I feel like someone having in their hands issue number one of a comic... well maybe not like that but its still quite cool. I love looking back at how things started. The Federation of Astronomical Societies newsletter has been running since June 1984 and over the last few months I've been sorting and scanning in a bunch of older records. This will eventually enhance the full online archive (before we only had back to 1999 online) of our newsletters.
The highlights of this issue are a write up of a night out at the Temple Observatory by a member of Coventry and Warwickshire Astronomical Society. Oh and if you were wondering, as I was, the telescope is still used. There is the first ever news round up, a stable of the FAS newsletter over the years and an article on how to make a star clock. I quite enjoyed seeing that the FAS subscription for the year was £7.50 - which would not be for a small society. Lets compare that to our medium society now of £44.50 (not including early payment) - its not that bad given we are looking back close to 3 decades.
I love looking at the Orion nebula. Its always a lovely object to look at - its even better to take photos of it. I've not managed a properly deep image yet and the one that I'll show you below was affected by a pretty bright Moon. The Orion Nebula (Messier 42) is a diffuse nebula situated south of Orion's Belt and is a really easy binocular target.
The same photo with different contrast levels chosen to highlight different parts of the Nebula.
Been handed a dead hard drive and want to try and recover some of the data? That's the problem I had the other day. So I turned to some good old linux tools to try and recover the data. One of my favourite recovery tools is ddrescue. It works really well and given enough time can do a pretty solid job of data recovery - of course a better solution is proper backups but that's not always the way people go. Anyway, this is as much a note for myself but here is how to do some basic recovery using it:
sudo ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sde2 imaging loging
This images /dev/sed2 and produces the image file "imaging" with the log "logging".
To try and extract files you could use something like foremost
sudo foremost -w -i imaging -o /recovery/foremost
To make an audit of the files that can be recovered, recovering them with:
At the end of each year, yes I know I'm a few days early but bah I have to move house at the start of the new year, I like to summarise the music I've been listening to. The last few years have been much easier as last.fm keeps hold of that info. I suspect that its missing about 20% of the music I listen to, which isn't scrobbled for one reason and another. It might be a little higher than that but I don't like to include the car journeys when we are using the CD player.
I was a little shocked to see the number 1 artist of the year, and indeed a few different names in the top 10. I'm putting this down to a Calgary scene influence... (number, artist, plays)
1 Daft Punk 1,163
2 Linkin Park 664
3 Avril Lavigne 552
4 My Chemical Romance 526
5 Tiësto 522
6 Rise Against 285
7 Angels & Airwaves 271
8 Dead by April 259
9 Lostprophets 239
10 Disturbed 238
I have to say I did love the Daft Punk Tron album so I'm guessing this is what dominates that. I also find Tiesto quite good for background music whilst I'm reading (in particular I really think Kaleidoscope fits in really well with the Garth Nix books I've been reading).
Not that much new for 2011 in this list though. Wonder if that will change in 2012.
2011 will always be one of the most memorable years in my life - it better be as I did get married :-)
The year started off with me being back in the UK for my birthday which was great but my time at home was all to short and I jetted back off to Calgary (Canada). It is always a sad time to end up back in an empty flat far away from family. Though saying that I do have some
epic friends out in Calgary too. Once back in Calgary it wasn't long before I was trying out something new... yep I went snowboarding for the first time:
Was painful and so far has turned out to be the last time. I just can't believe how poor my balance is.
In March my best-man Steve came over to visit me in Calgary and that was a lot of fun. Amongst the highlights of his trip over where seeing ice sculptures (and standing on the lake) at Lake Louise:
In May, I said goodbye to Calgary as I had been offered a position at the University of Cambridge, back in the UK. I have to say I'm very glad to have come home and can spend a lot more time with my beautiful wife but I'll always have very fond memories of Calgary and miss lots about it - in particular the people. I wrote a detailed review of my time in Calgary. Though before I left Calgary I got to go to the wonderfully named small town of Vulcan:
Before I left Calgary I had a bit of a shock with a health issue, all was fine but lets just say I've since changed my work all hours, cut out go out drinking lots and living off caffeine.
July was a very busy time. We were heavily involved in Wedding preparation though I did manage to stop for a few bits of fun. This included going to the British Grand Prix for the first time. Yes, it rained - it was a great time though.
July also involved my stag do, but we don't talk about that. It was great fun... we went go karting, had burgers and drank. Epic times.I even won a laser quest:
August... well this was a hectic month but all got more relaxed after the 19th. On the 19th we got married:
most of the better pictures aren't mine and well I feel bad about linking them so won't
(I wrote lots about the preparations before)
In November I got to go to the University of Birmingham Vale Fireworks for the first time in 2 years so I was quite pleased - always
feels good to celebrate the saving of parliament by blowing up part of the country:
and now its December. December has been a hectic month, and we are moving down to Cambridge in the new year so busy busy but we did manage to go out observing the other week and capture the Christmas tree cluser. Merry Christmas!
I'm looking forward to 2012... should be lots of fun. So far I have lots of observing planned, trip to India in Feb and tickets for the Olympics (alas just football). As a friend of mine said to me recently einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr
It wasn't particularly clear during our observing session, which was mostly aimed at taking a look at the ISS and Jupiter with our own eyes, but we focused the Meade out at Wast Hills and took a couple of images...
If you change the contrast a little you can clearly see the Moons:
It was rather cloudy but we still managed a short exposure of the Dumbbell Nebula:
A simple example, very similar to that given in the CFITSIO guidebook, on how to create a FITS file using CFITSIO. In this case I'm also building against some casacore libraries, but these aren't going to be used in this little code snippet but the idea is to use casacore todo further analysis. I'm hoping to post more here over time. Anyway the code (this can also be found as a filebuild_fits.cpp:
/* Create a FITS file, using cfitsio and some casacore libraries
by Samuel George
21-11-2011
Compile: g++ build_fits.cpp -o build_fits -lcasa_casa -lcfitsio
*/
#include // STL iostream
#include
#include
extern "C"{
#include
}
using std::cerr;
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
using std::string;
int main()
{
cout << "Create a FITS file" << endl;
int lenTime(10), status (0), lenFreq(20);
long naxis(2), naxes[2] = {lenTime,lenFreq};
long nelements (lenTime*lenFreq);
long fpixel (1), exposure (1500);
char comment[] ="Total Exposure Time";
cout << comment << endl;
float pixels[lenFreq][lenTime];
// create an array of pixels
try {
for (int ii(0); ii < lenTime; ii++){
for (int jj(0); jj
pixels[jj][ii] = 10.0*(ii+jj);
}
}
} catch (string message) {
cerr << "Error creating pixel array" << message << endl;
}
try { // write the image to a fits file...
fitsfile *fptr;
fits_create_file (&fptr, "!output.fits", &status);
fits_create_img (fptr, FLOAT_IMG,naxis,naxes,&status);
/* Write a keyword - its the address you pass */
fits_update_key(fptr,TLONG,"EXPOSURE",&exposure,comment,&status);
//write an array to the image
fits_write_img(fptr, TFLOAT, fpixel, nelements, pixels[0],&status);
fits_close_file(fptr,&status);
status = 0 ;
} catch (std::string message) {
cerr << message << endl;
}
}
I had an odd CASA issue yesterday. It was complaining about missing leap second information for TAI_UTC! Seemed really quite odd to me as I hadn't done anything to my installation... anyway simple fix is to update the latest leap second information into CASA by running a simple command in the root casa install directory:
cd $CASA_ROOT/data
rsync -avz rsync.aoc.nrao.edu::casadata .
