ESA Rosetta Has Just Released This Marvelous Video Clip Of 3 Images,18 Minutes Apart, Of A Spectacular

China’s giant alien-hunting telescope is ready

Our alien-hunting game just got a lot stronger with the completion of a huge radio telescope in the Guizhou province of China. It’s called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), and it’s designed to listen for signs of alien life out in the cosmos. The telescope is finished, but the construction was not without human rights controversy.

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What Is The Zone System: A Practical Guide

If you want us to put it in the simplest words possible, the Zone System is a helps us get the right exposure in all our photos, every time, without fail, even in the strangest light settings, and without a trusty matrix meter. It is a magical system conceived of by none other than Ansel Adams himself, along with photographer Fred Archer in the late 1930s. As the father of landscape describes himself, the Zone System is “not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939-40.” These masters of photography created the Zone System to help us expose in tricky lighting situations where the dynamic range is out of whack, or the lighting is fooling your light meter into creating exposures that are too bright or too dark.

The Zone System was originally developed for black and white sheet film, which was the only type used in those days. Sheet film was individually developed on standard exposure papers, but today we have color roll film that can be mass developed on papers with varying exposures. The Zone system is as much applicable to these “modern” methods as they were to the film it was created for, and can even help digital photographers get perfect exposures. And guess what? Digital photographers, the Zone System can work for you too!

Why do you Need the Zone System

Technically you probably don’t. However, for those of you who are exposure perfectionists, the Zone System is extremely effective in measuring different tones and the dynamic range of a frame that you are about to shoot. It helps you make the perfect exposure with just a spot meter to work with. This gives you immense control over what you’re shooting. You don’t just make guesses at what the right exposure might be, or waste film bracketing “just in case”. Thus, you can easily figure out when you require extra lighting, and what kind and amount of lighting that might be, or whether there is need for a fill flash to get the right brightness. It can also help you figure out if you need graduated neutral density filters.

The zone system is highly beneficial in capturing accurate images when the camera is unable to set the exposure to an accurate reading, so that you get to decide what your image will turn out like, and you know exactly how it will look before you make the exposure. 

How does the Zone System Work?

A camera’s metering system measures accurate exposure readings by focusing on the middle grey tones, which is 18% grey. This grey is the average of black and white. So, when you are shooting in a bright area, your camera will try to dim the light by bringing it down to the average and making the image underexposed in the process. Similarly, when you are shooting in a dark area, your camera will try to increase the brightness of the image, making it over-exposed. Understanding this mechanism is crucial to understanding how the zone system can be used.

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How the sun abducted dwarf planets from an alien solar system : porkchop_d_clown || ourspaceisbeautiful.tumblr.com

Explain this to me...

“Quantum cryptography uses the quantum properties of photons to guarantee perfect secrecy. But one of its lesser known limitations is that it only works if Alice and Bob are perfectly aligned so that they can carry out well-defined polarization measurements on the photons as they arrive. Physicists say that Alice and Bob must share the same reference frame. That’s OK if Alice and Bob are in their own ground-based labs, but it’s a problem in many other applications, such as ground-to-satellite communications or even in chip-to-chip communications, because it’s hard to keep chips still over distances of the order of the wavelength of light. Now a group of UK physicists have developed a way of doing quantum cryptography without sharing a reference frame. The trick is to use entangled triplets of photons, so-called qutrits, rather than entangled pairs. This solves the problem by embedding it in an extra abstract dimension, which is independent of space. So, as long as both Alice and Bob know the way in which all these abstract dimensions are related, the third provides a reference against which measurements of the other two can be made. That allows Alice and Bob to make any measurements they need without having to agree ahead of time on a frame of reference. That could be an important advance enabling the widespread use of quantum cryptography.”

Catching Up: Weather is weird... TWWN continues... 80 Meter woes...

-=> Weather is just plain odd around here. We’re supposed to get up to 7 inches of snow, but nothing so far. Here in town it’s actually pretty nice

Out in the country it’s a different story. Not snowing, but 30+ MPH winds are whipping the snow we do have into near blizzard like conditions in some areas. Went down to Stockbridge to my favorite coffee shop, Mud Creek, and if I hadn’t been driving the Jeep I don’t think I would have made it. Was bucking drifts a foot or more deep in some areas, and visibility was down to just a few feet in places.

Problem with the Jeep is I get overconfident. I was bashing along around 40 mph in four wheel drive, and nearly lost it when I nailed a 2 foot deep drift. Wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been driving slow, but at 40 the front end wiped out and I nearly went sideways before I got it straightened out again. Needless to say, I slowed down a bit after that.

So, snow storms today, and by Thursday it’s supposed to be 40 degrees and raining.

Sigh…

Noticed they got the street dug up just down the road from the house here. Another water main break. Must be the fifth one we’ve had in town in the last two months. Feel sorry for the water utility guys. And I stocked up on bottled water just in case…

-=> Work on The World’s Worst Novel continues unabated. I’ve been having way too much fun with this thing. It’s an SF novel in the worst sense of the word, harking back to the old space opera days with ridiculous space battles, paying very little attention to whether or not the ‘science’ bears any relationship to actual physics. It’s also gotten very, very dirty. Well, not by modern standards. Compared to modern fiction it’s actually pretty mild, but for me… I keep wondering where this stuff comes from.

Curiously, I just realized that almost all of the main characters are female. The protagonist is female, her spouse is female, almost all the heads of government are female… Not sure why. Didn’t do it deliberately. 

-=> Amateur Radio stuff… I have, alas, been doing very little of late except listening. I’ve discovered that my Comet vertical antenna is total crap below about 20 meters or so, which is understandable when you look at how the thing is built. Most of the energy going into the thing, especially at lower frequencies, is never getting into the air. Frankly, it’s surprising I can get a decent SWR at all with the thing on the lower bands. I ran some generic calculations and if I got the formulas right (which I probably didn’t) if I put 200 watts into the thing down at 3.8 mHz I’m lucky if I get 20 out of it.

Weather has been so nasty I’ve never even tried to get the dipole up. For one thing, mounting it is going to be a problem. I’m going to have to put up some kind of mast to try to get the center of the thing up to around 35 feet, and then it’s going to have to be configured as an inverted V because there’s nothing I can hook the ends to.

I picked up a Gap Titan multi band vertical that I’m going to give a try. It’s far more efficient than the Comet and even better, I can finally use my big amplifier with it. It’s rated to handle 1,500 watts so I can finally fire up the Ameritron. If it works, that is. Considering Ameritron’s reputation, you never know what’s going to happen. I talked to a guy who used to sell the things and they’d go through every one before they sent it out because they were having a 25% failure rate straight form the factory. I looked it over carefully when I put it together and didn’t see any obvious issues, and it does come up in standby mode, but until I actually try using it, whether it’ll work or not is anyones guess.

From what I’ve been hearing, the Titan has some issues when it comes to tuning it to work on the various bands. One fellow I talked to told me he never could get the thing down to a reasonable SWR on 80 meters. Other people tell me they had no problems at all. So we’ll see. SWR doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve got a massive Palstar auto tuner that can handle up to 2,000 watts output to hang behind the Ameritron.

I really wish now that I’d spent a little bit more and gone for the solid state amplifier rather than the tube based one. The solid state amps are a lot easier to work with. They’re pretty much plug and play, just turn them on, select the band you want, and go. Tube amps are fussy, requiring a lot of fiddling whenever you change bands, even changing frequencies. It’s easy to mess them up and end up blowing a $300 tube. Still, it was almost a grand cheaper than the solid state amp I was looking at, so we’ll see.

Liquid oxygen tank confidence weld complete on VAC

A liquid oxygen tank confidence article for NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, completes final welding on the Vertical Assembly Center at Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

A liquid oxygen tank confidence article for NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, completes final welding on the Vertical Assembly Center at Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Just a typical Saturday in our courtyard calling Ohio using Morse code.