Monthly Archives: February 2011

Observation Report 2/2/2011

Posted on February 14, 2011 by james

Not the clearest of skies this evening, with some bubbles of cloud drifting across the sky, but you have to take what opportunities you’re given. I thought I’d do a bit more Messier Object hunting this evening. First on my … Continue reading →

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The Tree House Project

Posted on February 11, 2011 by james

(Apologies in advance if you’re confused by the feet-and-inches measurements. I was brought up with metric at school and imperial at home and tend to use whichever comes to mind first. 6′ is near enough 1.8m and 8′ is 2.4m) … Continue reading →

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Observation Report 30/01/2011

Posted on February 11, 2011 by james

It’s been a beautifully clear day here, so I put the scope outside as the sun was going down on the off-chance of getting some clear sky despite the signs of cloud coming in. At 8pm there was still some … Continue reading →

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Observation Report 18/01/2011

Posted on February 11, 2011 by james

I had two trips out with the scope today. The first time was around 8am when the sky was clear and Venus was visible about 15° above the horizon before the sun had risen. The planet was a clear crescent … Continue reading →

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Nuisance phone calls

Posted on February 10, 2011 by james

We’re ex-directory and on the TPS lists, but lately we’ve been receiving a fair few random sales and “you have won a Caribbean holiday!” type calls from “international, number unavailable” sources. I used to just hang up, but of late … Continue reading →

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My First Astro Image

Posted on February 10, 2011 by james

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I took this — just put a webcam in the end of the diagonal and did my best with to get an image as it travelled across the camera. I know … Continue reading →

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Skywatcher Startravel 80 Telescope Review

Posted on February 10, 2011 by james

I’ve had the ST80 for about seven weeks since I was given it at Christmas and I’ve had a few decent nights stargazing with it so I thought it was about time I wrote down some of my thoughts. The … Continue reading →

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Chainsaw chain-changing cheer

Posted on February 10, 2011 by james

When we moved here I “inherited” a heft Stihl 08S chainsaw. It was a bit of an animal when it came to cutting up logs, having a 21″ bar, but really too heavy to use comfortably for a long time … Continue reading →

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Loading MySQL data for phpunit testing

Posted on February 9, 2011 by james

I’d been bugged for a while because when I was writing phpunit tests for some of my code, I couldn’t find a tidy way of pre-loading data into a MySQL database for testing against. Everything I came up with seemed … Continue reading →

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Searching for the longest match with MySQL

Posted on February 9, 2011 by james

I’ve been involved with Carbon Guerrilla, a project to allow organisations to manage and track their CO2 emissions for some time now. Yesterday I was working on some code to allow people to compare emissions across locations by re-basing emissions … Continue reading →

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