Regulusastro Blog

Summer is here and with it the opportunity to catch you all up with a few topics that have been going on and off again throughout the blog.

Fish: The two tanks are doing well. The monster tank with the new hunk of mopani wood has really shown marked improvement this past week. The wood has lost 95% of the hazy gooey mold-like fuzz that I was apprehensive about earlier. The Synodontis has been eating it. I like it, if he likes it. The other tank occupants are happy, too. pH is at a nominal 7. I am running about 4tbl of peat pellets in the canister, so the system is pretty stable and has taken on a lovely dark tan color of black water Amazon. My favorite occupants now are the aggressive and lively black tetras which eat voraciously and like lightning.

The smaller tank with the angels is also fine. It’s a bit more acidic at 6.8 with a new piece of mopani and a lovely tan color as well. Plants in there are growing well, and the Amazon Sword has overstepped its bounds and is trying to do what it always does: leave. No way. I like that plant. It’s staying.

I have been making large progress on my astronomy text. Today I finished the section on spectroscopic parallax. I have been fining the largest difficulty to be the illustrations: I either have to find open source and uncopyrighted works, ask for permission to reprint with modifications and my own copyright, or make my own. I have been making a lot on my own and have become quite the whiz at technical drawing using Adobe Illustrator. This dog can and does learn new tricks.

Biking: Time to BBQ and relax a bit. I have been getting on the road bike between uber hot and wet days. My normal jaunts are about 15 miles, and I average that in about an hour or a little less. There is one good hilly section which keeps my breath going. I hope my heart keeps it up! The bike has been treating me well with the saddle change and stem change last summer. I do not feel all that cramped any more and the saddle is, well, a huge improvement. No more sore…. you get the picture.

Playing at the Domes: I am embarking on a journey into radio astronomy… again. I had initially gotten into this a long time ago (1988) with a friend, Steve Choate, while living in Amherst, MA. We built a simple tube type dipole for 10m with a chicken wire reflector. The project suffered in that we never had a sensitive enough (nor quiet enough) receiver. The antenna this time around is a full dipole for 10 and 20m with a simple yagi style reflector wire underneath for a beam aiming, simply enough, up. The receiver is a Yaesu FT1000mp from my shack. I figured I could put it to good use in radio astronomy while using my ic-756 pro III at home for ham play. Using a wide receive mode (AM), we should be able to get at least the Sun, the central Milky Way and interactions between Io and Jupiter. We’ll see! If all else fails, it makes a cool ham shack.

Painting and home ownership: We’ve almoist finished painting the interior in Northwood. The ceilings up the stairs and in the two bedrooms are the last to do. General touch ups will be needed, but the place is looking really good. We tore out the old now unused HO train table in the basement to make room and recycle the wood. The broken and messy parts? Into the burn pile. The mice in the observatory: dead thanks to poison. Trapping and being kind just did not work. Sorry guys. Some times a rodent just has to go, and they were making a big mess in the dome between leaving droppings and nut shells, and then wrecking the cables and fiber feeds. Bad mice. Gone now.

Oh – geocaching: We hid our first geocache this last week in the woods off of Drinkwater Road in Exeter: Astrocache1. Go seek it. A few people already have been by and signed the log. The trails there are well kept and can be walked or biked. Bugs: bring repellant. A link to the geocache entry for you here.

There: that should keep you all posted for a while.