chrisbekas.com

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PixelMoon

(via coresite.org)

Knowing the latitude and longitude of where you live is probably not everyone’s interest but for those of us with computer guided telescopes those settings can increase accuracy; other than that, hey, it’s cool to know!

So how do you find the lat & long for your location? Easy! if you happen to have a GPS device go to the location and use the GPS to determine the latitude and longitude. If you don’t have one, then you can use something like maporama to get the exact lat & long of any street address in the world. If you live in Australia, Victoria you can also use the land.vic.gov.au site (as well as get a very accurate property map).

Using maporama I got a Lat of -37° xx’ 17″ and 145° xx’ 33″ Long, and using land.vic.gov.au I got the same Lat and 145° xx’ 32″ (only 1 sec difference) not bad for maporama with a worldwide street database!

Related links: John Harrison and the Longitude Problem

The Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer team, or DISR, have released the complete set of images from Titan (no high-res images?). There were 3 DISR cameras onboard Huygens so the images as shown as triplets. Explore the complete set of Huygens raw images. Since there was a failure with one of the 2 channels for transmitting data back to Cassini, we only have 350 images instead of the 700; apparently the command to instruct Cassini to start listening to channel A just wasn’t there (I guess 350 images is better than nothing!)

The onboard microphone has also captured some interesting sounds; expected to make top 40 anytime soon! Another interesting thing about the landing was the fact that the temperature inside Huygens was 25 Celsius despite the -180 outside; I wonder how…

Images will continue to get analysed in the next few days/weeks; the Hyugens blog should also have all the updates.

The Huygens probe survives a fierce entry into Titan’s atmosphere and lands on the surface. The first raw pictures have been returned and all the other science instruments appear to be working successful. Wow! can’t wait for the high-res pictures to come in.

If you’re an astrobiologist, astronomer or simply have a general astronomical curiosity, you’ll be on the edge of your seat on Friday 14th. After 7 years of waiting, millions of miles in transit, the Huygens probe will take the plunge into Titan’s smoggy atmosphere. If it manages to withstand the 14g deceleration and intense heat, the probe will hopefully survive long enough to unveil the mystery of Saturn’s largest moon. As expected, there will be massive coverage from all the media, and NASA TV will be broadcasting live as the data comes in (67 mins delay from Titan). Go Huygens!!!

JPL Cassini-Huygens home | ESA Cassini-Huygens | NASA TV schedule | Huygens descent timeline | Huygens descent animation | Music2Titan

Whilst trolling through the Notes/Domino 6.5.4 fix list database I noticed that annoying full text indexing issue with Adobe PDF files is expected to be fixed in release 6.5.4.

SPR# FBEE4SVURB - Adobe .pdf files were not being full text indexed. This problem has been fixed in 6.0.5 and 6.5.4. This regression was introduced in 6.0.

Is there anything Firefox cant’ do? The SecurePassword Generator extension for Firefox is one of those little things that add a lot of value when you need new passwords (and you’ve exhausted all the names of the characters in Star Trek Voyager). It’s completely customizable, allowing you to generate passwords with letters, numbers, and/or other special characters.