We used to have a term for computer users, or "users" as we would call them who wanted a computer to do everything and wanted us to program them to do everything. "Blue Sky" requests. They wanted everything, and wanted to throw in requests which seemed to be "out of the blue" requests.
Well of course we would program or setup programs and systems that met the needs of the users or the specifications by the "law" as these requests and specifications would change the nature of the work people had to do and what the computer had to do. The goal was for my work location to meet the changing needs of the laws and to setup a system that had a lot of knowledge in it, so in theory we could hire many users who with a little training could do their job, without becoming legal experts and making all kinds of decisions and do all kinds of esoteric calculations with paper and pencil.
Being in computers as a career, I of course was a computer geek of sorts. And also I would use computers as a hobby or related to my own hobbies. One of my hobbies was "midi synth" music creation at one time, which involved computers and keyboards. Another hobby that grew into a side business which was a part time thing, was videography. For video I choose a Macintosh computer system with a system based on the Media 100 nonlinear editing system. This of course put me into a camp of "the users" and someone who uses a computer as well as supports one. In my hobby I was using a computer. I was in some ways of course an expert user. But also for my side business I wanted a system that I could use easily and was bulletproof and wouldn't crash or get in my way.
When you're on the "user" side, you'll find the usual frustrations with computers and all this advanced "technology". I didn't mind dealing with technical issues but of course it was a second job kind of thing. As a hobby, at times you may like to deal with computer issues and it gives you something do deal with and learn. As a get away from the old work grind, when you work in computers long enough, you may get into the thought or pattern of deciding that your hobby might be better off not involving computers much and not playing with them to much, because then you run the risk of being in a workaholic kind of thing. . . it's like your bringing work at home. Computers and advanced technology at times can seem to be a "solution" or a "set of problems masking themselves and appearing to be a solution". A friend of mine one time in the past said, "we are not selling solutions to these people, we are selling problems in need of support." His comment was coming from a support person perspective working for a big consulting computer company. His thought was we aren't really giving the users a turn key solution that works and doesn't need to be supported, because we are being paid to keep working on any technical issues they have. It's a little bit of a different perspective. In any event, I decided to open with this. Now on to the "blue sky" wishes of our user group, the astronomers at HJRO. Who not only have wishes and thoughts about how a computer and mount inside the observatory should work, but also have the fun of setting up the system so it will actually work. We are the users and the guys who setup the system. So we get to wear both hats.
We have been setting up a new computer system. It's really slick and cool a Mac Mini which will run Windows and MacOSX at the same time. During this installation those who are more familiar with Mac OSX and the Mac mini have taken the lead and of course we have others who are involved as well.
During setup and fixing of the computer and mount of course we run into configuration problems and it takes some time to setup the system. We have a Losmandy and Gemini goto system inside the observatory. From a user perspective this mount can be a bit perplexing at first. It's a great mount, and made in the USA by the way. The flaws that it has are natural for any product, but also a kind of strength at least for the making of it. The flaw it has is the controller has only a few buttons with many menus and button presses to get down to a complex menu system. Some companies try to put all the functions and buttons to do every function on a controller or a control surface. This is "ergonomics" it's ideally having a button or knob of slider for every function. And if all of the buttons on the controller represent one thing, and it's clearly labelled, then you have a system that can do almost anything within arms reach with a quick and simple motion. This kind of "user friendly" user interface ends up costing a lot of money. We see that in huge mixing consoles for sound engineers for example. They have hundreds of buttons and volume sliders on a console in front of them. It looks really complex. That is a different subject, but the point is they end up with a huge controller, because each button or slider is required for every underlying function. When you are doing a recording you don't have time to go down to select items below a bunch of menus. This is why at least for a time, people hated Roland digital synthesizer racks. They may have loved the Roland sound and some of the features, but they hated all the button menu/submenu pushing that they had to do to drill down and get something done. Musicians after all want to have instant feedback and tweak something quickly, they don't want to mess around like a computer programmer, mousing around and toying around with the interface, that gets in the way of the moment of making music. The interface gets in the way of the simple artistic expression.
With most devices, interfaces and computer systems, the same thing applies. But if you have a small footprint, and a small space, you don't have room to have a huge control surface. After all computers who are involved in complex operations have to nest them in menus because our controllers have to be smaller. Nobody wants to lug a 4 by 4 foot controller out to the field to do work with their telescope. So we can't map all the functions to their own button. We can have a smaller controller and a smaller device which is more portable. So we end up with things like "the Celestron" handheld controller, which by the way has a bunch of buttons, about 24 or so. It has an entire numeric keypad and many other buttons. Losmandy has a different approach with their Gemini goto system. They have a controller that has about eight buttons on it, and everything is nested below these basic buttons. The entire system is a bunch of layered menus. This can make running the device a little bit of a challenge until you learn it. It's a far cry from the many buttons on the Celestron or typical Meade controller.
Wow . . . what an introduction.
There are ways of course to help and that often involves more interfaces and setups of more computers, we end up using some other device to link to the computerized mount and that offers a program that may be more friendly and has a display, maybe displays a map of the sky and the stars. And it will allow you to see the sky and move that map around and select and object by pointing to it with a cursor and mouse. And you will "connect" that with some kind of command to the goto mount. Once connected the computer can control the mount. So we are setting up the mount and new computer to control the mount.
We spent some time Friday night, that is the other guys did most of the work setting up the computer and also testing an autoguider camera to see if that could control the mount and interface to the software inside our computer. An auto guider will look at the sky and you can select the stars in the cameras field of view and tell the computer to track that star. The guider system can be connected directly to the goto mount with a cable and the mount, guider and software all work together to "watch that star" and tell the mount to speed up a little or slow down a little or move a little differently to keep the star centered in a "target" window. That allows the mount to track the sky very precisely with feedback from the camera connected to the optical setup on the mount. So they tested the auto guiding yesterday with much success. I wasn't there much, I was outside the observatory. They had a lot of other guys there and I didn't need to crowd in there and join the crowd. I was kind of busy with errands anyways that day and pretty tired. So I left them learn and they gave me a summary at the end of the session.
Last night while they were doing a lot of setup and working on the configuration, I was outside the observatory trying to look at comet Panstarrs outside, just to see if I could see it from the HJRO site. They were busy and could not look at the comet inside, that was a distraction from the work they needed to do. I setup my telescope outside, the binocular telescope. From time to time we'd look through it trying to find the comet without any luck. I took some wide field photos and hooked up my laptop outside to take photos and review them to try to locate the comet. I took a photo of the comet, but was unable to find it visually. This of course was my little hobby distraction of that time.
I then went home to do some chore at home because some crisis happened. Some cooking crisis of some sort. I returned and everyone had been there for about five hours working on the mount and observatory. The sky was pretty nice. It would have been a good night to observe, but I was really tired, I think some of the others realized they could be imaging at home with their own telescopes, and everyone was pretty tired from the evening. Tim Dey mentioned to me later that night on the phone, that they had a problem with "the home" position on the mount and it was set incorrectly for the Losmandy Goto controller and I might have to reset an resync the mount on a star, adding an alignment. No problem. . . I planned on waking up at 5:30 and put out an announcement on our FAAC yahoo group list that I hoped to be at HJRO at 5:30AM to image in case anyone wanted to stop by in the morning.
I went home started charging up some items, did a bit of cooking and ate something late in the evening. Then went to bed. I didn't want to make the mistake of not setting my alarm. But somehow in all the setup of charging and getting everything ready, I forgot to set my alarm. So around 6AM I wake up from a strange dream about my being in Chicago and looking for a church. . . in any event that dream was re-occurring and it was repeating like some kind of "Groundhog day" movie. I finally woke up and looked at the time. It was 6AM. I was already more than 30 minutes late at finding the comet.
So I rushed off as fast as I could. Throwing on some clothing and I grabbed a few items, a camera and my laptop. I also took my Vixen binocular telescope, just in case someone showed up and was there waiting for me late. Because I posted I'd be bringing another telescope.
I drove up at 6:08AM, not bad 8 minutes after I woke up I was opening up HJRO.
I opened up the observatory and took off the telescope cover pretty quickly. I started up the Losmandy controller. Selected "warmstart" and got out my camera. The camera SIM card was full or almost full. I would have to delete a few photos off the sim card or get out my Toshiba computer and take photos using Backyard EOS and stream those photos to my computer. This can save memory on the camera SIM card. But first I had to find the comet.
We leave the computer on, so I had to "wake up the computer". It started up with a LOGIN screen what user was I? I choose HJRO.
Then Windows appeared, which was fine. Windows was what they were using last night, so the configuration should be setup for Windows running the mount. We can run the mount from Windows or OSX, but we have to make sure the USB is logically connected to the computer side we are running the mount from. So the sky launched. I would connect to the mount and tell the computer to slew to the comet or a bright star near the comet.
I told the computer to move the mount by selecting a GREEN icon which looks like a telescope. The mount was connected to the Losmandy, but when I told it to move the mount, the mount didn't move.
Nothing. It's 6:12am by now. It's taken me about 5 minutes to open up and connect the computer and boot up the system. This includes finding the shutter box and plugging it into the "new" higher tie for the shutter which was disconnected. This took a little more time but will keep the cable from interfering with people when the dome swings around.
The computer was useless to me, so I decided to try to get the Losmandy to do the work. It was going to be out of alignment and probably needed to be "synced to some star" because they messed up the home position last night. I pressed the buttons to instruct the computer to goto an object, and the mount responded by doing nothing. It had an "interrupted message on it". So the mount would not respond. The SKY WAS BLUE, but the system was not responding. This gives a new meaning to the term Blue Sky computer user.
So I ended up restarting the mount from it's home position and tried it again. The mount would of course not select the right target, it barely moved. I could move it manually. I started to manually slew the mount by holding down arrow buttons. This is supposed to slew the mount and let you at least move the mount manually. The mount didn't seem to respond. or it was responding very slowly like it was in a fine slew mode to move very slowly to fine tune a target you already found. I needed to move the mount a long ways to get near the comet, but the mount would not respond.
After uttering a few words I'm not proud of, I decided the only way I was going to photograph the comet this morning before the sun totally turned the sky blue, was to grab my tripod and shoot a manual photo from outside the observatory. This means it would be a wide field photo and not a close or bright photo I had hoped for. I could not use the system, not quickly on a time schedule. I woke up a little late, but also woke up early for nothing. It was a typical user experience with technology when it fails.
Once I finished taking a few photos outside, I went back inside. I decided, "the moon is up and a nice big target". I'll tell the mount to look for the moon and then try to make the adjustment and "sync on the moon". The sky was already glowing to bright to get a good shot at the comet. So I instructed the Losmandy to goto the moon. It moved and slewed toward the moon. The moon was in the west, south of the meridian. This means the mount and telescope should be setup with the counterweights on the western side and the telescope on the eastern side. The telescope was off by about 20 degrees and was on the wrong side of the meridian. Of course the controller wouldn't quickly slew the mount because it was set to some slow speed. I decided to reset the mode to "visual" in order to hope that the slew speed would be faster. But it wouldn't move except at a very slow speed.
Clearly the Losmandy mount is not setup correctly to function in the most basic way and I could stay around as the sky started to get brighter and go through all the settings and start to setup the mount so it will be setup correctly. But it was cold out and the morning was getting brighter. I was cold and tired. I recorded a quick, video message to vent my user frustration on my iphone and sent it out to a few of the core members, mostly out of frustration and then closed up the observatory.
I decided to head to Tim Hortons for a little breakfast wake up and started to write this blog post.
Below is a photo from yesterday. I'm loading this from my Toshiba and didn't spend time adjusting the photo at all, because it's not on my Macintosh yet and I left my Macintosh laptop at home.
So here is a cropped and wide angle version of the comet from last night. This was taken while some of the core members were testing and setting up the system (also known as breaking the system.)
Of course this is all just configuration stuff. The mount and computer are fine, we just have to tweak them with the correct setup procedures. That will take some time, probably during an early evening.
Last night the sky condition seemed excellent. It was a good night to be out under the stars and observing. Unfortunately I was to tired to go out and stay out. I wondered if that would mean this morning would be cursed with poor skies or clouds. There were not clouds. It looked pretty good, but there was a haze around the moon, which is a bad sign.
I haven't reviewed the "wide angle" photos I took this morning yet. I will soon and perhaps post them later. This was from last night.
The close up photo was simply cropped from the photo after it. Neither photo was processed and the comet is faint and near the dome. It is fairly faint now at Magnitude 4. I don't know if processing would bring out much of the comet as it's pretty faint. I keep hoping and trying to get the comet with a good tracking shot from HJRO, but so far I've not had any luck thanks to the comet position on my first attempt being behind a street light and the mount problems today.
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