Posts Made By: Ron Zick

How many Iraqi binoculars does it take to make one medium sized hydrogen bomb?

Mark,
Any day is a good time to go to Hawaii. The whales arrive the last week of Dec. and are around through March. The Best whale watching is on Maui, (my opinion), but the whales seem to prefer to calve in the vicinity of the lava outfall into the ocean on the Big Island, seems they like the extra warm water. A must see is the Volcano National Park. Figure on spending at least a day there. I would also highly recommend the drive down to the area in the park where the lava flows into the ocean. Arriving at dusk is best, you will probably see some whales, perhaps talk to one of the resident volcanologists returning from a research hike and get to see the newest land on Earth. The lava flow is best viewed after dark so you should take a flashlight.The lava flow is variable so the quality of viewing will vary.

The trip up Mauna Kea is not difficult if you are comfortable with mountain driving. Be forwarned, rental cars are not covered by the rental insurance on the Saddle Back Road and the Mauna Kea Road. If you wreck your rental car, you or your own insurance company will be paying. I did drive a rental up to the summit and found the road better than expected but realize this is a rural high altitude mountain road that goes from pavement to gravel back to pavement. The summit does get snowed in at times and high winds also might shut the summit down. There is a rest stop and telescope area at 10,000 ft., close to the lodge where the scope farm staff stays. It is recomended that you stay there for at least 45 min. to allow your body to get acclimated to the elevation before going on to the summit. There is a guided tour (free) in the afternoons by a local club.

One final caution about the summit, you are at a very high altitude and in somewhat remote area, though more than likely there will always be people around. If you develop any health problems, you and or your party will have to get themselves down the mountain. The elevation is to high for helicopter rescues and an ambulance is several hours away.

I can go on and on about the Hawaiin Islands. Hope you have a good trip.
Ron Zick

Hello Tom,
I had a similar frame drop rate with my Toucam Pro with a PI 200mhz computer. The internal bandwidth capacity is just too small to handle the high data rates a webcam requires. As the others have suggested there are a few things you can do to lessen your problem.

1. Don't use the supplied software. Personally, I like KCCD3.

2.Limit your capture file size to less than available ram size so that the whole avi file can be buffered. Most frames are dropped during disk writes and reads. I learned early on that having an AVI file larger than 650 meg.(cdrom capacity) really makes file portability difficult.

3.And finally, if the dropped frames are still really bugging you, update your hardware. I went to a 650 mhz PIII and almost totally eliminated frame drops. But as others have said, dropped frames aren't really a big problem unless the problem is so severe that it is causing your computer to hang.

Merry Christmas
Ron

Craig,
Meade has Pictorview 6.45 still available on their website, which is DOS compatible. I also might have an earlier version laying around if needed. I would really suggest trying to update to the latest version possible that your hardware-software can support.

Jason,
I have used two computers in my unheated observatory for several years in temps as cold as -15F.

The first computer was a desktop P1 233MMX. The only problem I had was the cheap cooling fan in the back of the chassis would howl when below zero. I just unplugged the fan to eliminate the problem.
The IDE hard drive, an old Maxtor, seemed to tolerate the cold though it would rev up slower.

My current system is a picmg based 6U server chassis with an 850mhz PIII. This system has two scsi drives,one of which is mounted in a hot swap tray for moving data to the house. I'm currently trying to finish the network for this winter.

The old desktop system tolerated the cold quite well but the 6u chassis system really seems to function flawlessly in the extreme cold. The one commonality with these two systems was that the hard drives, which were premium units when new, had lot's of hours on them from previous use. I would not expect a brand new out of the box unit to perform as well.

I use a trackball instead of a mouse in the observatory, it takes less table space and is glove friendly for me.

Keyboards do get fragile in the cold if they are dropped. The cheap ones seem to shed key caps.

Your question, "if this is a wise thing to do?" If you'reusing an old desktop or server machine, so what, they are dirt cheap. I think you will find that the laptops have a tendency to be more expensive and are more fragile plus the laptop by design was to be energy efficient, i.e. little drive motors that are effiecient but not very powerful. These would probably not like near zero much less below zero temps.

So to answer your question is, yes.

Derrick,
I don't have a GPS version of the LX200 so I am not totally familiar with your model however it sounds to me like one of the drive motors or axis is binding or stuck. The chirp, then the dimming led sounds to me like a large power draw. During boot up, after the chirp, the servo motors should start to slew.The control computer does not talk to the world until this happens.

If one of the motors is in a locked rotor mode:
A. you will get a large current draw, which you appear to have
B. the boot up process will lock up while waiting to receive from the encoder pulses which it can't receive because the motor is not rotating.

I would suggest, since you already seem to know your way around the insides, to disassemble the scope and check the servo motors for free rotation and to check the gearing for foreign material(s). Make sure that the scope is not up against a hard stop, if your scope has them.

Your scope,IMHO, does not seem dead. It's just being prevented from finishing the boot up process.

Bryan,
If your observatory is located on "the family farm", I think you might be missing on of the most effective and flexible options, a big female dog.

Most urban dwellers miss this option because they think of dogs as being restrained in some fashion. A good farm dog will usually be a mut,free running, that lives outside, rarely sees the inside of the house unless it is really cold, and is usually self-fed from the dog food bag. A dog that lives a life as described will have a great degree of ownership of its territory and while not having to be "mean", it can still be an excellent kids pet, it will very protective of it's territory. The only thing that will neutralize this security agent would be a bullet and if your criminal is of this type, stealing your scope is only a side issue. Also a final point, a farm dog and it's expenses are considered as deductible business expenses.

Wayne,
It sounds like you're asking for quite a lot.

First question you need to answer is: "Will this observatory be run unattended?"

How many hours away will help be if the observatory gets caught in a failure mode?

What safeguards need to be implemented to protect other humans and critters from this automated observatory?

How are you going to communicate with the observatory?
How reliable will this connection be?

It is one thing to have a motorized roof opener that you operate from your house 100 ft. away but it is quite another project to open the same roof on a building that's on a mountain top 4 hrs. away from a human to help it if it needs it.

It also sounds like you want to put a lot of intelligence in this observatory. There are very few truly automated observatories, the software for this type of project gets rather sophisticated. Most are remote controlled, a human is at the controls somewhere and usually there is a human on site to fix any problems that might arise.

I don't want to discourage you but this is a very large project.
I would recommend that you break this up into smaller more workable phases such as get the roof working first, then the scope, then the camera, then finally the weather system.

Technical Innovations- manufactures of the Home Dome and Pro Dome makes an automation system for their domes called Digital Dome Works. It's main function is to slave the dome to the scope mount. There are and or have been others on the market but almost all of them have been specifically designed to slave the dome to the scope. But AFAIK none are designed to be truly autonomous.

The color of the roof does have an impact on energy absorbed but the most crucial factor is actually the surface finish. A high gloss black can be much cooler than the average dull galvanized or silver painted steel. The newer painted steel roofs which are energy star rated all are fairly efficient reflectors. EPDM, asphalt, and galvanized metal are all great absorbers.

I predict that asphalt roofs are rapidly on the road to extinction. Between rising raw material costs, landfill disposal costs, relatively short service life ( in comparison to metal or other alternatives) and poor reflectance there isn't much reason except low initial cost.

Looks like it is just a bad capacitor. Probably tantalum. Fairly easy to repair and cheap as long as nothing else got fried.

This is not a very frequent problem on these scopes but bad caps are the biggest problem on pc boards.