100 hours of astronomy
It's been 400 years since Galileo trained his telescope upon the sky. My boss has recently constructed a replica of Galileo's telelescope, accurately stopped down to 16mm (since Galileo discovered his optics were so crap that not stopping it down yielded an unusable image), and of accurately poor optics. If I were Galileo, I would have taken one look through his telescope and given up on astronomy, so it's fortunate that he persevered. It was of course hardly worth it for him, with Christian persecution and all that.
But anyway, we celebrate him, and the world has just celebrated in the form of 100 Hours of Astronomy. Lastnight, I went down with Steve (and his Galilean replica) and a few others to show the local (and non-local) school kids some astronomy, and when I finished up, I came home and tried to connect to the live stream of 100HA (they've been crossing to 80 observatories and feeding it over the internets). Of course, they wildly underestimated how popular this video stream would be, and underprovisioned their interwebs pipe, so of course I couldn't connect to the majority of the stream lastnight, including where they crossed to our telescope.
Oh well, they've recorded the stream, and indeed all of the others. I actually feature in there - in the promotional bit at front. I managed to convincingly look like I was doing work on my laptop at the console (I forgot all about an event a few months ago when I was on shift when we shot some promotional footage). I'd love to obtain some of that nice photography of the dome.
But anyway, we celebrate him, and the world has just celebrated in the form of 100 Hours of Astronomy. Lastnight, I went down with Steve (and his Galilean replica) and a few others to show the local (and non-local) school kids some astronomy, and when I finished up, I came home and tried to connect to the live stream of 100HA (they've been crossing to 80 observatories and feeding it over the internets). Of course, they wildly underestimated how popular this video stream would be, and underprovisioned their interwebs pipe, so of course I couldn't connect to the majority of the stream lastnight, including where they crossed to our telescope.
Oh well, they've recorded the stream, and indeed all of the others. I actually feature in there - in the promotional bit at front. I managed to convincingly look like I was doing work on my laptop at the console (I forgot all about an event a few months ago when I was on shift when we shot some promotional footage). I'd love to obtain some of that nice photography of the dome.