Prizeonion

Found the Sombrero galaxy last night. Could even see the dust lane.

2010-05-17T04:41:00.001-07:00

Last night was the first time it has been properly clear and dark for a long while. I only had a short time out though, and set about finding the Sombrero galaxy before it dips too low for another year. I found it easily enough in the binoculars, hopping down from Virgo (gamma to chi, then finding the rectangle with the Sombrero to the upper-right corner). Was easy enough to repeat that with the 'scope then.

Like most galaxies viewed by eye, it is basically an elongated grey smudge. This one had one very hard long edge though, which is probably the prominent dust lane on the photos. Rather pleasing, and more hat-like than the pictures.

Also went on to re-find a few objects from last summer, as Hercules and Lyra are visible again: the ring nebula, M13 and M92. And a quick look at Saturn too. It would be impolite to do otherwise.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Clouds were kind, so managed to see the Werner X formation on the moon last night

2010-03-23T02:55:00.001-07:00

There is a formation of four craters that when illuminated "just so" forms a fairly distinctive X on the moon's terminator. I'm trying to find out how often it's visible, don't think it's every month.
http://the-moon.wikispaces.com/Lunar+X

Anyway, it was pretty cool seeing it appear. I started looking about 19:15GMT and could see two of the legs of the X, at 19:45 the others were barely visible. After tea, it was very clear, although the dew had come down and fogged up my eyepiece somewhat. What was most cool was the undeniable fact that I was watching the effect of the sun rising on the moon, at about 1/28th the rate on earth. Not quite as impressive as the time I saw the dark edge of the moon suddenly blot out a star as it passed in front. That really gave me a sense of how things are moving up there.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Good haul of fuzzies spotted tonight

2010-03-14T17:22:00.001-07:00

Reasonably clear night. Managed to spot a good load of new galaxies. Decided to concentrate on Leo and Virgo. Easily found M65,M66 and NGC3628 in a very nice triplet. Never as pretty as the pictures, of course, but in cleaner skies I suspect not too far off. I must go and find a better site. Then swung the scope westward to find M95 , M96 and another unidentified fuzzy.

Further East, I thought I'd take my first real look into the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Too many to pick out an individual to aim at, so scanned a line from ε-virgo to ν-virgo. Found eight clear fuzzies along that line (with a ~1degree field of view.) Clearly lots more to find in there.

Also had to have a look at Saturn and it's myriad moons. Very pretty. Spotted Hercules has popped back into view. A welcome return as it was one of the first new constellations I learnt last summer.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Fighting importing existing data from Google Picasa on Windows to Ubuntu

2010-03-10T12:45:00.001-08:00

So I have a duel boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 machine. I have painstakingly identified faces on thousands of photos in Windows, so the prospect of losing all that in Ubuntu wasn't too pleasing.

I had installed Picasa 3.5 roughtly following this how-to. Great, that worked, but none of the meta data was there. Firstly have your windows partitions mounted. Mine are mounted to /media

Add a link from the Google Wine sub directory to your windows data:

$ cd "~/.google/picasa/3.0/drive_c/Documents and Settings/<user name>/Local Settings/Application Data"
 $ mv Google Google.real_dir
$ ln -s "/media/WindowsXP/Documents and Settings/Graham/Local Settings/Application Data/Google"

So far, so good. I tried this, though, and although my people gallery was populated, none of the photos they contained could be found. I guess this is because the links in the meta data pointed to non-existent folders. So, step 2

Add a link to recreate the drives to match your windows ones. On mine, I had photos on E:\photos, mounted on Ubuntu as /media/data

$ cd ~/.google/picasa/3.0/dosdevices
$ ln -s /media/data 'e:'

This should then mean the existing Picasa meta data points to an existent path. Make sure that you re-import your photos using the new mapped drive though.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Spring, chickens - a few photos

2010-03-07T08:10:00.001-08:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

First clear night for weeks. Found a few galaxies.

2010-03-04T15:02:00.001-08:00

Seems to have been the first clear night in weeks, so I forced myself out into the cold for a bit. Glad I did as I easily found the Whirlpool Galaxyand also M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, which I've hunted for a few times before, to no avail. Probably found it tonight as they were good and high in the sky, so little atmosphere in the way. The Whirlpool is interesting, as I was expecting another fuzzy blob, but actually found two. Turns out that it is two interacting galaxies, M51A and M51B. Could see no detail, but the sky wasn't particularly dark.

Also had a gander at the receding Mars. Could see the polar cap still, but is definitely smaller now than last month. Saturn was up too, so had a to have a look at it too. Still looking awesome, even with the rings nearly edge on. I need to dedicate a night to staring at Saturn, like I did in the Summer with Jupiter. Lots of easily visible moon to watch for transits and occlusions.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Clouds held off, so saw Mars, M36, 37 and 38

2010-02-09T16:09:00.001-08:00

Probably the best views of Mars yet. Didn't bother with filters, just kept staring and occasionally the air would hold steady enough to see not only the polar cap, but a dark area toward the other pole, shaped like Africa. Also darker halo around the ice cap. Colour was pretty too.

While I was waiting for the scope to cool and the wind to die down I had a good look around Auriga, and a good long stare at M36, M38 and M37, the latter being by far the most impressive. A rich cluster of evenly bright stars. Also found the very variable Epsilon Auriga, at about mag 4.

Finished the night with a quick look at Saturn. Although low in the sky, the rings looked great and could see their shadow cast on the planet surface. Nice.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Got a good view of Mars last night, could see the polar cap and a few dark patches.

2010-01-27T01:43:00.001-08:00

Despite the clouds, I managed to get a good few glimpses of Mars last
night. The polar cap was pretty obvious and some of the darker surface
features easily visible, bizarrely better when looking through the
clouds. Don't know if that means my scope need stopping down a bit -
filters didn't seem to help. The colours were also pleasingly
distinct. No pictures though, I couldn't be bothered with setting up
the webcam.

I was pleased to have caught this glimpse now, as it has been cloudy
for weeks on end, it seems, and in couple of days Mars will be at its
closest until 2014 (see
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/mars/appends.htm).

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Found the triangulum galaxy and the wild duck cluster just now.

2009-09-16T16:32:00.001-07:00

It was a surprisingly clear night last night, despite the wind. At least that kept the dew at bay. Managed to find something down the bottom of Aquila, a nice cluster with easily resolvable stars. I think it was the Wild Duck Cluster, M11. Also had a look for M33, the Triangulum Galaxy (or confusingly sometimes the Pinwheel Galaxy.) I found it relatively easily in the finderscope, in fact it looked brighter there than through the main scope. Not much detail, only a feint hazy area. I hopped down from Mirach in Andromeda, where I start to find the Andromeda galaxy too.

It's getting interesting now the nights are drawing in. Starting to see new areas of the sky than the summer when I started on this. The summer triangle and Hercules are disappearing earlier every night.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Ubuntu Jaunty Deskbar Tracker

2009-08-05T03:48:00.001-07:00

In ubuntu jaunty, the tracker plugin wasn't installed by default, so
wasn't available in the deskbar. It wasn't even available as a module
to add. Just not installed at all. Quite why, I don't know. Fixed with
"sudo aptitude install" libdeskbar-tracker, then it became available
to select in the deskbar preferences.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Found the Andromeda galaxy using the new kit last night.

2009-07-23T06:04:00.001-07:00

In the couple of clearish hours last night between clouds, I set up the 'scope with the new finder and wide-angle eyepiece (a Baader Hyperion Aspheric 31mm). The finder is great. So much easier than using the straight-through finder-scope. It projects a pair of concentric circles up to the viewer which, due to some clever optics, remains steady relative to the stars regardless of how you move your head. I didn't bother with the finder-scope at all last night so the scope wasn't too top heavy.

The first thing I did was point towards cygnus's rear end, to drink in the multitude of stars in the milky way. Pretty awesome in the 1.8 degree field of view and a mere 40x magnifiation.

Next I thought I'd find the Andromeda Galaxy. It wasn't hard to find, once I'd worked out how huge the Andromeda constellation is. The core was nicely visible as were two companion galaxies, all in the field of view at once. Despite the light sky, it was possible to see the orientation of the disc, a hazy elongated ellipse stretching out of view either way. Nice.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Found the Dumbbell Nebula

2009-07-15T17:39:00.001-07:00

Just come in from a moonless and surprisingly clear sky. Found the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), which was bigger that I was expecting. Couldn't see any detail, just a hazy blob with a slightly darker band round its middle. Could see stars through it, or in front of it. Also found a little cluster nearby. Not sure what it was. Pleased my star-hopping is getting better, but I need another finder to complement the straight scope.

Jupiter was looking very neatly flanked by a pair of moons either side of it. The atmosphere was quite stable, so I could use highest magnification (about 300x currently) and really get a good look at the banding.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Created a pathetic image of jupiter too

2009-07-05T17:23:00.001-07:00

Jupiter is that tiny striped blob! So this is my first real attempt at using RegiStax to combine more than one frame in an image. Given the raw material, it's done a reasonable job. It was pretty hazy and the moon was almost full too. Jupiter's moons are too dim to be seen in theis shot (apparently Io was in transit during the exposure.)

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

First webcam image through telescope: the moon in bad skies.

2009-07-05T16:01:00.001-07:00

Last night I reconfigured (cobbled) a webcam to hook up to the 10" dobsonian. All I had to do was remove the lens and then find some way of fixing it in place of the eyepeice. Turns out a sligtly modified 35mm film case works well. Amazingly, the focal plane lay well within the normal range of the focusser, so things were pretty straight-forward and stable. The only issue is that the CCD in the webcam is tiny, so the images are very zoomed.

Features on the surface stay in the field of view for about 45 seconds. The earth rotates at 360 degs/24 hours => 1/4 degee per minute. This makes the FOV is about 0.2 degrees, pretty narrow. With the barlow, I can only make that narrower.

Being a rubbish old webcam, literally from a skip, it is only 640 x 480. Am now playing with the awesome-looking RegiStax to see if multiple images will get better quality.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Last night's tally

2009-07-04T04:51:00.001-07:00

Had surprisingly good skies last night and Jupiter was very clear, managed to see four moons and very clear colour banding. Also found the ring nebula and M13 again, as well as M92. The new 8mm eyepeice was really good. Clear and a good field of view, seeing individual stars in the globular clusters was easy. It also woked really well in the 2x barlow to give 300x magnification, whcih was very useful for jupiter. I definintly need to improve my star-hopping though, spent too long trying to find stuff, and not enough time looking :)

Posted via email from Graham's posterous

Canon Camera Window Problem

2006-10-10T05:46:00.000-07:00

My installation of the Canon camera tools got severly messed up when I installed a new version of the software (Camera Window and ZoomBrowser) on top of an old version. I think the problem arose because I installed both versions from different user accounts. (I have a multi-user Windows XP setup, which some software wasn’t written to cope with.)

Anyway - the symptoms are that after you plug in the camera, Windows recognizes it, but the download window doesn’t show up. For one user, it works, for the other it doesn’t. The weird thing is that I could watch the process list and see the app (CameraWindow.exe) start, but then quit without showing any error message.

After much mucking about, I tracked it down to the permissions on the registry keys. One user had permission to modify the keys, the other didn’t, so the application quietly failed. I couldn’t even re-install the app, as I didn’t have permissions to write to the HKLM\Software\Canon key.

To fix it, I uninstalled as much as I could, switched users to find who had permission to alter the registry key, deleted it, then reinstalled the software. I actually reinstalled (the same version) for all users this time, but probably could have just modified the permissions on the registry keys for all users to have access.

Mapping Bath

2006-08-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, a gang of OpenStreetMappers descended upon Bath in the UK. I went along, to lend a hand, armed with my trusty Geko and a bike. I had already made an attempt at mapping the town ccentre, but not much outside the old city walls was done.

My first day’s results can be seen here, the second day’s work here, and all the raw data from the weekend from all the people involved is shown here. For only two day’s surveying, I think the amount of coverage is pretty impressive. That’s only the raw data though. Now lines need to be drawn on top, using vectors, then those vectors combined to make streets and the attibutes, tags, added, such as names, size and restrictions.

Ingalls Lake Trail

2005-10-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

The trail up to Ingalls lake takes you over dry hills, through sparse clumps of larches to a beautiful and open alpine lake.

This hike provided a perfect compliment to the previous one in the Olympics. Whilst the Olympic national park is a temperate rainforest, Ingalls lake lies on the east side of the Cascades, in a rain shadow. The ground was dusty and the trees stunted and sparse.

The drive from Seattle was long but through interesting scenery and the novelty of farmland. At 10:30 am we hit the trail and after a couple of miles we were out of the forest and getting views of the red and grey rock-strewn hills around us. The plants here were very different from those in the Olympics, and there were barely any huckleberries.

Just before we reached the highest point of the walk, Rainier emerged from behind the nearest mountain to the south. It was a perfectly clear day and we could see the glacier-topped giant very clearly. To the west, far more distant, but still clearly visible, was its brother, Mount Hood.

From the high point in a saddle the trail contours roughly around the basin below. It was easily visible and we could see where lake Ingalls was probably hiding. The view across the glacial valley to Mount Stuart was impressive, but the views closer to us were equally good; [scored orange-red rocks][scratched rock] dotted with yellowing larches. There is a campground here, a superb isolated location, but it would certainly be cold. There was frost in the shade even though it was early afternoon.

On the way around the basin we encountered a couple of marmots, which didn’t seem bothered by our clumping boots and got too close to get completely in shot

The last leg of the walk turned into more of a scramble up over to the edge of the lake. It was a stunning view: Ingalls peak to the left of us, orange, streaked with grey and to the right, reflected in the blue waters of the lake, were the crumbling peaks of Mount Stuart.

We lunched here in the silence and sun, ducked below the cold wind. The view looked familiar, on checking the guide book, I found out why: it was on the cover.

The return journey, back out the same way we came in, passed quickly. We saw the marmots again - passed the autumn larches and went back over the saddle for more views of Rainier. We arrived back at the car at about 4:30pm and headed back to the city in search of food.

Seven Lakes Basin

2005-09-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

This was a long one; 18.8 miles in one day with over 4500ft of climbing. We met people on the way round taking three days over this loop. “I hope you boys have got a flashlight.”

It was a long day: 16 hours from downtown Seattle until our return. There was no earlier ferry we could have caught. The trailhead is some 40 miles west of Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula, about two and a half hour’s drive from the ferry terminal in Bainbridge. We were on the trail, at about 9:30am, in the cold morning air. It felt like autumn was coming.

The trail emerges from the trees surprisingly quickly, so we had views from pretty early on, which made the climb far more bearable. The weather was superb, blue skys with a few wispy clouds above, but not too hot.

After a brief respite in a beautiful flat area full of ponds and ripe huckleberries the climb continued. We soon crossed over the ridge to views over the west side of the Olympic range, out to the Pacific.

We lunched atop Bogachiel Peak, which gave us views all around, over the Seven Lakes Basin to the North and South to the snow-covered summit of Mount Olympus.

The High Divide was a strange section; one side of the slope was south-facing an covered in tall pines, whilst the north side was open, covered with only grass and the odd stubborn and weathered tree. It’s a very pleasant section of the walk, being mercifully level and with views across the valley of the impressive glacier crawling down from Olympus. We soon spotted Heart Lake, but from our point of view, the heart shape was upside down. After dropping down from the High divide we soon entered thick forest and the rest of the walk was of close-up views of trees and undergrowth. There were plenty of varied fungi about in the damp autumn air. By the time we got back to the car, the light was fading.

It was a bit of a slog, especially towards the end, but absolutely worth the effort. You can do it one day, so do.

See all the pictures here.

Heather Park, Angeles Lake Loop

2005-09-13T05:43:00.000-07:00

The labour day holiday provided the opportunity to do two hikes in one weekend and still get a rest day. Monday was walk two, this time in the Olympics. There were two possible hikes we had our eye on, but we had to settle for the shorter one due to not arriving at Port Angeles until 10am. The longer walk was another 50 plus miles down the road. It would have been dark before we got off the hills.

The trailhead for the loop we settled on is cheekily just outside the national park. The turnoff is literally within a stone’s throw of the pay station.

The start of the walk is on an old logging road at a ‘gentle gradient’ which soon raised the heart rate. It was at least an hour’s slog before we broke tree cover for a view into the thick of the clouds which were stubbornly clinging to the mountain tops. We met two seasoned hikers on the way up who both commented, with some surprise, when we told them we were doing the loop that “That’s a long hike fellas.” We had been warned.

After zig-zagging through alpine meadows and patches of trees, we chose a spot for first lunch near Heather Park in a saddle on the ridge we were going to follow. The clouds parted briefly to reveal a snow-clad Mount Olympus in the distance. Beautiful, and worth the climb.

Here we faced a decision. The book and its map showed a trail up through the peaks to the south-east. The only obvious trail was down and west, then contouring below the peaks. Add this to the fact that we weren’t entirely sure where we were, due to a possible branch in the trail some half a mile back down the hill. The GPS was useless; whilst it gave an accurate indication of our position, the map we had was devoid of grid markings. We plumped for the obvious trail.

The next section of the trek was a slog. After dropping a few hundred feet down gravel we countoured (roughly) below the crumbling peaks for a while before we had to re-gain the height to a saddle. From there it was another disheartening drop down into cloud to traverse another scree slope, then climbing back up to 6000 feet to another saddle. This was the only busy part of the trail due to the proximity of the Hurricane Road trailhead. There was still a mountain goat on the ridge though. A pleasant surprise and impressively big and furry.

The walk out was quick. No-one fancied being in the forest as it got dark. Lake Angeles proved to be a worthwhile (and minor) detour. It was flat as a mill pond, so reflected the surrounding mountains impressively.

Easily the most spectacular hike so far, even without the views. Worth the effort.

Denny Creek and Melakwa Lake

2005-09-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Labour day weekend. We hiked up along Denny Creek to Melakwa Lake, in the Central Cascades.

The trail starts from a busy car park and soon takes you under the I90 westbound carriage, rising from the firs on concrete stilts. It looked suprisingly good.

Whilst the I90 route to the trailheads around North Bend is very coinvienient, it was getting a bit samey. At one point we were further from the car to where we were a couple of weeks ago. With all this wilderness, that’s not right.

We soon found ourselves zig-zagging up through forest and rockfalls to Keekwulee falls and alongside the more hidden Snowshoe falls. From there it is a short pull up more switchbacks to the lake itself.

Melakwa is Chinook for mosquito, apparently. There were certainly a few of the little suckers about, and their prescence, combined with the overcast skys and occasional drizzle made our lunch break short and the idea of swimming was never realised. There are a couple of good looking camping spots between the upper and lower lakes, but the eponymous mozzies might be a bit of a chore in the evenings.

Coming down was worse than going up, due to the rocky nature of the path, combined with the lack of novelty, as we’d seen it all on the way up. It was still enjoyable to be out in the ‘wilderness’ for a few hours though.

Vancouver - A trip to the land of metric

2005-09-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

A weekend in Vancouver. The trip up from Seattle was painless enough apart from the grilling by the Canadian border guard, who seemed annoyed that he couldn’t refuse us entry.

I can recommend The Victorian Hotel. It was cheap (for downtown,) central, clean, independent, quirky and quiet. Quiet is good. We checked in, abandoned the car and walked around town in the sunshine, admiring the views across the sound to the mountains beyond.

On Sunday we hired bikes and pootled around Stanley Park for a few hours in the sunshine. I was pleased to find a game of cricket in progress. The clouds were scraping the hills on the other side of the water, which is why we’d saved Grouse Mountian until the Monday.

Monday: rain. Not forecasted. It cleared after breakfast but the clouds remained. We stubbornly set off up into the hills anyway. We tried to find the Lynn Creek suspension bridge, a free version of the Capilano bridge but marginally smaller and in the next valley over. We actually ended up in the Lynn Headwater park, which was great. There was hardly anyone there. We set off on a short walk through the fir trees past huge ancient stumps left from the first time it was logged.

On the second attempt we found the suspension bridge, bounced our way over and watched a couple of nutters jumping over the waterfalls in the creek below. They’d obviously chosen to ignore the gory warning signs explaining the multitude of horrific ways you can drown under a waterfall.

After a picnic lunch in the woods by the bridge we headed home, stopping to admire the distant view of Vancouver from Crescent Beach. That was a strange little community. Very peaceful and more lifeguards than swimmers.

All in all a great, very relaxing trip with some of the best elements for a good time: good food, good sleeping, great views… and not getting mugged even when you accidentally walk though the crack-ridden areas after dark.

More pictures here.

Paradise, Mount Rainier

2005-08-23T05:42:00.000-07:00

The call of the mountain became too much again. On Saturday we drove the three hours from Seattle to Mount Rainier with the intention of tramping on it a bit. We set off early, but in my usual style we took many stops on the way to obeserve the view, take pictures and do a little bonus walk in a quiet area. My favourite viewpoint was the one without a view - well, no view of Rainier, just some fir trees up close.

When we finally arrived at Paradise, it was full. There were cars everywhere. Both main car parks were full, as were the overflow ones. The roads were lined with vehicles and all but the lowest picnic spot spaces were filled. We parked about as far from the visitor centre as possible, and had lunch. I was getting a little despondant as I didn’t fancy walking up a road as part of my trek and there were people just everywhere - busier than if we’d stayed in Belltown. Add this to the fact that my water bottle had leaked a couple of litres through my rucsac all over the boot of the car.

I think there’s a Joni Mitchell song about paving over paradise.

We tried the car parks again, and this time, amazingly, we got a spot. I refilled the offending water bottle and we set off up the tarmac’d path of the skyline trail. The views were spectacular in all directions. North was filled with Rainier’s glacier-clad southern face, and in all other directions we were surrounded by more modest peaks. In the southern distance Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens were visible - emphasising the fact that we were in an active volcanic zone, halfway up a non-extinct volcano. Even though it was a clear August afternoon, the wind was cold, reminding us how high up we were: 7000ft above sea level.

The higher the path went, the less crowded it became. Not surprising really, but very welcome. At the highest point there were bits of glacial ice blocking the path and all around were barren rocks. Despite the early, disappointing signs, the trip was well worth the effort. I probably won’t get too many chances to clamber on a volcano in my lifetime, and glaciers are quick becoming a thing of the past - I should take these opertunities whilst I can, even if in doing so I expediate the glacial retreat a little.

See all the pictures here.

Gallery2

2005-08-22T05:41:00.000-07:00

I have been trying out Gallery2, a huge leap forward on Gallery, but not quite mature yet. You can find my g2 implimentation here: http://www.prizeonion.co.uk/gallery2.

I was all set to switch over to it permanently, when I discoverd that there is currently no RSS feed plugin. There seems to be a fairly active effort to rectify this though. Read the discussion here.

The transition was painless though, I have a parallel setup and just imported all the Gallery1 pictures using the plugin in the admin page. Very nice.

Snow Lake

2005-08-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

Another walk in the cascades. This one proved popular, with a group of eight of us heading for the hills; it took a while to fill out the permit… It was another ludicrously hot day and the majority of my pack was full of water. Our goal was Snow Lake, an alpine reservoir at some 4000ft above sea level. It’s a well trodden path and by far the busiest yet, I can see why though; after only three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation we crested a rise to be confronted with a spectacular view of a dark blue lake, surrounded by white rocks and deep green pines.

We’d set out to swim in the lake. It seemed like the perfect day for it, being as it was so hot, the cool alpine waters would be refreshing. They were indeed. I found them a little too refreshing and after ten minutes my teeth were chattering. I spent the next half an hour trying to maintain my core temperature by shivering on the shore bathed in sunshine on a 30°C day.

At least I actually swam, not like our friends from the lower latitudes.

Summary: Busy, but well worth it. Don’t forget your trunks.

More pictures in the gallery.

Kendall Katwalk

2005-08-01T05:39:00.000-07:00

Another fine walk. This time we headed east, to the Central Cascades. We were at the trail-head in about an hour, far more convenient than the Olympics. Our goal for the day was to reach the Kendall Katwalk, a narrow path along a cliff face, which turned out to be disappointingly safe.

The trail starts at about 1000m, in the the forest, and winds gently up to the peaks with the occasional breaks in the canopy, most spectacularly with a huge section of flattened trees, crushed and swept down the hillside by an avalanche.

On the way up there were berries growing, some I recognised and some I didn’t. I ate the ones I did. I’m still here, so I guess I was right. They looked like bilberries, tasted like bilberries and stained my fingers like bilberries, they must be… huckleberries.

The path opened up to spectacular views over the local peaks in the Cascades, including Red Mountain and south to Rainier, looking unfathomably big as usual.

Again the GPS struggled to keep a lock in the dense trees and steep valleys, but when it did lock on, it provided proof that we were at possibly the highest altitude I’ve ever walked at. The route ends at a high point of about 1660m, some 5000ft or more. There were no clouds and it was really hot up there. There were still some patches of snow on the northern faces, however. We didn’t hang around too long after lunch at the turn-around point and tramped off through the alpine meadows back into the cool shade of the forest. It seemed a longer trudge down than up, perhaps because the only thing at the end was having to drive home, tired.

Six and a half hours, 18km; a good day out.

See all the pictures in the gallery.

CityPass Leftovers

2005-07-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend I managed to use up the leftovers of someone’s CityPass tickets, resulting in trips to the Seattle Aquarium and the Museum of Flight, neither of which I would have gone to otherwise.

The Aquarium was pretty small and frankly not as good as the one in Birmingham. They did have sea-otters, however, but they were in a pretty small tank. It was worth the visit for the cuttlefish though. They scudded about, flipantly changing colour and I wasn’t sure who was the observer and who the observed. I made a rule to never trust a cephalopod.

The Museum of Flight, down at the Boeing airfield was a real surprise to me; I enjoyed it. I generally don’t like aeroplanes. The best part was the WWI and WWII section which had some human stories and wasn’t all completely heroistic.

Some of the old bi-planes were great too. I particularly liked this one which looked less like a plane, and more like an opulant flying wardrobe. I was also amused by this seat from a 1923 DH-4, made from wicker and leather. I think I sat on something similarly uncomfortable, but with less style on my flight over here.

Amongst other gems in the main hanger were the impressively large blackbird and a cruise missle, “capbable of delivering a nuclear payload.” It bore a wonderful danger sticker:”Ordnance activated devices within.”

As a little unexpeced bonus, the Blue Angels were there, taking off to do their stuff for the unfathomable Seattle Seafair festival. The police turned up on their Harleys, and as if to upstage the Blue Angles, gave an impressive display of formation parking.

Lena Lake Trail

2005-06-26T05:39:00.000-07:00

Following a “high-energy” breakfast in the fabulous Five Point Café, I and a couple of colleagues managed a day hike over in the Olympic Mountains. This trip was to be a recce., to find out how long it’d take to get to the Olympics, and to see find out what the trails are like.

It was a good journey just getting there; the ferry from Fountleroy to Southworth was a pleasing start to the trip, with fantastic, peaceful views across the blue waters of the Puget Sound. Once over the other side, we hit the trail-head after about 90 minutes driving along the coast, past numerous firework shops, followed by a short journey up Hamma Hamma Valley.

The track wound up from the valley floor through mainly pine trees with some interesting flora on the way. The number of switchbacks seemed a little excessive a times but it did mean it was never too much of a slog uphill.

The GPS was struggling in the steep valleys and dense tree cover, but I managed to get a lock for most of the route. It turned out to pretty pointless taking it. There is only one track, and it’s pretty much a motorway up to the first lake. Still, carrying that, my digital camera, SLR and two lenses, fleece, waterproof, food, spare batteries and two litres of water was good exercise.

I was thinking originally of uploading the GPS track for others to use as navigation, but frankly you’d be insane to use such wildly inaccurate data.

The lake itself was nestled in a very secluded spot, with the camping sites hidden up amongst the pine trees. It really made me wish I’d brought the tent - and swimming kit.

You’ll find plenty more photos in the gallery

RSS Reader Plugin for WordPress

2005-06-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

I wrote a little plugin using lastRSS to fetch a RSS feed and output the result as a list. You can see it running here under the “Bookmarks” section, where it’s using my del.icio.us bookmark feed as its input.

I wrote it because the other del.icio.us plugins I found were using the PHP curl module, which isn’t installed on my server. After I’d finished coding, I discovered the Wordpress RSS Link List Plugin, which basically does the same thing but is more mature and has a couple more nice features like the ability to add a RSS feed in a WordPress article.

It was a good exercise in writing a plugin though, albeit a very simple one. I still think the name of mine was better though: RSSGrabber.

Firefox Extensions

2005-06-21T05:36:00.001-07:00

One of the best things about Firefox is that it installs pretty much as a minimal browser. It is then up to individuals to install the extra features they want. There are a couple which I’ve found invaluable:

Adblock - which allows you to block adverts, pop-ups and other annoying elements and scripts on any page. Very easy to use and makes a huge positive difference to browsing.
SessionSaver - so that you can quit Firefox and have all your open tabs reload on the next start-up. It also allows you to re-open recently closed tabs, which is handy if you close one by mistake.

I’ve been using others too:

Tabbrowser preferences - which adds more options to do with the browser tabs, unsurprisingly
Greasemonkey - which I’ve not had a lot of time to investigate, but has provided a couple of useful scripts to change the way some of my more frequently visited sites behave.
delicious - very handy plugin to add and view links to your del.icio.us account. Has both right-click and sidebar tools.

Google Maps - High Resolution images worldwide

2005-06-21T05:36:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact Google maps are only available for the US and UK, the satellite images now cover a large proportion of the globe. High resolution aerial photographs are also available for certain major cities and other random areas. The UK, for example, has central London coverage but only the south-east of Birmingham.

More spectacularly Beijing is covered, here is Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Not having the maps (or even place names beyond countries) makes finding places difficult. It’s easier to find the longitude and latitude of a place via a normal google search and then plug that straight into the Google Maps URL.

Kimya Dawson

2005-06-20T05:38:00.001-07:00

Saw Kimya Dawson play last night at Chop Suey, a cosy venue over by the university. It was a great gig, and the varied warm-ups were pretty good too. The first bunch I saw were a little odd, but they had some good titles like “No More Animal Shit in Modern Art.”

The Pharmacy played a few pogo-inducing numbers before settling down to share the main set with Kimya. I was at the back, and a bit miffed to find Ms. Dawson seated below the shoulder level of the crowd. Thankfully she invited everyone to sit on the floor, which we all did. Everyone got great views and the whole set felt like some kind of infant school story-time… with swearing. It reminded me of a Kathryn Williams gig, but faster.

She closed the set with the rather marvellous “The Beer,” have a listen.

Gallery RSS Feed

2005-06-20T05:38:00.000-07:00

I have been using the rather powerful Gallery for a while but only recently activated the RSS feeds on my gallery pages. The main reason was so that I can have any updates to the gallery appear on this front page sidebar. Again, this is done using my little RSS plugin.

Strange Cloud Formations

2005-05-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

Got talking about strange cloud formations recently, having been sent this link, then remembered these spectacular images from a while back.

I’m not sure about the first link, but the second are definately mammatus formations. They’re formed by cold, saturated air dropping back down from a cloud. We’re not used to seeing clouds without flat bottoms, and this, added with some lighting from the side at sunset, it combined to produce such spectacular effects.

A quick image search for mammatus brings in some more examples of varying extremes.

The Sound of Enceladus

2005-05-09T05:35:00.000-07:00

Cassini is still busily collecting data around Saturn; lots of pictures and this audio snippet, an audible representation of electro-magnetic field measurements taken during a flyby of Enceladus.

There are plenty more examples on the University of Iowa “Space Audio” page. Of particular note is this “AKR” recording from the Earth’s magnetosphere, which sounds rather like the jungle at night.

Amateur Mapping in the Guardian

2005-05-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

Interesting to see how the press is picking up the idea of free maps. This article in the Guardian is the latest I’ve seen, following the New Scientist mention a few weeks back. Its good to see the issues of mapping copyrights being aired in the national press like this.

US Air Traffic

2005-04-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

Found this fascinating video of US air traffic over a day. I can’t imagine how much fuel that lot burnt up over the course of the animation.

Found via LawGeek.

Meloe Proscarabaeus

2005-04-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

Found this unusual beetle:

Bigger…

A little research revealed that it is an oil beetle, genus Meloe. I’m not too sure on the species, but the Proscarabaeus is most common in the UK and blue-black, so I’ll plump for that one. Though, according to my invaluable book, it’s a big one.

Bigger…

More Conjoined Grapes

2005-04-08T05:33:00.000-07:00

A quick search on Google revealed that my conjoined grapes are by no means unique.

There’s two more examples here along with some other foodal anomalies.

Space Research and Pretty Pictures

2005-04-07T05:25:00.000-07:00

I know there’s more to space research than pretty pictures, but there do seem to be a lot of them about at the minute. ESA’s Mars Express has snapped this little lot of the northern pole’s ice cap (and a other interesting features.)

Then there’s Cassini, which is still out there, producing some stunning pictures. There’s the Hubble telescope too, which looks like it might last a bit longer still, after a little jiggery-pokery.

Precision and Accuracy

2005-04-07T05:23:00.000-07:00

I was pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of the tracks I was getting out of my GPS unit until the other day.

Then I noticed something odd; the tracks in places follow a very smooth curve, apparently matching the road I was following. At certain points there are glitches, where the track jumps a few metres then carries on in a smooth curve.

The Above image shows the same section of path walked on two separate occasions. Note how the track for the higher resolution data (yellow) deviates from the former track. Also note the sudden re-alignment and the consequent parallel nature of the paths. (Scale of 1m/pixel)

This highlights to me, the difference between precision and accuracy. The precision of GPS units looks impressive, but precision is not the same as accuracy.

Precision is how well defined a value is, for example 3.141593, is precisely defined to the 6th decimal point. This does not mean, however that the value is correct - i.e. it is not necessarily accurate.

Accuracy is a measure of how correct a value is, for example 3.14 ± 0.02. This tells us that there’s no point in quoting a precision of six decimal places (as above) because the remaining four decimal places will almost certainly be wrong.

Relating this back to my GPS example we can see that the unit precisely tracked a curve, but not necessarily the correct curve. The curve looks correct because it precisely follows a neat curve, but it is not accurate because it is the wrong curve.

I’m assuming that the jump occurs when the unit locks to a new satellite, or a building reflects the signal.

Zissou

2005-04-02T05:26:00.000-08:00

Go and see Life Aquatic. It’s brilliant and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

2005-03-31T05:24:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a Garmin Geko 201 GPS unit, which is rather neat. It came with no software, despite the fact that it boasts one of the better trackpoint memory capacities (for the budget models anyway) of 10,000 points. Thankfully there’s a lot of free stuff out there.

Rather thoughtfully Garmin provide the pin-outs for their propritary data connector, so I could rig up a serial cable from an old null modem cable and a matchstick. I downloaded my data to the PC in the GPX format using the handy GPSBabel tool.

Data transfer has not been a problem; there are more than enough tools to do that. The problem has been finding a decent tool to plot the data. For 2D, the best so far is Viking. It uses GTK, so works on the common platforms. The main problem is that it doesn’t accept GPX files, but only files in the GPSPoint format. There is a tool to grab data from Garmin units in this format, GPSPoint, but I had to compile the Windows binary as I couldn’t find a working link to any pre-compiled versions. Get my GPSPoint Windows binary here if you need it.

As far as I can tell, there is no 3D visualisation in Viking, so I’m still searching for a good realtime 3D GPS visualisation tool. It’s good, none-the-less, to be able to see exactly where I’ve been over the past few days. Hopefully I’ll be contributing my data to openstreetmap.org soon, after I’ve done a few more miles.

Conjoined Grapes

2005-02-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

I found a pair of conjoined grapes!

Amateur Huygens Images

2005-01-20T05:27:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned below, I was pleased that the raw image data from the Huygens probe was released so quickley. This has lead to some rather impressive images from amateurs to be produced. This sort of thing shows how useful, and good, the web can be.

Huygens Success

2005-01-19T05:28:00.000-08:00

Well, I’m glad to see that Huygens was so successful. It’s also pleasing to see that all the raw image data has been published so soon. There’s a press conference on Friday too.

Huygens Splodge-down

2005-01-13T05:29:00.000-08:00

Huygens will enter the atmosphere of Titan tomorrow. I’m hoping this won’t be as disappointing as the Beagle “landing.” Data should be first recieved back on Earth at 16.14 CET.

New Zealand Satellite Image

2005-01-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

Found this rather good image of New Zealand. It was imaged from the Space Shuttle back in 2000 using radar topography. It really shows off the active geology of the country, something which impressed me when I was there.

The film’s pretty good too, as is the same sort of image for Australia.

Gallery

2004-12-13T05:32:00.000-08:00

I’ve just moved most of my photos over from Yapig, to the more powerful Gallery. It’s a shame; I liked the simplicity of Yapig, but it doesn’t support nested galleries yet.

Free Windows Software

2004-12-08T05:32:00.000-08:00

Over the years I’ve found quite a few good free programs. I’ve not bought much software since my new installation of XP, and have found most of what I need as either freeware or open source, or both. Here’s my list:

Utilities

Anti-virus
AVG 7, Free edition
Archive / ZIP
IZArc
QuickZip
CD/DVD burning
DeepBurner
CDBurnerXP Pro
Burn at Once - good for quickly burning an ISO
Spyware removal
Spybot Search & Destroy
Multiple entry clipboard utility
ArsClip
Calculator
AnalogX PClcalc - Almost ideal, but not quite; does not parse divides correctly.

Programming

Text editor
Notepad++
C/C++ Development IDE
Dev C++
Scripting
Python - Powerful and object oriented, yet still simple and easy to program.

Internet

FTP
FileZilla
Browser
Mozilla Firefox
Newsgroup binary reader
GrabIt
PC remote control
Ultr@VNC
Web server
Abyss

Multi-Media

Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer - Finally, a lightweight, simple image viewer, once you switch from the awful default skin.
XnView - Good, but slower than the above for fullscreen viewing.
Video player
Media Player Classic
Audio Player
Winamp 5, Free Edition
Audio Encoding / Transcoding
dBpowerAMP Music Converter - Handles MP3, OGG, WMA and more. Simple right-click file explorer interface.

Other

Celestia - Allows you to explore the universe in 3D. Comes as standard with plenty of objects, but additional can be added, including extremely high resolution textures for solar system objects.
NASA WorldWind - Like Celestia, above, but concentrates only on the Earth, fetching data from the web as required to give the highest resolution images available freely. Fantastic. Similar to Google Earth, but open source.

In the beginning…

2004-12-08T05:30:00.000-08:00

Hopefully, I’ll start adding more to this rather blank front page. Most content is in the Photo Gallery, which you’ll need a password for, for most of them. Mail me for it. I just don’t want them public by default.