Saturn

I tried for the 1st time Saturn this night. There were many clouds and the seeing was very bad, but I managed to get a small 20sec .avi from Saturn.
Not bad for the 1st time.
The 1:6 focuser pays off, much better/easier focusing than before.

Sayo Kerrie

Sayo Kerrie (Indonesian meal-soup)
250 gr. soup-beef (small pieces)
2 onions
200 gr. green beans
4 small potatoes
2 toes of garlic, pressed
2 teaspoons sambal oelek
4 teaspoons of fresh ginger
2 teaspoons koenjit (kurkuma)
2 teaspoons ketoembar (coriander)
1 teaspoon djintan (cumin)
1 teaspoon trassi (shrimp paste)
2 salam leaves
2 teaspoons of brown sugar
2 teaspoons of kerrie
1 broth block (bouillonblok)

Clean the onions, cut 1 in 4 pieces and the other one in snippets. Take a pan, fill up with 3/4 ltr. water, the beef, the onion in 4 parts and the broth block. Put the fire low and let the beef draw for 1 hour. In the meantime, make with a mortar a paste of onion snippets, garlic, sambal, ginger, koenjit, ketoembar, djintan and trassi. Fry this paste in a soup-pan in a little bit of butter. Add the broth and the beef. Add sugar, kerrie and salam leaves. Let everything bubble shortly and put the fire low. Peel the potatoes and cut them in small blocks. Clean the beans and cut them in half. Add the potatoes first and cook for approx. 8 min. Add the beans and cook for 15-20min until they are ready. Serve with white rice.

Not so nice xmas

.....Just before Christmas my father in law suddenly died unexpected. He was already recovering very well from an illness he had one year ago............So not a very nice Christmas and not a happy new year for us.

Mars in opposition

Last night, Mars was in opposition. That means that it is closest to earth. You see it also, because the picture of yesterday below, is slightly smaller (and the scale is the same).
Again, with the Philips toucam webcam and the telescope, I started imaging. The seeing was slightly worse then yesterday evening.
Here is the best picture I took, selected from 15 4min movies. It is quite detailed.
It was very cold this night, at the end the whole telescope had even Ice on it. But the result was worth the cold!

Mars again revisted

After learning many things during the night of saturday-sunday I decided to redo Mars again. This time with 1/100 shutter fixed and with the help of the free Qfocus program. The enlarged screen enabled better focusing. See the result. Much better picture and much more detail, the polar cap is much more defined now.

The Moon

The moon was very bright tonight, so I decided to photograph it with the webcam and an 2x barlow lens.

Control panels ready!

After 2 weeks of testing 2 new control systems are ready for transport. It was a lot of work, but now they are working 100% ok.
In a few months time we will start the kiln together with these panels.









These panels are one of the last ones built by our chief-electrician before he will retire, and, judging from this picture, he's very happy about that (the retirement).

Mars revisited

After learning many things the previous monday I decided to redo Mars again. I started later now with imaging, because Mars is then higher on the horizon, which enables a better seeing. I could use 10fps with 1/100 shutter imaging iso 1/250 shutter. You immediately see it on the sharpness of the pictures.
This image was the best I took of in total 15 separate imaging stacks. This particular one I took at 01:13 on 16 december. The 243 best images from a total stack of 1501 ones were stacked using registax. I also decided to make a small movie of all the best images I took.
These are pictures from 23:34h, 01:13h, 01:19h, 01:34 and 01:57 hours time. Click on the picture to see Mars rotate!

Birth of the autoguiding telescope

And here it is: my 200m F5 newton with 90mmF10 refractor for autoguiding. Now I can start thinking about exposure times >2min for really faint deepsky objects. Tonight will be clear, I'm very curious how long exposures I can take now before background light comes in.

For the 1st time: Planet Mars webcam astrophoto

This is the 1st time I tried to photograph a planet. In this case Mars. It is standing very close to Earth now. I made this picture using a Philips ToUcam webcam PCVC740K ("the egg") which I bought almost 7 years ago when webcamming was a hype. I never knew back then that this particular webcam is one of the most sought-after and suitable ones for astrophotography. This Philips webcam has a CCD sensor (and not a CMOS, like with many other webcams nowadays, which is 10x less light-sensitive). I put this webcam on my 200mm newton telescope with 1000mm focal length. By using a so-called 2x "barlow" (teleconvertor) I doubled the focal length to 2000mm. I made a 4 minute .AVI movie with 10fps, 1/250 shutter and the gain on 25%.
This particular picture of Mars is a composition of 34 images from a 4 minute AVI movie I made (so 34 good pictures out of 2400). The reason only 34 images were good is mainly caused by many turbulence in the atmosphere. I stacked the good pictures using registax (free software) and post-processed with Photoshop. The result is not bad for the 1st time. The small circle on the top is the Hellas region, the black line pointing down is Syrtis major.

Old 8-bit Atari planetary program

Nowadays I use the superb program cartes du ciel. But long time ago when I had my 8-bit Atari 600XL computer. I had to use the Atari Planetarium.
After a long search on the internet I was able to download Atari800Win software emulator that runs on a PC. Then I was also able to download the original disk-images, 2 pieces, because it was on 2 5.25" floppies. And got the whole thing running again!!!
Nice, it also works >year 2000!

Fine small car: Toyota Starlet 1.3EFi

Normally, the car workshop where I always go to always lends me this bloody Suzuki Alto, but yesterday, he gave me something else: a Toyota starlet 1.3 with the 12-valve EFi engine that was also in the older type Corolla's. This is a very nice and fast car for its size. I never drove a small car like this, with this kind of "quality" feeling. You really feel when you're driving, that it is a reliable Toyota. It already has 166.000km on the clock, but will go a lot further if given proper maintenance.
If my bassguitar+amplifiers would fit into this car, this would be the one, but I think they will not fit. Also the handling at speed is quite good, as well as the modern brakes. It corners quite quickly. Rating it I would give this car a 8.0, and the Suzuki alto a 6-.

Christmas again!

Sinterklaas is back to Spain again, so now it's time for Chrismas. The shops are full with all kinds of decoration.....







We always had our place decorated in blue with Christmas, but this time Marion decided it had to be something else: red.

Pasta with spinach and egg

Pasta with Spinach and egg

350gr penne pasta (or other pasta)
600gr spinach a la creme (frozen)
10 cherry tomatoes, cut in 4 pieces each
4 parts of cervelat sausage (100gr total)
4 eggs

This is a nice and quick dish!

Cook the pasta according the instructions on the packet, al dente in a lot of water with salt.
Let the pasta leak free of water.
Prepare the spinach according the instructions on the packet.
Put the pasta with tomatoes in a ovendish (with butter).
Add the spinach and put the sausage on it.
Make holes in the slices of sausage with the back of a spoon.
Put in each hole one egg.
Put the dish in a preheated oven (200C) for 15min.

Testing control panels

I'm testing 2 control brand new control systems each consisting of a computer- and controlpanel and a thyristorpanel for controlling high temperature sintering kilns.







Here is a detail view of a computer- and controlpanel with on the left side the VME process control computer system and on the right various relays, power supplies and other switching gear.

Autumn walk in the southern woods

This weekend we made a nice walk in the woods south of Reusel, very close to the Belgian border. It is an area where a lot of smuggling had taken place in the 50-60's.......





In the woods you see a few of those border-marking poles. It marks the border between the Netherlands and Belgium.

Calibrating steel hardening furnaces

Last week I calibrated temperature measurements inside some steel hardening furnaces.........

BIG carnaval shop

This year we decided to go to a real big carnavalshop for some nice outfits. After googling on the internet we quickly found "Der Carnevalswiert" in Heerlen. It was really nice, and the biggest carnaval shop I ever saw in my life. The best thing is that they have all outfits in all sizes, you can even dress up the whole familiy the same way, because many outfits also have a "children" version.

At last, a clear night after many clouded ones

Here's the 17P/Holmes comet, it is passing the earth now and is very big. It just fits my eos400d sensor. The bright star is Mirfak in the constellation Perseus.






And M42 and M43, the Orion nebula (even visible to the naked eye on clear nights). It is a cloud with many very young stars 1600 lightyears distance from us.

Testing the new Osciloscope

The good old Tektronix TDS5032B oscilloscope I used for years is going out of production, and will be replaced by the new DPO4000. Had an enormous amount of compatibility problems, and a lot of misreadings......but it is starting to work better step-by-step....

Penne/Rigatoni with wild boar salami

I found a very good recipe in Jamie Olivers cookbook, it is fresh, quick and tastes great. I included it here without any modification, because it is really Jamies recipe:

This is a great dish for when you've got mates coming round as it's easy to make and looks fantastic. The wild boar salami tastes great, and as well as cooking with it you can use it in sandwiches.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas 5.

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan, and fry half the salami until quite crisp. Add the onion and garlic and cook slowly until the onion is soft. Add the balsamic vinegar, chopped tomatoes, crème fraîche and basil. Mix together, season to taste, and simmer for a few minutes.

Cook the rigatoni according to the packet instructions until 'al dente'. Drain, and drizzle over a little olive oil and seasoning. Tip into a baking dish and pour over the sauce.

Lay the mozzarella over the top with the rest of the salami. Bake in the preheated oven for 25 minutes until golden. Delicious.

• a good glug of extra virgin olive oil
• ½ a wild boar salami, sliced (or use Napoli salami)
• 1 red onion, peeled and sliced
• 1 clove garlic, peeled and sliced
• 4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 400g tin chopped tomatoes
• 3 tablespoons crème fraîche
• a large bunch of fresh basil, leaves picked and chopped
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 300g rigatoni
• a ball of buffalo mozzarella, sliced

Are you gonna go my way

This is one of the first rehearsals with our new singer: Lieveken. Here we are rehearsing "Are you gonna go my way". It is the Tom Jones/Lenny Kravitz version...

The VFR is clean again!

After riding it in very bad weather the last weeks my VFR was very very dirty. It was a lot of work and took the whole saturdayafternoon, but it is clean again................Next week it will start to freeze again (icy roads risk) and then I will put it in the shed for its wintersleep....

At last: M33 Triangle nebula

At last, after a very long search I found the M33/NGC598 (spiral galaxy) yesterday. It is also called the triangle nebula, magn. 5.7, in Triangulum, under Andromeda. It is 3.000.000 lightyears away from us. From yellow star Beta Andromeda up to M31 is the same distance as towards M33, but then you have to go down. This is the most far away deepsky object that is visible with the naked eye. It was -very faintly- visible at 40x. But it has to be very dark, which is not the case in my light-polluted backyard.This is how I found it: Put scope on tip of the triangle (alpha Triangulum), on the sides there are 2 lines with 2 stars, they point where to go, then to small triangle (with star sao74921), it points to the correct direction, then slightly bigger triangle (star HR485) and then via the line (with star HD10133) towards M33, note that it has another triangle (with star HD9444) nearby. It was only very faintly visible on 40x in the 200mm F/5 newton. It will definately not be visible in the 90mmF10 refractor. But I know now how to find it, so next time I will make some pictures.

Many clouds so working with the quick peek scope

The last weeks there are many clouds in the evening, and also a big chance for rain. So carrying in/out the big 200mm Newton is a lot of work. I decided to put the 90mm F10 guidescope on my Gitzo photo mount, and it works perfectly. This evening, with even many clouds, was a fruitful night out. I saw M31 (andromeda nebula), M45 (pleiades), comet 17P/holmes, mars, M29 (open star cluster in cygnus), M57 (planetary nebula in Lyra, very very faint), m43 (large nebula in Orion), as well as the Alcor/Mizar double star in Ursa Major (big bear) and Beta Cygni, a double star in Cygnus (swan). So that's not bad for a refractor evening. Makes me think back of the times when I was young and was out there with the borrowed JWG 60mm telescope of my nephew. With this 90mm refractor I can see a lot more however, but not as much as with the 200mm Newton.

Walking on the Loonse and Drunense Dunes

It was a nice day for a walk, we haven't been a while to the "dunes", so that's where we decided to go.






It is called "the dunes" here because there's a lot of sand, it is very desolate and more like a desert....... but still some trees manage to survive over here..










This is how it's like in the 'dunes'......since many people walk here with their dogs you see a lot of footsteps............
Look at the trees in the back, you only see the top of the tree sticking out of the sand, the rest of the tree is below....

Transformer ready

And, finally, the 480V 380kW transformer from the USA (built in 1989) has been modified for 400V so we can use it in Poland. It took a long time before it was shipped from the USA to us, but at least it is ready and working still quite well for such an old thing!

Comet 17P/Holmes outburst

Yesterday evening I was searching for NGC1491, but at a sudden moment I caught a "strange" nebula in my 10x50 binoculars. I aimed the scope and saw this (strange) picture. After first realizing it was something special I found on the internet that it is comet 17P/Holmes.
17P/Holmes is a periodic comet in our solar system. It has been discovered by the British amateur astronomer Edwin Holmes on 6 november 1892. End of October 2007 this comet had a "outburst". It's lightstrength (magnitude) changed in a few hours from magnitude 17 (very faint) to magitude 2 (well visible to the naked eye). This is an increase of 400.000x in visibility.
The comet is still visible to the naked eve, and it looks like this in 10x50 binoculars. If you wish to see it yourself use the following picture:

Look for a bright "star" in the east, in the consellation Perseus. It is sitting left of the large cluster of stars in Perseus.

It's up and running again

The kiln is up and running again with its new computer system and the new cpu. Here it is firing its first load of real products again.






And here you see a detail of the upgraded control computer. The only thing that broke down was the original PC, so we needed to replace it. The only thing they had was an old laptop, but the whole thing is running ok now.

Working at the computer.....

Here me and Keith are installing new software and all system settings in the new computer.
It's all going well, the kiln did its first testrun.

Back to Ruabon!

This is the 737 that flew me to Manchester, but first.....








I had a nice cookie&cream Herbalife shake, ready to get going!!









And then with a real British taxi (the best accessable in the world) to Broughton.

Trip to Ruabon UK

Next week I have to work again in Ruabon UK.............so hopefully I get the chance to shoot some nice pictures over there again....

Telescopes

A telescope is never big, long or wide enough...............

New oil in the VFR!

The last days my VFR was protesting a little bit, so I put in new (synthetic) oil and a filter. Always very nice, you really feel the bike running better and more smoothly. Even this morning when it was very cold (only few degr.), smoothly running from the start!

M57 Planetary nebula

Focusing is much easier now with a self-made Hartmann mask (with 3 triangles).
See the result of better collimation and focusing. With only 20min I have the same result as previous 60min exposures.
Also the "coma" abberation is much less compared with the previous exposures I took from M57. It was a lot of work, but the re-adjusting of the whole telescope paid off.

Very faint, at 4-o-clock position from the nebula, 2-3 rings further is very faintly visible IC1296, a barred spiral galaxy of 15.3 magnitude, 300 million lightyears away from us.

Hornets nest.......

Yesterday our central heating in the house stopped............after looking inside I discovered many of those big mean hornets! I once got stung by one of those, compared to that a wasp-sting is like a mosquito bite........ I put on all my motorcycle gear to have some leather protection and removed about 20 of those hornets. But when I listened carefully I hear many more of these things inside the wall.
The wasp removal expert that had a look but couldn't reach it from the outside, so I arranged a ladder and this afternoon he will try again to fume them out........
At least our heater is running again (max. temperature guard was broken).
I'm curious what will come out of the hornets nest when the wasp removal guy comes back.........

To be continued............

Hay fever.........

Our neighbors got married! Their friends however blocked all entrances to their house with big packs of hay so they couldn't go in........

Walking the 14 lakes route

Today we walked the 14-lakes route around all 14 lakes of "The Oisterwijkse vennen".
Here's a male duck.......





We had lunch at the Nature Monuments information office. Of course with a nice herbalife shake!






Because it is autumn, we saw many of these......Here are a few "tondels".

"Back to Business" event in Papendal

The event is almost starting, my sister is trying to take a picture, but our whole team is focused on the big screen....










David Heber is starting his presentation about improving nutrition and the benefits of herbalife.






Our team with Torsten and Petra.







And at the end we were treated a presentation by Alan Lorenz. Very nice and motivating presentation. Also very funny, we laughed a lot.

In total: a super day.