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!