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Astro-Tech 8" Imaging Newtonian, Part VIII
Final refinement on the Astro-Tech Imaging Newtonian: rather than paint, powder-coat, or anodize the tube, I simply wrapped it with fake carbon fiber wrapper (used to make regular cars look more...
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Canon 10-22mm EF-S and 16-35mm L IS Compared
The results of this comparison are pretty much fore-ordained, but I was curious as to how obvious the differences were to an amateur and non-critical photography user such as myself.I've used the...
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Collecting Haze Data with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Amazon DynamoDB
I finally decided to put those Sharp airborne dust sensors which I bought during the last haze epidemic (in 2013) to good use, along with the small mountain of parts I have at home.I used this very...
View ArticleGetting Oracle Linux on Amazon EC2
If you feel the need to roll your own Oracle Linux install on Amazon EC2 (since Oracle no longer provides an officially-supported AMI, and you may not be too keen on using one of the community...
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Connecting to Amazon Redshift (or generic PostgreSQL) with Oracle SQL Developer
I guess old habits die hard; I've never used TOAD in my life but having a GUI-based SQL client is often convenient. I've used Oracle SQL Developer on and off for years (after all, it is free as in...
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Making A Cheap Dobsonian Base From an Ikea Bedside Table
The Ikea RAST bedside table is cheap, made of pine, and happens to be almost a perfect fit for a typical 8" Newtonian OTA.The upper and lower shelves just about fit an 8" OTA, and if you remove the...
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Printing Your Own Azimuth Setting Circles
If you ever are in need of printing your own azimuth setting circles, having a piece of software to generate the rule marks is very useful.I needed to create a 360-degree paper tape to wrap around the...
View ArticleParsing VPC Flow Logs with Pandas
Here's a trivial code snippet to parse AWS VPC Flow Logs. This is extremely useful when setting up permissive security groups and then tightening them up later.This script will (probably) fail if there...
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Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L versus Pentax 200mm f/4 Super-Multi-Coated Takumar
I have compared two Canon lenses, the 10-20mm f/3.5-4.5 consumer zoom (on APS-C) and the 16-35mm f/4 L IS here. The results were predictable - the L zoom was consistently better than the consumer zoom,...
View ArticleAmazon Polly Just For Laughs
If you've ever had a burning desire to create custom dialog for Consuela the housekeeper in Family Guy.. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910111213141516171819202122232425#!...
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Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM II
TL; DR - use it at f/8 and it has (almost) L-class sharpness.Back in 2001 or 2002 this was one of the lenses I wanted. It was too steep for me and I ended up with a Sigma 28-105mm f/2.8-4 (the...
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Takahashi Mewlon 210 Maintenance
I've been looking for a Takahashi Mewlon 210 Dall-Kirkham Cassegrain since about 2010, but the new prices are pretty high and I didn't want to pay list price. I was able to find a used one (I am...
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Takahashi Mewlon 210 Vignetting on Full Frame
The Takahashi Mewlon 210Dall-Kirkham Cassegrain only has an 18mm image circle at prime focus, and 39mm with the dedicated reducer.Here are some images of daytime scenes taken with a Canon 6D full-frame...
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A Tale of Two Taks
I recently was able to buy a used Takahashi EM-1S from Yahoo Japan Auctions. Generally, Japanese sellers don't ship out of Japan, but From Japan made the process much easier. There's not much in the...
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Repairing Astro-Physics GTO Hand Pad Cable
The cable on my Astro-Physics GTO hand pad cable (AP part number E0190CABLE-E) had deteriorated over time. The rubber insulation had peeled and cracked, exposing the shielding and conductors...
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Takahashi EM-1S RA Drive Analysis
I had a look at the innards of the Takahashi EM-1S RA drive, because I wanted to see how hard it would be to convert it to center-positive. Quick answer: it's hard.Here is the outside of the EM-1S RA...
View ArticleBuilding and Using Astrometry.Net on MacOS
Why Astrometry.net on MacOS? because Macs are built to take bullets and have long battery life. Unfortunately building almost anything on MacOS is ten times as hard as doing it on Linux. There are some...
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Polar Alignment With A Bubble Level
In low-latitude locations such as Singapore (1.3521° N) or anywhere that Polaris is not visible, polar alignment can be difficult and time-consuming to achieve. One method for doing initial alignment...
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Canon EOS 6D + 35mm f/1.4L vs Fuji XE-2 + 23mm f/2
IntroductionI've been a Canon EOS user for almost twenty years, except for a brief foray with the earlier Pentax DSLR's (K10D and K20D) about ten years ago. My favorite camera for the past few years...
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Almost Full Frame: Fuji X Camera Lens Turbo Adapter (Ver II) from Mitakon
I very much like the form factor and UI of the Fuji X-mount cameras: they are very much the poor man's Leica.A challenge is that wide lenses are hard to find, due to the 1.5X crop factor, since the...
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