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.