Sorry about the lack of posts

I've been very involved with my daytime job. I work as a computer analyst for the state of Michigan and will be retiring soon. You would think retirement would allow me more time. It should, but it causes more work at work as I scramble to get things setup for those who will have to take over my duties at work.

The observing conditions have been poor lately and that has kept me away from the observatory. Additionally I'm trying to get rid of time deadlines in my personal life and get ready at least initially for some vacationing and getting into some projects that may take a lot of time. This means I'm trying to get rid of a few responsibilities yet help those who will be taking them over. For example I'm giving up the job of editing the faac newsletter at least for a while. The new editor hopefully will be able to edit and do a better job with it and I'll help her with it but try to remove some of the deadline pressures I felt. It seemed at times I was trying to open up the observatory on a clear night for visitors just before a newsletter deadline and I needed to edit the newsletter and also felt a desire to open up the observatory. I live close to the observatory and I try to keep it open and provide access for club members and the public, so it's a priority for me.

Well you would think that giving up the newsletter editing job would provide me with more free time, but that's not the case at first. Because I want to provide some hints and even photos for the new newsletter editor. Help them get into the swing of things without many hassles. So I'm keeping busy getting some training material and reference material ready, and I lost a disk drive through an accident and it had about 3 months worth of recent photos stored on it. I'm not even sure how many photos I lost.

The new newsletter editor has a Macintosh to edit the newsletter with. I use a Macintosh as well and we both use Pages. This is a big advantage for the transition because I already have figured out the little shortcuts and quick things you may want to do in Apple's Pages application. I'm actually using a program called "ScreenFlow" that can record a Macintosh screen session and create a video of any program I have on the Macintosh. I can record the editing of the newsletter inside Pages, and show and tell all about the shortcuts and hints I've learned in editing and throwing together a newsletter. This will save the new editor hours of experimentation and provide a better quality product. If things go well, I'll hopefully be able to provide her with an article or two and they will be better than when I was the editor, because I'll have more time to write and refine the article, rather than write and edit the newsletter. I'm hoping to provide better content and take better photos and video of activities in the club and the observatory and provide better content that's current event related.

So I've been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes, but not posting a lot about the observatory. I also of course have many other little things to do, but hopefully I'll have a lot more free time after the new year and that will mean I'll be able to focus and help out the club and the observatory in different ways that may be new and unique and provide a better overall experience. Maybe even help out with gathering more in the realm of stories and photos for the newsletter. It's tough to edit a newsletter and try to create content. I tried to do both and that was difficult. To many hats and to much to do. The quality will suffer when a person tries to do to many things at one time.

There are a lot of little projects and probably more when it comes to writing things and drafts that go on behind the scenes and I never bring them up here. So much to do and so little to post at times on the observing blog.

I've really had very few observing sessions in the past few weeks due to the weather as well. I tried a new heater for the winter observing sessions. This heater throws ir heat and heats the person or object directly rather than heating the air. It heats via radiate energy from ir radiation. This is more efficient and causes less heat to build up and escape from the shutter. Having hot air inside an observatory will cause thermos and interference with the best seeing conditions. The best way to observe is bundled up and keeping heat sources away from the telescope and away from the front of the telescope. This even means heat sources out a ways from the telescope that may be throwing up heat. The heat from a warm sidewalk after sunset may throw off thermals for some time. For this reason astronomers who are hoping to get a better view will seek sites with more ground around the telescope and less building, pavement or anything that gives off heat. Die hard astronomers and imagers who do astrophotography will even tell you the construction of an observatory can cause problems. Block walls provide security of course, but they hold a lot of heat and may radiate thermals into the sky if they are heated up. The best observatory color for the outside walls is white. Black walls would be a heat sink and heat up much more. Light thin walls are also better because there is less thermal mass. But of course in today's modern environment, you cannot have super thin flimsy walls, especially when you consider security of the equipment from bad weather or uninvited guests. So most observatories are just big buildings, but ideally you would have a flimsy building out in the middle of a tropical island to observe from.

As you can see I'm starting to talk about vacation islands, and I haven't even retired yet.

More to follow.

In news regarding the observatory one of our faac members is working on creating a flyer for libraries to advertise the observatory. George Korody is working on this and he asked me for photos. In the rush to get my computer reorganized I actually dropped a critical disk drive and lost a lot of photos. That put a bit of a damper on my thanksgiving vacation.



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