Timepass Na?

Free as a bird

Are you aware of how important is Project Gutenberg? Classics have no borders now. They are all free. My dad told me once that he had to save his weekly allowance to buy a Balzac. Now you can have a computer for 100 bucks and read 30,000 books for free. This is a dream for my dad's generation. So, lets appreciate the value of it. Children in Africa can read Indian, African, European and Chinese classics for free. And we all owe this to free software, GPL and DRM opponents.

So praise it!

Twitter Account

Have we mentioned yet that we have a twitter account and it goes as "HandToNose"?

Great Debates

This is a compilation of debates conducted by the Astrobiology Magazine. Good Stuff.

Pleiades (Messier 45)

Today, we took our first photo in Astrophotograpy with our new telescope. We took the picture of Pleiades a.k.a. Messier Object 45.

Pleiades is consist of 7 blue stars (seven sisters) which are very young. You can clearly see the seven sisters in the picture we took.

Our photo is in a very amateur shape, as it can be seen. We used our 4.5 inch Newtonian telescope with 500 mm focal lenght and simply put our Camera (EOS 350D) to the eyepiece.

Our First Iridium Flare

Yes, at last we bought a decent telescope.

It has an 4.5 inch mirror and 500mm focal length. Being a Newtonian, it is good enough to observe nearly all the planets and nearly all Messier Objects. Even we were able to see the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.

While me and Diadra was out and spying on Jupiter, we saw that Iridium Flare. Certainly not less than -6 magnitude, it was the brightest celestial object on the sky. It was our first flare. There are some websites available which informs about the flares to happen:

http://www.heavens-above.com/

Have fun with flare hunting!

Swine Flu

Yep, I got the Swine Flu. Although nearly recovered as of yesterday, It took some time. I stayed at home for nearly a week.

Back to blogging.