Posts Made By: Dan Goldberg

I'm thinking you'll be fine. The CG-3 is an EQ-2, is it not?

If you're talking about a plug-in power supply, it'll cost you quite a lot of money to find or build one that can supply the currents that a peltier draws and power your other equipment on top of that. It will also not be compact or light.

How powerful is this peltier?

If you're looking for a battery you can get a gel-cell lead acid battery. It's safe for mailing and shipping, but it's still going to be very heavy and quite large as well. Alternately, you could consider some sort of NiMH battery pack. NiMH batteries can store curiously large amounts of power given their size and weight, but you'll need a special charger for such a battery pack and again it will be neither light nor small for your application.

Why not use the boat battery, or is this a sail boat or something?

Do you plan to do processing on the laptop too? Imaging and control are pocket change for a computer. You could easily do with an old, used clunker. If you want to run Photoshop or some other demanding software, though, you're going to want to get a fairly recent notebook.

If you're buying a new notebook the best thing I can recommend is 256MB RAM at a minimum. 512 is better, 1024 is better still. You can never have too much RAM, and your RAM can never be fast enough. DDR is the way to go. Processing speed (what most people mythically equate to MHz) is of virtually no significance because P4's and Athlon's are just so powerful. Get what's in your budget. Many people grossly overestimate the amount of hard disk space they need. 20GB is really quite a lot of space. If it's not too expensive, get yourself more but if you're on a budget and you're not some chronic MP3 downloader then you'll likely never even use half of that.

I would shop for a notebook with 1 or more USB ports, a serial port, a parallel port and a PS/2 port. Ethernet is a given as is CardBus. Everything else is personal preference.

There has been a lot speculation with this regard for the past couple months. I was wondering what motivated Parks to buy Lumicon's corpse, and what exactly they got other than Lumicon's good name.

So you've got a killer scope and mount and you're looking at the moon? You must be a *real* moon lover.

For the SLR you can buy an SCT T-adapter and a Nikon T-mount. Prime focus away! Alternately, you could piggyback the camera on your telescope.

Digicam's are a little harder to hook up. I don't know about that model so I won't say anything. It's a case by case thing.

I don't think France needs to judge its position in world politics by the irrational response of American consumers. Fact of the matter is that France is fully entitled to think and do what it wants, within reason, as a soverign political entity and if that sometimes upsets America, well that's too bad.

Americans seem to think that they are owed an unpayable debt of gratitude for their World War efforts, and they certainly are owed gratitude, but that doesn't mean they can throw it in France's face anytime something doesn't go the American way. Fact is that without France, America may not even exist so maybe it's time to call everything even and recognize that France is a country in and of itself and has interests that sometimes differ from American interests.

France is making the same googly eyes at Iraq's oil as both Russia and America are. To think that they will just bend over because America's unhappy is foolish. America has every intention of acting in what is perceived to be its own best interest. I don't see why it's unacceptable for France to do the same.

Coincidentally, I'm with America on the issue of Saddam Hussein (though I think this whole proposed imposed democracy stuff is bologna). I just think that Americans need to step back and realize that the relevancy of the UN isn't contingent on America's agreement with security council policy and that France is an ally and a long time friend, but also a nation with its own opinions and interests.

America is the single largest producer of vetos (actually it's the former USSR, but since the collapse of Soviet communism Russia has only vetoed twice) in the UN security council and has the gaul to lambast other countries for vetoing? That's the definition of Americentrism. Almost all of France's previous vetos have been in accordance with American vetoes.

Was this the right thread for my vent?

Source?

In the typical exaggerated cartoon fashion, yes it was. I was quite surprised that they would dedicate an episode to light pollution. I'm somewhat confused by exactly what type of telescope it is that Lisa bought, though

I've got the set of four Skywatcher Ultrawides. The 15's a little short in eye relief, but it's acceptable.

In my use I've found that they all suffer from some pretty serious ghosting when viewing bright objects off center, so they're not ideal planetary eyepieces, but I think that's pretty common in Erfle designs. Correct me if I'm wrong. I find that they all offer sharp and highly usable FOV's. All but the outer edges of the FOV's are free of significant abberation.

Overall they're good eyepieces for the money.