Here's an example of a problem that can happen at the end of a small publishing cycle. The FAAC Astronomy club has a newsletter. I've been the editor of it for a few months now, starting in January. Getting the articles together can be a challenge.
It's probably a typical job that any newsletter editor faces. One of my problems is I'm really not that great a writer, so it's a learning experience. In the end you have a PDF that we put up on the net. But that PDF size can become an issue. There's a few ways you can get around it. With Pages, an Apple application I can export out a PDF as a Good, Better or Best resolution. There are some tricks for screen resolution that can be done to photos to keep the photos small. Greg Ozimek pointed out to me back in January that I can reduce the resolution of the images to 72DPI for each photo. Still keep all the colors and that will shrink down the size of the PDF tremendously. This is likely a standard trick of the trade for desktop publishing.
Now a few members have "dial up" modems yet and access the internet with slow connections. We put the PDF file out there a copy of the newsletter than anyone can download. If I export the PDF in a BETTER format it's almost at as high a quality as could be exported. It's compressed pretty well, but hold resolution closer to the original scaled in the document. This means if a person looking at the PDF zooms in to 200% or 300% they will see larger and better quality images. If I use BETTER I get a 1.3 meg PDF file, for the same file (this months newsletter is 16 pages long.) That's pretty big for some people downloading. If I export (the same type of PDF file) that would take 1.3 megs in better. At the GOOD resolution, we save space, it's only 703kb in size. Half the size, but less than half the quality for images. The image quality is okay at 100% but lacks quality when you zoom in to view the "good" document.
Maybe we'll end up having both resolutions on the net. Attached is a sample of a photo inside this months newsletter zoomed in at 200% in the GOOD and BETTER resolutions. Which would you rather look at? Maybe posting both sizes will allow the members to decide depending on their dial up speed. The goal is supposed to be something less than 1 meg per newsletter. GOOD, does that job, but it's just not up to the zoom quality.
There's a typical choice in the life of a newsletter editor (and webmaster I suppose). It will be interesting to see how others involved with the newsletter weigh in. For now I'm just putting this in because it's a slow astronomy day.
We saw the Imax movie last night about the repair of the Hubble telescope with shuttle missions. It was shot in IMax 3d and was amazing. Tickets are normally $10. If you like space and Astronomy and can afford the $10 ticket for a short movie, and for astronomers, they all wished it was longer, you'll get a real thrill and treat seeing that IMax movie in 3d at the Henry Ford Museum IMax theatre. It's like being on the shuttle, the closest thing you'd ever get to actually flying on it in space.
DOB Project. I've been thinking about doing a really cheap low end dob project, just for fun. Nothing of super high quality, but something more like a really minimal approach to see how cheaply I could build one. Because I have a very affordable mirror. If I built it with a very minimalistic design, I could even use it as a basic demo scope, to show people how they work. But of course it would suffer in quality of what the mirror can do. I may do this just for the fun of it and to quickly throw something together. I'm even wondering about putting together a very non-conventional mirror mount at first. Not a real travel scope, but more of a scope one would put together out of poverty if they only had a few scrapes and a mirror and other basics.
Just a thought for today. I may get around to that with an 8 inch. I've also been thinking a bit about that 12 inch mirror at the Hector J Robinson observatory or the 8 inch we had and wonder how much it would cost to build a folded dob, to shorten the focal length severely. The large secondary flat and second secondary would add to the cost. Just some telescope building thoughts. Time to post and move on for now.
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