It turns out that the earth will be quite uninhabitable in 300 years time. But before anyone gets any brilliant ideas that perhaps we can get out of this bind with a bit of engineering such as spraying sea water into the clouds, let me just say that part of my day job is tightening up a servo control loop for a 250 tonne telescope and 550 tonne ( Read more... )

I like how the mayor takes the piss about our broken town clock at the end of this video clip:

AAO celebrates 35 years.

(video links are embedded in this if that page demands plugins you don't have).

Film of Prince Chucky and the far more eminent Fred Watson hereI love the quality of local news ( Read more... )

Dammit, it's 1.4 degrees, and it's *raining*, not snowing. Why can't it snow? Ok, so it's a phase change and phase changes take energy and are hard. But it was already frozen when it was in the clouds, so it takes more energy to heat it up to falling rain water drops, rather than let it stay frozen and give me my snow ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

I just did a google search on "death by falling hardhat", and there was not a single result. Hopefully that will be fixed in a few minutes...

In unrelated news, the safety committee is meeting just across from my office right now. I was hoping to come up with an excuse for not having to wear hardhats every damned place.

Like all telescopes, we need to know what time it is. Not as precisely as say your average radio telescope which can time pulsar rotation periods to precisions like that measured for J1713+0747: .004570136522917930±.000000000000000800 seconds (at some particular unspecified time in history. Although pdot was probably small enough that it's still ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago on Planet Linux.o.a, Peter Lieverdink mentioned some dishy time lapse motion ( Read more... )

People, stop focussing on HECS debts (and what student has $540 per week living expenses? Only if you are helping pay off the beemer your dad gave you, or you are extremely careless in finding living quarters). Whether you will obtain a large HECS debt is almost irrelevant. Who cares if science students pay more HECS debt than arts students? If ( Read more... )

What a month. First I decomissioned 3 old solaris machines, and their +12 disk packs, and moved a significant number of services off a fourth old solaris machine (only to have the senior and rather stubborn dinosaur herder move a bunch of services over to it from one of the retired machines, before I could get in before him and move them to a more ( Read more... )

If anyone has ever thought "why is it so hard to servo a telescope", wonder no more (this post prompted by a similar musing from the lead programmer of the new Telescope Control System as he works the final few bugs out of the servoing control ( Read more... )