Category: Uncategorized

We finally had some clear skies again and I had the scope out and got a few decent images.

This was the best of the lot, IC 1318B, sometimes called the Butterfly Nebula. It’s about 4,000 light years away and is an emission nebula. Emission nebula are caused by intense ultraviolet radiation from a dying star that ionizes the interstellar gas around the star.

It’s been a rather dull time around here with me more or less laid up because of first my hip and then my back. But my back is almost normal and while the hip is still giving me some issues it’s getting to the point where I might be able to get back on the bicycle in a week or so. Damn that’s been frustrating.

But meanwhile life goes on, right?

I got bored and was fiddling with Photoshop and came up with this black and white image of a stag standing in the woods and then found a plack with a sort of illuminated frame around it that I picked up for the heck of it at Walmart or Hobby Lobby and hadn’t used, and thought engraving that image on the plack might be interesting so I tried it using the Vision Pro and that’s the result over there on the left with the frame lighted up.

Bad lighting but you can get the basic idea. I though it didn’t turn out too bad. I sent that photo to Kyle and Sarah down at the pub and they claimed it so it has a home already.

I do wish there was some kind of retail market for stuff like this locally, some shop that would market arts and crafts from local crafts persons on a consignment basis or something like that. If I were about 10 years younger and had a bit more ambition I’d be tempted to do something like that myself.

Meanwhile the gardens are growing like crazy.

We’re already harvesting onions and small beets and MrsGF just thinned out the carrots and we have a whole dish full of baby carrots we’re going to be having for supper tonight.

The celery up there is looking amazing and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think I can resist snipping off a few stalks for snacking or salads.

Even the “Stump Garden” is looking good.

The weather has been clear today so I’m hoping we’ll have clear skies tonight so I can get the telescope out.

One of our kitties, Charlie, loves to go outside. We put a harness and leash on her and she has great fun exploring the gardens. But one of the local cardinals took exception to her presence the other day and actually flew down into the lilac to yell at us.

Ooo, he was upset! How dare I bring a cat out into his territory! He kept giving me an earful until finally Charlie had enough and we went back inside.

Got this one yesterday evening.

I’m still not entirely sure how all of this post processing stuff works because the results I get after processing are often much, much different than what I’m seeing in the original images. For example, here’s what the original image looked like before processing.

I’m still very, very impressed with the results from this scope even before processing the images. I’m getting better images with this little scope than I ever saw with my huge 11″ Celestron

… at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. I somehow managed to entirely mess up my right hip and only now am I getting back to normal. I could stand or sit, but transitioning between those two situations caused such excruciating pain I could hardly stand it. The consensus was I severely strained or perhaps even tore some muscles in there somehow. Going to the bathroom was pure torture because sitting down on the commode or standing up after sent a pain through my hip that made me want to weep. And I could forget completely about getting out on the bike.

So even though it’s now early summer and absolutely beautiful out there and the gardens are thriving, I’ve been more or less cooped up in the house being more grouchy than usual and not having enough ambition to do much of anything.

Anyway I’m about 80% back to normal now. I’m at the point where I might try taking the bike out for a run around the block in the next day or two just to see how it goes.

Another thing that had me grumpy is that except for the first night I had the new Sestar 30 Pro telescope, every single freaking night we’ve had has been overcast. Do you have any idea how incredibly frustrating it is to have a brand new telescope and having cloudy weather every single night? Arrggghh!

But now, finally! We had clear skies early last evening and I was able to get the scope out…

Well I say able to get the scope out. And it was out, but I was sitting inside comfortably at the kitchen table having a snack while running the scope from my iPad. If you’ve ever had to endure dealing with clouds of mosquitoes, freezing temperatures and the other inconveniences of using a visual telescope, you can imagine just how amazing it felt to be running the scope comfortably from inside the house. It almost felt like, well, cheating, somehow. And I suppose some amateur astronomers will claim that it is. Spending hours outside in the dark, having your blood sucked dry by mosquitoes in the summer, or trying to keep your fingers and toes from freezing in the fall and winter, is, according to some of them, part of the “joys” of amateur astronomy.

Yeah, sure it is…

I got some neat images despite the fact that it wasn’t even fully dark yet when I started this. Last night was the shortest night of the year so at about 10 PM or so when I started it wasn’t even completely fully dark yet.

Let’s start off with this.

That’s a globular star cluster designated as M 13. It’s the great globular star cluster in the Hercules constellation and it is an astonishing thing when you discover what it actually is. Globular clusters are groups of hundreds, even tens of thousands of stars tightly packed into a tiny, spherical group. In this case several hundreds of thousands of stars packed into an area less than 145 light years across. Exactly how many stars are in there isn’t known but it could be as many as a half million.

Above is M 51, the Whirlpool galaxy and its companion. That this one turned out this good surprised me a bit because even though it was high in the sky, near the zenith, my conditions here at the house are horrible with light pollution so bad you can almost read a large print book sitting in the backyard at midnight, plus it wasn’t fully dark yet. All things considered I’m pleased that it turned out this good.

The one that really surprised me was this one, though:

That’s NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. Nebulas like this can be a pain in the neck to image in light polluted locations like mine so I was surprised I was able to capture anything at all. That this not only showed up but even shows some color was a bit amazing to me.

Now let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to take that same image of M51 up there and run it through some AI filtering and see what happens. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to turn out because this is the first time I’ve tried this.

Hmm… I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I don’t believe for a moment that there was enough information in that original image of mine for the AI to come up with what looks suspiciously like an image that was taken with the Hubble from NASA. I’m suspecting that instead of enhancing the image it’s sucking up data from NASA’s telescope database and adding it in.

Let’s see what it does with that nebula

Hmm, again, I’m not sure where it’s getting the data from to do this because I don’t believe there was enough information in the original image to get these kinds of results.

Anway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share the new images from the scope.

OMG the horror… Every single person involved in the production of this abomination should be locked up before they can commit further atrocities. It is difficult to describe the experience of listening to this — this thing. It sort of resembles, well, the nearest comparison I can come up with is Alvin and the Chipmunks on a particularly bad batch of acid singing lyrics written by someone with a smaller vocabulary that my cat and who was told by a cynical marketing agency to “Just write whatever crap you can come up with” and was about 3 martinis into a 4 martini lunch. About halfway through the first track I wanted to wash my ears out with bleach.

Yes, you too can experience the horror of the Smurf’s All Star Show for just $1 at the Hilbert St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I mess around with laser engravers/cutters and my two machines are both from a company called Wecreat, the Vision Pro and the Lumos. Wecreat recently came out with some very significant new galvo style lasers under the Lumos model name, the Lumos Flex and the Lumos Ultra. The Ultra is way outside my price range, about $3,500. But considering it’s a UV and MOPA laser all included in one package, that’s an extremely good price.

It was the Flex I was interested in. It’s a significant upgrade from my mine. I had a 3W infrared laser and a 10W blue diode laser in mine. The Flex looked like it was exactly the same as mine but with a new laser head that replaces the IR laser with a 15W fiber laser and upgrades the blue laser to 15W.

The blue laser upgrade is significant, but it’s not so much more powerful that I’d really be tempted by that. It was the fiber laser that made things interesting. Fiber lasers generally produce enough energy to cut metal. And they’re capable of doing some very interesting tricks like 3D embossing. They’re pretty slick stuff. And yes, I wanted one but fiber lasers have always been way outside of a price I was comfortable with. Wecreat wants about $2,000 for the thing and I’d already dropped way too much money this year on laser equipment.

But then I was reading the fine print at the end of the hype/advertising for the Flex and noticed a brief mention of the fact that my original Lumos could be upgraded to the Flex by simply replacing the laser head module, and for half the cost of the complete Flex. Now I was interested again.

I sent an email to the company and said “Hey, how can I get one of these upgrade modules?” And they wrote back and said “send us some money and give us about 2 weeks to build one and we’ll get it to you in about 3 weeks.”

And well here we are, 3 weeks later and it is now in my hot little hands. It took all of about 3 minutes to replace the old laser head with the new one, download a new version of their Makeit software, and away we go.

I haven’t had much of a chance to do more than fiddle with it a bit because I’ve been busy with the old unit making a batch of humorous drinks coasters that need to get finished up. But I’m going to have time to put it through its paces this weekend and I’ll let you know how it goes. The bit of fiddling I’ve had a chance to do indicates that it has a heck of a lot of potential. I entertained myself for some time cutting holes in thin sheet metal and engraving things on various bits of metal I had laying around before I had to get back to work. Long enough to see this thing is going to be a hoot to play with.

It’s going to take some time to figure out the exact setting I’ll need in order to get it to do what I want. But once I figure that out this thing is going to be very useful indeed.

Roses

Every year we think this dopey rose bush in the front yard by the sidewalk has finally died, and every year it surprises us and somehow manages to come back. This year I was sure it was dead. When MrsGF pulled on one of the branches something like 3/4 ths of the rootball came out, completely rotted away. I was sure it was dead. Only no, it isn’t, somehow.

I have no idea how this thing manages to survive. Amazing plant. Just saw the first flower of the season and it’s absolutely loaded with buds.

Cats and Backpacks

MrsGF got me a new backpack to carry stuff when I’m out on the bike, but the cat seems to have fallen in love with it. If I put it anywhere where she can get at it, she’s immediately sitting on it. Cats are weird.

I just had to share this one.

I got this photo entirely by accident the other day when I happened to be holding my cell phone when this little guy turned up. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten a halfway decent photo of one of beautiful little birds.

{Fiasco: A complete, often ridiculous, embarrassing failure or disaster. It typically refers to an event or ambitious project that goes horribly wrong and completely fails to meet expectations.}

Yes, I said fiasco, because that is what this is. Look, I’ve been reading science fiction almost my entire life. I actually pretended to be sick so I could skip school to watch the original moon landings. I would dearly love to see people back on the moon. But even considering all of that I am also a realist and this whole moon landing scam that NASA is pushing is… Well let’s take a look at it in detail, shall we?

There’s been a lot of hype and, frankly, a lot of 100% pure bullshit being spouted by NASA’s proposed landing of human beings on the moon again. NASA is now claiming that the much delayed moon landing is going to take place in early 2028.

Yeah. Sure it is. The chances of that happening are about the same as me winning one of those billion dollar lotteries which I would never buy a ticket for in the first place.

This whole moon landing fiasco is now years past it’s original launch date and of billions of dollars over budget and while the SLS and Orion ship have flown, we’re probably at least 5 years away from NASA actually being able to pull off a moon landing. They sure as hell aren’t going to be able to do it in something like 18 months. Especially after Blue Origin’s “New Glenn” rocket lit up the whole space coast in Florida with one of the most spectacular explosions seen in decades, taking out not only the rocket itself but its transporter and most of the launch facility. And the New Glenn rocket is (or was) an essential part of this plan to put people back on the moon.

And as for plan itself, it is so bizarrely, hilariously complicated it would have made Rube Goldberg proud. A plan that’s so ridiculously nonsensical that one might even claim, with some justification, that it was more about finding a way to flood private companies with taxpayer money than it ever was about actually landing on the moon.

This plan depends on SpaceX to get specially designed variants of its Starship developed, including a human rated lander. Maybe. It depends on Blue Origin (and SpaceX too, maybe?) to develop landing craft. Maybe. It depends on in orbit refueling of ships. Maybe. It depends on dozens of other private vendors being able to deliver promised equipment, almost none of which is actually in existence except as computer models.

Did you see all of those “maybes” up there? That’s part of the problem. Nobody seems to know for sure who is going to do what or how or why. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are supposed to be developing some kind of lander either to carry humans down to the surface or at least cargo. Maybe. SpaceX is maybe going to be using Starship to deliver cargo to the lunar surface. Maybe. SpaceX is maybe going to be using another variant of Starship as a tanker to do in-flight refueling of other space vehicles. Maybe.

SpaceX? It hasn’t even managed to pull off a completely successful test of it’s basic Starship. It doesn’t even have one that’s done a full orbit, for heaven’s sake. The last launch looked promising with the new Type 3 ship and booster, but that had issues so serious that the FAA has put a hold on any new launches. And even if that particular ship is successful, it’s not the one that would be used for the lunar program. That would require an entirely different variant of the starship. The variant of Starship that is currently being built and is in testing has nothing to do with the lunar mission. It is one that has a single, specific purpose, to deliver huge numbers of Starlink satellites into orbit.

But at least we know that SpaceX can move fast. And once it’s new Gigabay production facility is up and running in Texas it can crank out its heavy lift booster and Starships in a fraction of the time it can now. But even so, to come up with an entirely new variant of the Starship, put it through testing and several launches to make sure it actually works? Build one rated to carry human beings? In less than 18 months? Sorry. No. Isn’t going to happen.

Then there’s Blue Origin. SpaceX has the infrastructure to crank out boosters and starships in an astonishingly short period of time at least. Blue Origin doesn’t.

It’s New Glenn rocket was supposed to be the launch platform for the Blue Moon Mark I and Mark II landers which were supposed to deliver cargo and eventually also land humans on the moon. (Maybe) And while the New Glenn launch platform has worked, you have ot remember that one out of the three previous flights failed to deliver its payload to orbit and now this one blew up on the pad taking most of the launch site with it.

Then there’s NASA’s SLS, made out of cobbled together parts left over from the shuttle program, including 40 year old space shuttle engines they found in a warehouse somewhere, and that has been plagued with hydrogen leaks, and a Orion space craft which has a highly questionable and potentially dangerous heat shield, thruster problems and non-working interior plumbing.

And then there’s the cost. I don’t really know what the dollar amounts are going to be to cover the costs of SpaceX and Blue Origin for their part in all of this but you can be damn sure it isn’t going to be cheap. But I do know what the SLS is going to cost and it is going to be mind bogglingly expensive. You ready for this? Hold onto your shorts.

NASA’s own inspector general is stating that the first four Artemis missions are going to cost $4.1 billion per launch.

That is not a typo. Four point one billion dollars per launch.

And as I said that number doesn’t include the costs from the required equipment and launches from SpaceX and/or Blue Origin according to the information I have.

Then there is the one question that no one seems to be asking for some reason.

Why?

Seriously. Why? Why do we want to put people on the moon again? Ignore all of that bullshit about somehow mining ice to create rocket fuel to launch Mars missions and all of that guff because it is exactly what I said it was, bullshit. It is not going to happen. Period.

Ignore the bullshit about mining the moon for exotic minerals or other nonsense like that. That is also exactly what I called it. Bullshit. There are no exceedingly rare, exotic minerals on the moon to be mined in the first place. None. Zilch. Zero. If you believe there are, please tell me what rare minerals are worth about $20,000,000 per pound? Because that’s about how much it would cost to retrieve material from the moon, about twenty million dollars per pound.

NASA is planning on an eventual 25 missions to the moon. At current prices, that would work out to about $100 billion.

Let’s look at this a bit differently, shall we? $100 billion would be enough money to build a basic house for every single homeless person in the entire country. Seriously. Run the numbers yourself if you don’t believe me.

There are about 770,000 homeless persons in the US according to the most reliable numbers I can find. A basic, small, 1 bedroom house can be built for about $100,000. We could literally build a basic 1 bedroom home for every single homeless person in the country for less than the total cost of NASA’s moon landing program.

So someone please explain this to me?

At 7 AM Thursday morning I threw the “big switch” in the basement and switched the entire house off-grid. It is now 10:30 AM Friday morning and despite some cloudy conditions not only are we still running the entire house off-grid we’ve already almost made up all of the energy we used from the batteries during the hours of darkness. And that’s with less than ideal weather conditions. It’s been partly cloudy all morning but despite that we’re making more than enough energy to power the house and recharge the batteries.

I’m of an age where I am still astonished that we can get enough energy out of a handful of panels that look like just a few sheets of black glass to power an entire house. I understand the science behind it. I know how it works. But I’m still amazed by it.

Well the experiment can only be described as a success. At 9 pm last night I switched the house completely off-grid. We ran the house off the battery bank all night. Solar power began to come in almost before the sun was over the horizon somehow. Not much, just a couple of hundred watts, but even so, I was surprised. We made no effort to conserve electricity. We just did what we always did.

By 8 AM we were running the entire house off the solar panels and putting a few hundred watts back into the battery bank. By 8:30 we were making 2.5 KW of solar and dumping almost 2KW of that into the batteries. By 11:30 AM the batteries were fully charged and the house running on the panels. We made 12 KWh of solar power just from sunrise to noon today.

I’m very pleased with how well this all worked. This means I probably won’t need to put the ground mount panels back up against the back side of the garage. We should be able to handle everything with just the new panels on the garage roof. Putting the other panels back up would remain an option of we ever ran into a situation where we’d need more power for some reason. But as of right now, we don’t need them.