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TRUE TECHIE

The recent book I read was „The boy who harnessed the wind” from WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA. It’s a very touching story about an African boy who is fighting poverty with simple but brilliant technical inventions. I definitely recommend this book! If you’d like to have a preview, check out his story on youtube.

Das letzte Buch, das ich las, war „Der Junge, der den Wind einfing“ von WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA. Die Geschichte, von einem Afrikanischen Jungen, der sein Schicksal in die eigene Hand nimmt und Armut mit einfachen aber brillianten technischen Erfindungen meistert, hat mich sehr berührt. Das Buch kann ich definitiv empfehlen. Einen Vorgeschmack gibt’s auf Youtube zu sehen.

LEGO SOLAR PANEL STAND

Today the sun was out and I just thought about how to improve the efficiency of my solar panel. I'm using it to recharge my iPhone while running the radio app. The panel + battery have been one of my best investments ever. I'm using them a lot. So finally I came up with a Lego solar panel stand that does work out pretty well!

Heute war die Sonne draußen, und ich musste überlegen, wie ich mein Solar Panel noch effektiver gestalten kann. Ich verwende das Panel um mein iPhone zu laden, während ich eine Radio App nutze. Panel + Akku war eine der besten Investitionen seit langem. Ich benutze sie häufig. Schliesslich habe ich mir einen Lego Solar Panel Halter gebaut. Der funktioniert einwandfrei!

KLEINE GROSSE WELT

Ein paar Schnappschüsse mit der Mikroskopkamera:

A fiew shots taken with the microscope cam:




























Waschmittel / detergent


























Oben und Mitte / top and middle : Schnee / snow
Unten / bottom: Pfeffer / pepper

HUGIN II

Wie vor zwei Tagen gezeigt ist HUGIN ein nützliches Tool um aus mehreren, sich überlappenden Fotos ein Panoramabild zu erzeugen. Aber es kann mehr als das. Heute habe ich die Korrelation einiger Bilder probiert, die ich mit meinem Teleskop vom Mond aufgenommen habe. Und das Resultat ist erstaunlich.


As shown 2 days ago HUGIN is a very good tool to generate panorama pictures by putting together a couple of overlapping photos. But it can do more than that. I tried the correlation of a couple of photos I took of the moon with my telescope today. And the result is brilliant.

MOON

I tried a new telescope setup yesterday that gave an improved quality of the pictures. I did not use an ocular and attached the CCD instead of it. So it worked out fine for the moon, the next time I’ll try to capture planets.

STARS?!

...see the shadow on the picture? The sun is out. And if there is a clear day, a clear night might follow. So there is a chance to test my prepared cam tonight and get some shots from the moon.

THE MOON

I took some more shots of the moon. This time without using the objective which gave a better result. You can find it below. I did some further tries by taking photos of JUPITER and his MOONS. In that night we had a very good seeing so I could identify the different colours on the surface and clearly see his moons. It’s awesome every time. But the photos I took with the webcam where disappointing, also after some correlations of several pics. So I think I need to tune the webcam somehow. Maybe it helps if I reduce the distance of the CCD to the objective a little bit. That would require a new housing but it’s worth giving it a try…

PARTIAL LUNAR ECLIPSE

I watched it – the partial lunar eclipse we had this August. It nearly reached 80% coverage on August 16th at 11:11pm MESZ in Germany. One thing is for sure: it wasn’t that spectacular in terms of the shots I made than at my RECENT TRY where we had half-moon. Furthermore we had a bad seeing yesterday with high air humidity.

IMPROVEMENTS

By using the gasket and the old film package I improved my telescope / webcam setup today. That should allow me to easily search for a celestial object and as soon as it’s found, fix the webcam and capture pictures. In the meantime I tried open source software to do some finishing on the already taken pictures of the moon. Though I have to admit that I wasn’t able to really improve the quality of the sources, the software came along with some nice features, e.g. you could split an AVI-film into the separate frames. With that you are able to obtain dozens of photos by just taking a few seconds of film.
I’ll be on holiday shortly. I’ll take everything with me and hopefully will be able to provide some more photos afterwards.

NEW EXPERIMENT / RESULT

I spent the last night outside to watch the moon with the SETUP described before. It took me some time to set everything up and I nearly took 300 shots to get 20 more ore less good pictures. But I think they are pretty good for the first try. You’ll find the results below, click the pictures to enlarge them.









Actually I know that what I did is kind of amateurish, so these are the next steps to improve things: there is open source software available that allows you to take a series of pictures or a video and correlate them. This should give excellent results. Furthermore I’ll try to improve the cam housing.

To get an impression how quickly the moon passes the lens watch the video below:

NEW EXPERIMENT

I think I’ll try another experiment and get my refraction telescope from the garret this weekend. Furthermore I’ll try to attach my webcam to it and take some digital photos of the moon. That’s what I actually want to test since a long time. I’m more than interested if this would work. I’ll keep you updated on the results…

NORTH?!

Recently I read an outdoor book which gave some interesting hints how to find North in the wild if you loose direction. Of course it’s easy if you have a watch at hand. But if not and if you have at least a little sun, there is an easy way to achieve North direction. First of all you could estimate that by knowing the way of the sun. If you need to know this more accurately you could try that: take a stick or something straight and put it rectangular into the ground. Look at the shadow it gives and mark the end of it. Repeat that from time to time and you’ll get an ellipse which is approximately a straight line. By drawing a rectangular line to it you’ll get the North direction. On the northern hemisphere the starting point of the line is east, the end west, the end of the rectangular line that points away from the sun shows North. I tried it (find pictures below), it worked pretty well. If you are in a hurry and as a first shot it would be enough to take two reading points approx. 30 minutes apart. If you do that around noon it would work out pretty well.