An Artificial Star is a point source of light. It is used to simulate a real star indoors, so you can collimate your telescope's optics indoors and/or during daylight.
Commercial artificial stars, such as this Hubble Optics one, cost $25 or more, and their main feature is a small plate that has precision holes of 50 micron up to 250 microns.
You can make your own artificial star, which is very close in function to the commercial ones.
You can watch this short 4 minute video on how I did it, and read on for detailed instructions.
If you have been experiencing audio skips or stuttering on a Raspberry Pi, then I may have a solution for you.
For background, I use an older Raspberry Pi as an audio player, using mpd as an audio server, MPD Remote on my Android Phone, and Sonata on my Xubuntu Laptop.
It was working fine for a long time, but then it started skipping audio every 10 or 20 seconds, regularly.
Last Monday, I gave a talk at the KWLUG on Microcontrollers and The Internet of Things (IoT).
It covered topics such as: how microcontrollers are different from 'computers', the Arduino and Arduino IDE, the ESP8266 and ESP32 WiFi enabled microcontrollers, and using MicroPython on them. Also covered the very low cost STM32 ARM Cortex microcontroller.
After nine months of modifying the OnStep open source telescope controller to run on the cheap STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, it is time to reap the fruits of this long labour: I have an OnStep powered mount ...
What happens when aboriginal people who are living a hunter/gatherer or farmer life style come face to face with 20th century technology and civilization too quickly? Their minds could not fathom the rest of earth's human civilization gradual progression over the past 5,000 or so years.
The people of Tanna island of Vanuatu suddenly woke up during World War II to the U.S. Navy establishing airfields, forward bases, and housing close to 250,000 people, with all the necessary support services, including telephone and cinemas.
Over the winter, I worked with Howard Dutton, the author of OnStep Telescope Controller, to make it work with the low cost STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers. This involved writing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), so adding different architectures in the future would not be too hard, as it was.
On Friday 11th of May, 2018, I gave the second part of my presentation on Islamic Astronomy's Legacy in Arabic Origin Of Modern Star Names. This was for the KW RASC.
Yesterday, I gave a talk for the KWLUG on Incremental Backup For Linux. This is targeted towards home networks or small businesses using Linux, although I touched a bit on some enterprise considerations and technologies.
The solution I use relies on the dump and restore utilities for the ext4 filesystem, along with rsync from laptops.
The slides are attached below, as PDF. The meeting was recorded, and the video should appear here shortly.
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