipment, and the glass parts in the optics are usually the least of my worries.

Let them hang together in their secret deliberations, maybe they'll hang separately down the road. 8)

Hey, a guy can hope can't he?

I suspect that many of these Gitmo alumni, especially the older ones, are sociopaths. As such, they can never be "rehabilitated", they can only be isolated from society or executed. Those are the only proven solutions that prevent sociopaths from preying on others.

Brian Lamb at C-SPAN has called Queen Nancy's bluff:

http://www.c-span.org/pdf/C-SPAN%20Health%20Care%20Letter.pdf

Her reply will likely be the usual, incredulous "Are you serious?"

I don't know the exact answer to your question, but I did hear a speech by a trial lawyer a couple of years ago that addressed the issue. According to the lawyer, individuals in the U.S. must now abide by over 100,000 federal statutes. The laws govern activities that range from automobiles to zoology, and crossing any one of them can get you a big fine, a trip to Club Fed, or both.

His point was this: if the Feds want to make a case and indict somebody, they can probably find some violation(s) of the CFR to justify it.

Evelyn Gariss, editor of The Browning Newsletter, predicted the onset of this multi-decade cooling trend last year. Her analysis is based on well known, cyclical changes in Pacific Ocean currents and sea temperatures.

About those checked bags-

I was between flights at a small airport last month and wandered over to a railing on the 2nd floor mezzanine where I could see down into the area where TSA was hand searching checked bags after they passed through the X-ray machine. On one large bag they pulled out a big bottle of what looked like Smirnoff vodka, and several glass jars of some kind of tomato sauce product. They took these jars over to a machine where they were wiped with gauze swatches and these swatches were them run through a gas analyzer -- looking for traces of nitrates I suppose.

Anyway, I would imagine that any closed device like a telescope OTA will get the same treatment with TSA agents unpacking it, swabbing it for testing, and in general messing with it. You might want to think about this before consigning it to the checked bags.

That the way it's done in Chicago, so why not the White House? You gotta problem wit dat? 8)

I've used an acer netbook to run an imaging setup. It has a 1.6 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120 GB hard drive. The OS on it is XP home. Can it run lots of USB devices? To sidestep the power issues I use an active extender cable between the netbook and a powered USB hub at the scope. That way each device gets the rated current and I don't have to worry about losses over a 15 foot cable. When I run a USB video imager where the device is streaming lots of data, I bypass the hub and run an active extender cable directly from the netbook to the camera.

Software is another issue. All of the apps (TheSky6, CCDSoft, K3CCD Tools, Metaguide, etc.) run well by themselves, but adding more than three USB devices to the mix results in some "interesting" situations. Windows and/or the applications don't play nice together and sometimes stuff just stops working. Killing the individual app usually works but I've also had situations where a full reboot was needed.

Another problem I encountered was caused by the power up sequence. If I power up the system with my CCD camera off, and then turn it on, the netbook will not see it on the USB bus. Again, I think this is probably an issue with Windows XP.

The "original" version of Call Me was arranged as a reggae song. When Blondie got their contract, they became a rock-n-roll band overnight. 8)