A bit off topic.

The observatory has been closed for some time due to the snow and cold weather. I didn't want to dig it out with a snow shovel to freeze and basically have no visitors.

What can an astronomer do when they can't go to their favorite observing place?

The answer for me was to experiment with observing in extremely cold weather, by braking a cardinal rule of observing, never look out of a window of house.

I wasn't looking through a window pane of glass, but opening a window, and looking out of the opening. That same rule still applies, because air currents and temperature differences can make up a tremendous amount of turbulence. And the heat and cooling down of the optics or more importantly heat moving up the tube even in a closed tube refractor may cause heat to be moving up in a small heat mirage, very small for us but amplified by the optics. What happens?

Well to be brief, without a long write up, the optics cool down and the view gets to be very marginal. One has to close the heat vents to your room to prevent more heat from flowing out of the room.

Low powers for example in the 10 to 26 power range are not all that bad. For a quick wide field fix, it's not to bad. One might use curtains and try to find other blocking methods to limit the air flow over the front of the lens.

I created a long tube of stiff cardboard like paper to fit over the telescope, giving it a long dew shield, in hopes of funneling any hot air from the window around this dew shield instead of in front of a telescope aiming out the window. This helped some, but maybe only improved the image 15 percent at most. The image in colder days with greater temperature differences seems to be even worse because perhaps of a greater temperature difference between the indoors and outside air.

At medium and high powers, views of things like planets, the planet Jupiter were extremely poor. Making a decent telescope operate like a really poor store bought cheap telescope from China, which you can never fully appreciate. The image of Jupiter on a really cold day at medium powers looked almost like a blurry flag, or a blur as large as the moon. The wealthier was cold that day, and I could see heat from a nearby chimney and neighbors furnace flying up near where I was observing. And the heat flow was going 10mph in one direction and then 10 mph in the opposite. So there was a lot of wind turbulence that day that could affect seeing.

When the seeing is better, with lower power, you can see some things clearly maybe as much as 20 percent of the time. That means a brief look for maybe a minute at the eyepiece may only snow 20 seconds of clear viewing interrupted by 40 seconds of blurry viewing. This can be just super short sharp viewing moments, interspaced with a lot of blurry poor image.

Now even with the worse viewing, of maybe 3 percent sharpness or less, for a short fleeting moment I could make out Jupiter's bands, and see a moon close to jupiter just peeking out next to the planet.

Now outside in the subzero cold I might see a stable image much of the time. I didn't have the time to check. Rather than checking outside and freezing and shoveling snow, I tried to take some photos from inside.

The wide field photos were not horrible, most of the time, but they were not good images either. Certainly not much use. Photos of the sun was okay, but not anywhere as sharp as it could be. Solar viewing with a safe solar filter worked okay from inside. I haven't done lunar observing yet.

Of the 33 photos I took of Jupiter only. One turned out sharp, but it was overexposed and I could not pull out any detail.

So my summary is it's like going back in time when all I could afford was a really bad telescope. Viewing out of the window often can take a thousand dollar telescope and make it look like it was bought for $30 from the local Walgreens or CVS, truly poor images most of the time. There are occasional little brief moments when the image is sharp.

Is it worth it? I think it is if you want a quick observing fix and want to stay warm. It works better with binoculars, you can stay warm and safe inside the house and observe. If your not careful and known as an astronomer, your neighbors might think your window peeping however so it's something you'd want to exercise caution doing.

If it's really cold out, the view is even worse than if it's moderately cold out. In some cases with it being really cold, one might be better off observing outside quickly with a simple grab and go telescope. Because the views will be better while your out there and your just taking a quick peek.

I'd say if your setup provides good seeing ten percent of the time, with lower power it's probably worth it to observe for a while from indoors. Your observing targets will be much fewer because you can only look at a part of the sky. Clusters are probably good targets. The sun with a proper safe solar telescope, is probably okay, but you need to be certain your using a safe method. If you have any doubts call a good astronomy store like OPT in California, and verify your observing setup is safe before you use it and damage your eyesight.

The other thing I did was think about and plan to buy a camera for astronomy. But it's really expensive, the setup I want and I decided to do a little testing and purchase a new laptop for video editing, another hobby of mine. I bought a Windows 8 machine with an i7 processor. I'm testing a video editing program with it, and the program seems pretty nice.

But all I can say about that laptop, is the laptop configuration and Windows 8 is very lame. It is horrible. The worse thing about is is random programs opening, because Windows, at least my setup and this laptop wants to open the newer 32 bit graphical applications at the drop of a hat, or actually randomly by hovering actions acting as if they are mouse clicks.

The hovering feature, to select stuff should be called land mine. Because one can rest a mouse cursor anywhere and it may take that hovering over something as a key press. Part of the problem is super creative wannabes wanting a bunch of features based on a mouse hovering over something,

It's like walking in a mine field, and menus open up and programs randomly take over your screen. You may even copy or delete something, because your mouse hovers over something.

It's a complete walking and living nightmare. One is expected to move a mouse around as if it's a mouse in a maze and you cannot leave the mouse on many parts of the screen, but have to find a safe place to leave it, to prevent random actions and programs from running.

Part of the problem may be tied toward laptop manufacturers trying to be cute with many features and gestures on the touch pad as well. But overall I'd have to say these Windows 8 machines from a user interface perspective were designed by clowns or groups of absolute lunatics.

If I'm able to wrestle and tame this system, a video program called Edius looks promising. I just have to figure out a way to have it run and stop all the random insane crazy actions of the laptop that appears to be possessed.

Now some would say, well you don't know what your talking about, but they would be wrong. A good ergonomic interface should have a positive action from the human user to command the computer to do something. The computer should wait and sit for a user action. Each action should be specific in the users mind and easy do to without causing the computer to be confused. With hovering selects, the computer puts the human on a timer, and if you don't do something, the computer will do something automatically. It's like having a psychotic group of people or robots just beat you up randomly without knowing why they are doing it or when they are striking. Windows 8 at least in my case will make you think your laptop was taken over by demons.

There are ways that one can tame the Windows 8 beast, or so these are claimed. Why not setup the computer to work right in the first place and allow users to add the extra features like strange gestures and super sensitive mouse clicks that seem to randomly appear. As a user I don't want a hidden 32 bit program to appear from the windows 8 tablet app in front of my 64 bit desktop app while it's running, and these apps run without a simple way to quit them, sending you into other strange paths to try to get back to what you were doing. It's like having a crazed dictator stab you in the back randomly while your trying to run a computer. What's good about that.

So to conclude this post, I have been toying with astronomy from indoors and trying to tame a crazed computer that was designed by people who should be out of their jobs. Seriously Windows 8 is going to sell a lot more Macintosh computers.

I also had a laptop with Windows 7 behave the same way and I had to tame it and cut back on all the "I wish I had more gestures than the Mac" settings that PC builders throw into their laptop designs.

Focus of a program shouldn't randomly go to some other process that causes the OS to launch a bunch of other programs.

They say Windows 8.1 can solve some of this. Maybe it can, maybe I'll try that upgrade.

I have a cheap windows 7 laptop that I can use for some basic astronomy stuff. I really would like to do everything on a Macintosh system and do as much as I can on one.

In the case of video editing, with Edius, I can import any footage without really any importing time. This means I can edit a ton of video quickly in theory, once I learn the new interface and customize it.

But everything else and even some features of Edius are inferior to the Macintosh experience, and I'm running an old Macintosh MacBook that is five years old. For video in some aspects, Media 100 is still faster than Edius is, and this is on a system that is five years older.

This shows me at least with the work I do how far behind the PC is. It's years behind, and unfortunately going backwards.




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