Regulusastro Blog

It’s been an exciting week for astronomers as the American Astronomical Society holds its 219th meeting in Austin, Texas this past week. LOTS of people were in attendance, as this is the larger of the two annual meetings for the AAS. At last count the list topped 2700, but I am sure that went up by the end of the week.

I went for a few reasons this time around:

• Meet up with a new group of NITARP (NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program) teachers and scientists.
• Meet up with my prior year’s NITARP team and present two posters.
• Meet with those who are interested in PEA’s astronomy teaching internship for 2012-2013.
• Check out the new science being done in the wide universe of astronomy.
• Check into new technology offerings for those of us running observatories.
• Check into new data sets being made available for astronomers to plow through. Got data? Got project!

The weather was lovely, hovering around 70F for the week with one day of rain. Not bad! The food from surrounding restaurants was a joy, from Tex-Mex to Italian, from Brazilian to BBQ, it was all there, and usually with live music. Speaking of music, we spent one night out until closing time, just to enjoy the blues, rock and other musical talents available throughout the town.

Frigid, of course, had a great time, enjoying the air flight, the warmer climate and the friendliness of Texas. Frigid’s postings were routine to Facebook where people could catch a glimpse of the latest in penguin escapades throughout the week.

Science Poster, Christine, John and Frigid: AAS 2012 Austin

Little Switzerland (LS) has been greened…. that is, the base layers of the scenery are complete. It is now time to work on those little details that can, and I hope will, take years. Here’s a photo journey of the greening of this little HO world:

When we last blogged about LS, we had just finished about 1/3 of the base layer. I was having some issues with the Marklin C Track which is easily messed up with glue and such. The real issue is not the outer rails, but the inner lugs that the locos get power and digital signals from. These are little metal bumps in between the rails. They pick up all sorts of glue, paint and such, and then can’t be readily cleaned with a rag or paper towel, as these get snagged in the bumps.

Here is the section that needed some real work. The ramp which elevates the train up and over some of the hidden sections in the mountain were made with risers from Woodland Scenics. These things are Styrofoam, and need covering… I used some plaster cloth, the type used to wrap steam pipes in industrial settings (thanks to a friend for the wrap!). Snip with scissors, dip in water, apply to riser, let dry: voila!

In the meantime, the station area was being detailed to a point where it actually looks pretty good. The station is a remarkably detailed version of Bonn Station in Germany.

Here you see the Rhur Express hauled by a Class 55 loco passing through the station area.

The risers get a paint job here: Dark grey is a pretty realistic color in all railroad applications. One can buy quarts of flat grey at any paint store these days: it’s cheap, flat, and water based making for easy cleanup.

Between the yard tracks I went for a darker grey paint, one that most closely matches MArklin C-Gleiss: DARK matt flat grey. I brought a piece of track to Lowe’s. They happily gave me this ugly paint color in a fresh quart can. At the same time, I was liberally painting earth-brown and sprinkling with green foams to make the meadows you see below. You can also see the blue painter’s tape used to mask off the track from getting all glued up. If you use tape like this, buy the tape for sensitive walls, not the durable tape which has a death grip.

Here is a general wide field shot off the LS layout as it currently stands. In the far background you can see the N Scale USA layout resting on its 4×8.

Some video for you: A Marklin DB CL 005 locomotive pulls some international passenger cars in a typical European Express Train consist.

Little Switzerland (LS) is our HO layout in the basement. Yeah – I have two layouts, an N scale USA layout and an HO German/Swiss layout.  The LS trains all run on Marklin digital: many consists both passenger and freight, and mostly SBB. I have collected into the German realm as well with such classics as the 1970s TEE and the Rheingold trains. Up until this week, we had a few large board, a lot of track and a mountain. Well, this weekend greenery has been added along with some cool details around the Bonn Station replica.

Standard methodology was used: lay down a sloppy layer of the appropriately colored paint, sprinkle on grasses of typical colors and let it dry. Once dry, wet thoroughly with a spray of isopropyl alcohol and then spray with a 50:50 mix of white glue and water. I add a drop or two of dishwashing fluid to the glue and maybe a tablespoon of isopropyl as well to break down the surface tension. This allows the glue to flow a lot easier into the grass and rock.

Trying out Blogsy with the newly received iPad 2 that the school wants all teachers to try. It has crashed once, when I was adding new tags to this very post! It lost everything I had typed, so this is a second edition. I love the interface. I love the interconnections between image and video accounts. Here’s to the future.

The N Scale layout has been getting some attention this summer during those rare rainy days. I figured that late nights and rainy days would be the perfect opportunity to do indoor workouts and then to put some cool details onto the track. There has been some pretty remarkable headway, so here is the news:

Yes! You can see I have been adding trees to the scene. The family got wind that there are also such things as fall foliage, so that is the general direction it has since taken. Here you see the green trees going in.

For the switching yard, there is now a little Chessie Systems locomotive, there getting the job done right. Below you see the making of an N Scale gantry crane for the intermodal yard. I can tell you one thing: this model was tough! It has a lot of small parts, and now, being 46 and more myopic, tweezers and magnifying lenses were a huge help here. The original color of the crane was orange… not quite right given the typical ones are very dirty white or yellow. Out came my can of Piper Cub yellow and a dab of black to weather it. The result: a nice looking yard addition.

You can also just see some of the autumn color showing itself in the above photo. The bottom left image shows the new station being built. That was the last structure for the layout, and will be a nice center piece for the arrival of the Super Chief or an Amtrak passenger service. Eventually I will get some more shots for you and place them here. Stay tuned!

This next week starts off the third Astronomy Education Conference I have given here at Exeter. All of them have been truly successful, a lot of fun and popular. We have a full attendance agan this year: 14 teachers from around the USA. We’ll have two visitors as well, Sidney Wanzer of the Northeast Kingdom Astronomy Foundation (VT) and Dr. Connie Walker, an astronomer at the NOAO who will visit by Skype. The weather looks to be an unquantifiable variant this time. We’ve had some marvelous rains and a real lack of clear skies. Hopefully we’ll have at least one good clear night, so we can show off a little, have some fun, and share it with the biologists who are also having a weeklong conference at the same time.

In the mean time, I am working hard on some new data from the NITARP project of which I am the teacher-lead. We’ve got some 250 stars to categorize before August, so the race has begun. I love crunch time: data to look at is exciting. Variable stars are even more fun, and some of these little guys are really odd in their variability. Let the discovery begin!

Susan’s Uncle John left us a bunch of N-Scale trains, which has been my source of fun, amusement and total focus for a couple of months now. I wanted to do the right thing: make a layout worthy of the cause and something that would be fun for the kids to play with as they learn about modeling, train transport, intermodal transport and such. The result is a nice little track plan like this:

The upper left: A railroad museum with old cars and locomotives that look cool, but are no longer in running condition for any number of reasons. One main reason for me has been that many old trains in N scale come with Rapido couplers. The cars in the museum have Rapido couplers which are bolted into place and are not easily replaced with more modern and realistic looking Micro-Trains knuckle couplers.

The center left is the intermodal yard for train to truck transport changes. I intend to have an office building there along with a gantry crane to move materials to and from truck to train.

The center right is another industrial site, to be determined. I am thinking that either a rock mill (granite, slate, marble) or a furniture store would be nice to place in there.

Bottom center is a train station and some shops. The station will likely take the form of an older brick Santa Fe station + depot combination.

I wanted the layout to be easier for me and my back to install, so I decided upon Kato Unitrack for the base. I am familiar (years of working) with Marklin’s M and C Gleiss (track) which comes with an integrated road bed, so the Kato offering was just fine. I also intended to go with DCC for multiple train operations. DCC works very nicely with Kato track, and there is another plus. Kato switches come with electronics already installed! This is a savings in the long run both in time and money, plus they operate using DC power from a separate source (not the track)… this makes them remotely operable from the DCC, or, with more money, decoders can be bought from Digitrax for conversion to pure DCC and handle them all digitally.  Below is the layout in its initial phase.

Below the track layout is basically complete. The switches have power lines running to their bases, so those needed to have holes drilled through the table and to the switch controls. Wiring wiring wiring! The layout is wider and longer than the supplied wires, so I did a lot of soldering underneath the table.

Here you can see those tangles of wires heading down to the floor. The red/black pairs are the switch lines. The blue/white pairs are the power lines for the rails themselves. Since DCC is pretty simple, and I really was not into blocks, all I really needed one one line… but there is a catch. Kato switches are power routing! They did this to allow one to “run” or have multiple trains a DC layout, but the switches only allow power to one train at a time. Well, with DCC, each train gets commands to run or not all on the same layout, thus power routing was actually in the way of my plans. I had to run the DCC power to each section of switch isolated track. No worries. It was easy, and Kato supplies power cables with click right into their tracks.

The other end of all those cables have to go somewhere, so they go here… the switch system uses the Kato throw switches (blue). They receive power from the output nodes on the Kato power supply (DC). The supply only gives power to the switches. The track power is disconnected, so that little train controller on the blue box does nothing.  Track power comes from the black and white unit to the right in the photo below, a Digitrax Zephyr unit. I am just pleased as punch with that system. It is easy to use, comes with excellent documentation, and is affordable.

Here you can see the roads going in. I was going to use Woodland Scenics road system, pouring and leveling goo between dams made from window insulation foam. This is a pain… so I chose a MUCH simpler solution: self adhesive foam sheets. They are about 1/32” thick and come in multiple color packs of 10 sheets for virtually nothing. I bought a bunch, cut them to shape then painted them matt grey. They take paint very well. They stick very well. They are the right thickness. They are affordable. They cut easily. Love it!

Below you will see the micro-village forming. The houses are pretty typical New England style dwellings. I gave each one a little drive way and parking area (Woodland Scenics Earth foam).

Here the ground foam layers are coming together rapidly. I started with earth color, then a burnt grass tone to a bright green grass color for realism. White glue (half a gallon!) was used for the layout. Alcohol spray followed by 50:50 glue & water spray was used to seal the mess down later.

Here, the base layer of earth tone is almost done. The ground foam goes everywhere in the basement. My recommendation: have the shop vac handy when you take on a similar project. It can save your mind.

The earth tones have been completed in this image below. It is time to make some green happen, so the whole table needed to be sprinkled accordingly.

Before a whole lot more was done, I wanted to make sure the base layers were on the table pretty solidly. I masked off the track to allow for wide coverage spraying (so as not to let things get too fowled up). Kato switches with their internal mechanisms can get really gummed up by glue spreading to their insides. They are cleanable, but one has to remove them from the layout for cleaning, and this means de-gluing, and de-soldering. No thanks.  Once masked, the whole table was sprayed with alcohol to allow the next layer, white glue, to lose its surface tension and spread more easily. 50:50 white glue and water was then sprayed on, and it soaked right on in as expected. 24 hours later, the whole set was dry and ready for following steps.

The vast majority of base layer ground foam is complete here. The roads are done. Roads will have white striping, a la pre-1950s when yellow became the USA norm. I use fabric paint markers for road striping. Do not use Sharpie paint pens: they leak like a screen door on a submarine, and their paint is not opaque enough. The electronics are working. It is time to spend the next 5 to 10 years on details

Below, you see some details. Some cars and old locos are in their museum spot (foreground) and there are some buildings going in.

Below is a close-up of the future railroad museum. There are some old F3 and F7s back there along with some cabooses, freight and stock cars. Eventually there will be a path (a PATH a PATH!) for pedestrians to use to get to the museum.

Here is the station entrance track way. I anticipate signalling and signage to get involved here eventually. The ballasting is a Kato blended sand material which works nicely with their Unitrack ballast color.

Lastly, an aerial shot of an old and worn down farm building with its newly worn driveway and some younger trees. I intend to make the trees to scale. Too often we see trees which are just TOO small for the layout. Mine will be the real deal, folks: big when needed, and small when needed. Stay tuned. There is definitely more to come.

Ever wondered how to measure "distances" in the sky? Astronomers use the units of degrees to measure the separation in arc-distance from one object to another. Interestingly, the human hand and arm work nicely to allow you to measure degrees. One fist width placed out at arm’s length is about 10 degrees of arc. Spreading your thumb and pinky fingers apart (aka the Hang Loose hand) gives you about 20 degrees. One degree is about the width of your pinky finger’s nail. There are a number of web sites which can show you more about this method. Here’s one: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/07/27/3169109.htm

Written for those in the northern hemisphere:

Now you can go out and find the Summer Triangle, a familiar asterism of three bright summer constellation stars: Deneb (in Cygnus), Vega (in Lyra) and Altair (in Aquila).  At about 11:00 PM local time, if you look to the east, you will note three pretty bright stars which make a big triangle in the sky. The highest one off of the horizon is Vega in the constellation of Lyra, the lyre or harp. It appears as a pretty bright blue-white star.

About 24 degrees to the lower left (moving down to the eastern horizon) is the star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus the swan. This star appears to be about the same color as Vega, and to my eyes perhaps a little less blue.

38 degrees to the lower right of Deneb, and 34 degrees to the lower right of Vega is our third star, Altair in the constellation of Aquila the eagle. This is the lowest star in the triangle, and the one furthest to the south.

There! You’ve just found the Summer Triangle! You also have learned the skill which will allow you to chart the entire sky (should you want to take on that venture). Enjoy the night!

So, this is what happens when a family member gives me all their old trains. RIP, and thank you. Amtrack rides again. Now…. to make the whole layout!

This is the mountain complete with the final coatings of turf. Ground colored; summer burnt turf; fresh spring turf.

Here’s the magic that worked for me: First layer on the ground colored turf onto the rock colored plaster mountain by brushing on (slathering on) a layer of 50:50 Elmers Glue:Water mixture and blowing the ground colored turf onto the mountain. Let it dry.

Next, spray on a mix of 70% isopropyl alcohol to soak the turf, and then spray on a mix of 40% Elmers to 60% water. Let it dry.

Blow on layers of progressively brighter and greener turf, dry, right onto the mountain. Spray this down with the alcohol and then immediately with the 40:60 glue mixture. I did not like using eye droppers like some people. The spray was faster and just as clean. I will use a dropper for the bushes which are coming next. Here is the current result: