In Poland again!

I'm back in Skierniewice, this is the entrance to the factory. Full with plants, to show how 'green' we are over here.....

Tonight Pawel will take us (chinese guy and me) to a real good Polish restaurant, this will be fun!

Composition of astronomy pictures

This is a composition of pictures I took through the telescope since August 2007. This was my first half year of astrophotography, and there is much more to come!

What a pity!

M106, NGC4217 and NGC4284

There was a very bright almost full moon last night. But I decided to go "deepsky" anyway because I wanted to test my UHC-s filter.
5 min ISO800 exposures (autoguided) were much too long: full blue picture. I went back to 2min autoguided, this was more or less acceptable, but at the end still too long: next time with this moon 1min is max at ISO800.

Visible on the right is M106, a spiral galaxy. Also NGC4284 is very faintly visible. On the left is NGC4217.


With photoshop I was able to filter some moonlight out, but still too much.


All exposures were 24x2min ISO800 autoguided

New picture of The One

New office

Here I'm very hard at work...........

And here I'm having my company obligatory daily 12-o-clock "powernap".

The One rehearsal

Here's Eric playing the drums and singing.........

And Lieveken playing the drums too!




















Rens and Lieveken singing!

















And Patrick, playing solo guitar.




















"Tiet vur un pafke!"

New location of our company (again)

We moved to another building again with our department, this is an overview of our office with Pieters tokina lens






Kars is afraid that he cannot see it anymore, so he decided to use 4 widescreen monitors from now on.






And we have a nice production hall in the back that we can use for testing equipment and other stuff. It even has a big crane for lifting equipment.





Oops, Pieter caught me. (Fred has no time, he is very busy with his work).

M51 revisited

This night we had (again) many thin clouds and fog came up. I was still able to redo M51 again: This time I could make 9 5min exposures at ISO800.

The result is slightly better than the previous one.

Tear- and waterproof map for our trip to Wales

For our trip to Wales I found a very nice map of the UK, it is:



tear












And waterproof (here they keep it under water)









And it easily fits into the tankbag!

So maps: arranged (no need to buy the bulky ones at the local gas-stations with the big cartons you always have to rip off!)

See http://www.thebestrides.biz/

M51 under difficult conditions: clouds-clouds-clouds

After pimping my scope over the last months with the many cloudy nights I really had to know if my system was working as it should.

This was the 1st night out with full computer control on my scope, it can now automatically go to any object you wish to see, in seconds. Futhermore, it has been fitted with a guidescope that enables longer exposures than 1min. Because of many light from our village I also had to add a filter that filters this light out.

After setting up the scope, aligning and focusing I was ready to take exposures, but then the clouds came. I was able to make 3 5min ISO800 exposures though, during the 4th rain started to fall, so the whole thing had to go inside very quickly. There were many clouds so you also see them a little bit on the picture.

The result was not bad for the 1st time. Here you see M51, it is a spiral galaxy that is "eating" its neighbor galaxy, NGC5195. They are 37,000,000 lightyears distance from us.

The picture is not very good because of the difficult weather conditions, but the computer guiding of the scope works perfect. You can click now on an object on the computer screen, and the scope will go there automatically. Furthermore the autoguiding with the extra telescope also works very good. In total the system test was ok, now I have to wait for the next really clear night to test long exposures.

Saturn re-edited with photoshop

After viewing my Saturn picture many times I thought there were still many details in the picture that could be improved with the proper postprocessing.

After playing with photoshop I came up with the following final picture of Saturn. The Cassini division is clearly visible now in the rings of Saturn.

The One: Open your eyes

New website of our band: The One

See the following link:
http://coverbandtheone.come2me.nl/

Saturn revisited

For the first time I could use my IR/UV block and IR pass filters. I made 2400sec exposures with the IR/UV block filter (RGB frames) and the IR pass filter (luminance frames). From each avi I stacked 800 of the best frames, totalling into a 80sec RGB and 80sec IR picture. I combined both pictures with photoshop into the following picture. The result is a lot better than my previous attempts without the filters. By using a 2x barlow the effective focal length in these exposures was 2000mm.



(my previous attempt without using filters, 3rd january 2008)






(my 1st attempt on saturn 31th december 2007)

Nothing better than a nice gig with the band

Me Groovin!










The One!








Eric!








Rens and Lieveken.








The bar was full!








Mr. Adams

Funny Chinese picture: these guys are in a rush

This picture was shot by one of the guys that is working in our Chinese factory in Qingxi near the highway.....See the bored guy that is sitting locked in his car!

Nice gig with our band: The One

Yesterday afternoon we had our first gig at "Kerkzicht" in Diessen with our new singer. All went very well.
I hope to post some pictures in the coming days.

For our next gigs: check http://www.youtube.com/user/patrickduis

Cloudy nights: so scope pimping time

Most nights are cloudy, so there's not much to be seen with the telescope, so it's scope pimping time.
I decided to turn my heq5 pro mount into a real goto mount with the EQDIR interface. After installing it I can star-align my mount, together with Cartes du Ciel planetary software in such a way that I can easily select any object in CdC and the scope will automatically slew to that object. This will enable me to see many objects in 1 night without having the fuss off starhopping from 1 object to another. Which is in turn nice to do, but takes a lot of time, and since the nights are getting shorter it makes sense to focus on using the "dark time" more efficiently. We'll see what happens when the EQDIR interface arrives from the USA.......

End of March snow?

This morning there was a few centimeters of snow in our garden, very unusual for March......On the news was that at 8.30hrs there was an 888km traffic jam, not the all time high, but second best ever in Netherlands.





On the way to my work I shot this nice picture while driving through the woods.

Astronomy picture of the day

I found a very nice site each day has a different very nice picture of an astronomy object.

Look at:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

.......

Back from Pila

Here we are flying in an Alenia ATR72 turboprop from Poznan to Warsaw......











And from Warsaw with an Embraer jet airplane to Amsterdam. Here we are flying towards the west, where the sun is setting on the horizon.
This airplane had a lot of room in the economy class, very special for such a small plane.

Final testing

Here one of the kilns is running a cooling test.

Almost ready!

This is the inside of one of the kilns. You see the ceramic heating elements that heat up the kiln. Each element can heat with a maximum current of 90A and 8kW. This enables us to heat the kiln up to about 1300 degr. Centigrade......






And this is the control room. On the right is the computer that controls the kiln I put over here last year. On the left are the 2 new ones....

Pila report 2

Yesterday we had dinner in the "Orange Piano" where they serve the famous Polish "Zurek" soup in a very nice piece of bread......
I had many times "Zurek" in Polish restaurants, but this was one of the best ever....






And this morning when I opened the curtains of my hotelroom I saw a very nice sunrise.......
It became a very nice day today, with a lot of sunshine! (Maybe spring has started over here......)

Pila report

Today is Sunday, we went to the factory for some checks on both kilns. After that we took a nice walk through Pila because it was nice and sunny.
Here's one of the churches.




The people over here paint their houses in very nice colours.......

Both kilns are already running burnout curve

It is all going quite well over here in Pila. Today we burned both kilns out and tomorrow we are going to test with a dummy load of products.







One of the kilns had a broken UPS. After checking it thoroughly I found that one solder spot of the main relay was damaged.
I soldered a separate wire to the connection points, and the UPS started working ok again!

Back in Pila again.....

So: I'm back in Pila again for starting 2 new kilns.
The trip was long and boring: from Amsterdam to Warsaw in 2 hours time, then 5 hours waiting in some kind of -shithole- and then in 1 hours time back from Warsaw to Poznan. From there with taxi to Pila.

The weather was very nice though, see the picture......