Slashdot is a news web site for technology and nerds alike that has been active for over two decades.

The site changed ownership a few times. The current owners employed young moderators who were not around when the site was still privately owned and managed by the same team who created it.

One glaring example of the disconnect between the current moderators, and the site's history is the total ignorance on what the icons and logs attached to stories mean.

Here are a few examples from recent months:

Years ago, I wrote about using syslog-ng on OpenWRT for logging.

Times have change, and OpenWRT has evolved. With the current stable version (19.07.3), syslog-ng is no longer the preferred method. Instead, I have found that rsyslog works better. In this article, I describe how to install and configure rsyslog.

The new moon for the month of Shawwal 1441 AH has only been sighted in several countries in Africa.

For example, Mauritania claimed that declaring the end of Ramadan, and the start of Eid Al Fitr was based on multiple confirmed sighting, also claiming that the number of witnesses exceeds 40 people, in various places in the country.

The same thing happened in Senegal, Mali, Cote d'Ivoire, Niger, and Somalia.

Just like Ramadan 2019 Moon Sighting was fraught with false claims of sighting the crescent, which the courts in Saudi Arabia took at face value without basic confirmation against astronomy.

It seems that Ramadan 2020 is also set to suffer from the same faults.

If you look at this screen capture from Stellarium, a free astronomical planetarium program, you will see sunset on Wednesday the 22nd of April 2020, near Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Today, I saw the most bizarre thing.

But first, a backgrounder: here in Southern Ontario, there are two types of day time squirrels: the larger grey squirrel, and the tiny red squirrel. What the latter lacks in size, he makes for it by being very aggressive towards the larger greys, often chasing them off from several backyards at a time. The reds also object to humans being present by chattering in a bird like manner.

So what happened today?

For those of us who do astronomy, whether visually or for astrophotography, polar alignment is a procedure that we are familiar with, and have to do before every observing sessions, unless we have a permanent observatory.

Here is a time lapse sequence of Comet C/2018 N2 (ASSASN).

This comet was discovered by the All-Sky Automated Survey For Supernovae (ASSASN) using software to analyze the images from one night to the next, and detect anything that is not a star.

The sequence was made on October 8th, 2019, between 1:35 am and 2:11 am while the comet was near the Triangulum constellation, and the M33 galaxy.

Today, I released my OnStep Python API on Github. This API allows commands to be issued from any Python 3.x program to an OnStep controlled telescope.

This allows a lot of use cases, for example, testing certain scenarios, or automating certain tasks.

Several examples are provided as starting points on how to write your own programs.

Patches for features, and fixes are welcome.

For this year's Eid Al-Fitr 1440 A.H. (2019 C.E.), the Muslim world had some countries, as well as some masjids in the West, ending the Ramadan fast on Tuesday. In Kitchener/Waterloo, we had the Kitchener mosque, following astronomical calculations, end the fast on Monday, while the Waterloo Masjid, following sighting, ended it on Tuesday.

Seeing the Unseeable

The problem here is that it was astronomically impossible to sight the new moon on Monday, since it is not illuminated at all.

Yesterday, I released ETL-Astro, a set of Python programs that generate astronomical catalogs in a variety of formats from license friendly data source, allowing for incorporation in GPL-licensed products.

The programs can do the following: