A failure or a learning experience - Meteor Showers and the beauty of digital SLR's

Back in the day, I would carry my t-mount and a 35 mm SLR for my 8 inch Celestron to dark parts of the county. I took some pics of Halley's comet in 1986. Unless I reach 100 or 101, that will probably be it for me. I would also mount my SLR on a tripod and make timed exposures of meteor showers using a glow in the dark watch, (was it radium? I don't know), a mechanical cable release with screw to hold the shutter open when set on B, (BULB). With film, you generally only had one film speed unless you had multiple cameras or used up a roll and changed the film speed. The schedule for meteor showers would come from Sky & Telescope or a brief radio spot by Earth & Sky.

Fast forward to the present and now we have digital cameras, the internet, Facebook, and iPhones. If you have a digital SLR, it most likely has manual options, but in this day and age, most people probably point and shoot and have it set on automatic.

With a meteor shower, long exposures are necessary. Even at its peak, Perseids was supposed to have 30 to 40 meteors per hour. On the low end of the peak, that would be 1 every 2 minutes at best. That means to catch one you would need to leave the shutter open for at least 2 minutes but 5 to 8 minutes during non-peak time would work better.

In comes the technology. I was checking my Facebook page and there was a post by my "friend", NASA. I was informed about the meteor shower and a special program starting at 9 pm. So, with the kids in bed and reminiscing of past victories better than they were, I decided to try my new digital SLR. I changed the zoom lens to an old nice F1.4 lens. F-stops are the ratio of the length of the lens from film plane, to the diameter of the aperture which is like your pupil. So when the number increases, you can put more of them into the focal length. With f16 you can place 16 apertures side by side to get to the film plane. Also note they are doubling the aperture opening with each setting.   A bigger number, means a smaller opening.  Think of a pinhole camera.  It's opening is very small, so it needs long exposures to let enough light in to produce an image on the film.

OK, I'm straying, so go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-number to get a better understanding.

My point here is if you are going to hold the shutter open, even as dark as you can get, it continues to pile light onto the image sensor and this means we need to close down the pupil/aperture or we will get a white or washed out image.

I'm on the patio, it's dark and I'm using my iPhone as a timer and a flashlight. I figure out how to manually set the f-stop, and also set the shutter to BULB. I then figure out how my wireless remote works for BULB. The first time, I held the remote button down for 7 minutes and when I released it, the shutter didn't close. I found out I only needed to hold the button for a 5 or 10 seconds and to close the shutter I needed to press the button on the receiver attached to the camera.

My first 3 pictures were very grainy. It just looked like noise from the image sensor. Remember, 3 pictures means 21 minutes. with each one I would make an adjustment. I would change the ASA value, or the f-stop. It's really dark, so I decided to remove the skylight filter from the front of the lens. I started to unscrew it, and it just came off. Oooops!!! it was the lens cap. How stupid, but, it is dark. I didn't give up. I set the ASA to 400, I set the F-stop to 8, then 10, then 9, then back to 8.  That's the beauty of a digital camera.  Instant feedback.  Well, in this case, 7 or 8 minutes. I saw a really bright meteor go straight overhead. I repositioned the camera angle, took a few more 8 minute exposures. The stars traced a nice curve on the image because of the rotation of the earth so I knew I had it configured properly, but no straight lines from a meteor. From 11:30 pm to 2 am, I only saw 3 meteors overhead. There was always a thin layer of clouds that would appear and fade and the nearby city lights would light up the thin cloud layer. It wasn't optimum.

So after a few hours of this, I felt I had accomplished quite a bit. Maybe it wasn't a meteor caught, but I did spend some time learning.

There are several more meteor showers and the sky is usually clear in the cold winter. http://www.theskyscrapers.org/meteors/

I'll be ready next time.... as Jack Horkheimer says, "keep looking up!"

Using my iPad in the car...

A friend of mine is an early-early adopter of everything Apple. This is good for me. He couldn't wait for the iPad to come out so he bought one and he and his wife love it. He bought a second one so they could bask in the glow from the iPad screen together. He got the itch for the networking power of 3G like he has on his iPhone so he bought the 3G iPad. Sweet! Even sweeter, he had an extra iPad now so I helped him part with it at a very fair deal. I already had several wifi capable items for the car without an internet connection. Besides the iPads for the parents, there's the PSP, and the simcardless iPhone for the kids. Since we do not use Android phones and tethering wasn't available before the iOS4 update, I purchased a 3G wifi router from AutoNet Mobile, http://www.autonetmobile.com/. It is really nice, and lets everyone connect while cruising around town and long trips to the beach. Well, I got the itch also, and now have the 3G iPad but I haven't signed up for service yet. AutoNet Mobile recommends hardwiring the router to your car. I decided I wanted it to be portable so it can move from car to car or plug into a portable battery pack for camping or the kids soccer game. They now have a new product that lets you hardwire the base, and move the router around. Obviously they are listening to their customers.

All of a sudden my precious iPhone notes were gone.

About a month ago I updated the OS to the new iOS 4.  Always in a rush, the iPhone looked OK, so I hurried to pick up the kids from school.  I went to my Notes app and noticed only the latest Note was there.  All of my old notes were gone.  Yes, lots of them should have been cleaned up, do I really need to save the part number to the spark plug on my gas trimmer, or the instructions on how to interface a ps2 keyboard to an arduino using a custom chip, PAK-VIA when everyone knows you simply use a picaxe instead. (little-scale.blogspot.com)  What happened to the bags of mulch I was supposed to pick up 97 days ago.
Panic set in.  What happened?  Well, it wasn't so scary.  I had set my Outlook on my PC to archive items over 3 days old from the exchance server to the workstation so I would only have 3 days of email on the iPhone.  When I connected to the PC to update the OS, it synced and archived my Notes.  It was simple enough to drag them from the archive folder to the active folder and they automagically synced on the iPhone.  Life is like a box of chocolates, sometimes you never know what your gonna' get.....or lose.

Hey, you say you're still on XP, what about content search for XP?

If you have files that are registered properly on XP, Windows knows how to search them already.  What if you are editing files that XP doesn't have registered or the file doesn't have an extension so it can't figure out what to do. 

There is a registry tweak that lets you search files that are unknown to the OS.   Yes, you could use a "real" OS like Linux that lets you grep the files or you could load Cygwin and use grep from there, which I have installed, but XP will also let you search unknown file types with an easy registry tweak.

Run regedit.exe from the run option in the start menu or start a command window, and run regedit.exe from there.   Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex and create a DWORD value with a name of FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions and a value of 1.

Exit and it should start working.  You might need to log out and back in.  This also works on Windows 7.
Enjoy!    (adding standard disclaimer, be careful, editing the registry incorrectly can render you machine dead and you may not notice until you reboot.)

Windows 7 how to search within file contents

I have recently added a new laptop to my many pieces of hardware.  This one came with 64bit Windows 7 home premium. It is a really nice OS and solves many if not all of the the painful problems of Vista.

I like the ability to search for specific content within files.  This is not turned on by default to increase the search speed even though systems are quite powerful now.  This information can be found on many sites around the web and now one more.  In order to turn this on, click the windows start icon generally in the lower left of your screen.  Click on Computer to get an explorer window to display.  Near the top, there is a menu bar, click on Tools and select folder options.  There are three tabs acros the top.  Click on the Search tab.  Check the Always search file names and contents.  and you are done!