Detailed moon

I've found a new way to take sharp full-face pictures of the moon. With the C8 EdgeHD and f/7 compressor, the whole moon fits on the sensor of the Altair 26C camera. Here you see the moon very close to maximum apparent diameter, in this picture taken last night, with the moon unusually close to the earth.

Jupiter

Here's my first Jupiter picture of the season. Notice how small the Great Red Spot is. At the lower left, you see the satellite Io (I) starting to pass in front of the planet as seen from earth, and its shadow, which had already been on the planet for some time.

This is also my first Jupiter picture taken with the ToupTek 678 camera, which has 2-micron pixels and doesn't need a focal extender ahead of it — the telescope (C8 EdgeHD) works at f/8, and the full field is so large that getting the planet on the sensor is no problem. I then record only a small area of the picture, using SharpCap, and thanks to the USB 3 connection, I can get 60 frames per second. For unclear reasons, at one point I got a much slower USB 2 connection and had to disconnect the camera and retry.

Best 50% of a stack of about 7200 video frames.

Permanent link to this entry

A use for an LLM

I don't think LLMs (the technology that underlies chatbots) are reliable for reasoning, but they should be very good at matching queries to text searches. And Perplexity.ai, the LLM-based search engine, is something I've found a use for.

Very simply, it finds things in this Daily Notebook that Google and Bing don't find. I don't know why, but I can't always retrieve, using Google and Bing, things that I know are here. Perplexity does better.

I type the queries the same way as with any other search engine, starting with site:covingtoninnovations.com to tell it to look just at this site. I'm sure there are more verbose ways to express the query.

I think the reason for the better coverage is mostly that Perplexity is not as geared toward advertising commercial products. Also, applying LLM technology to searches can't hurt.

I don't have an opinion yet about the summaries that Perplexity delivers. But, again, text summarization is an old AI problem to which LLMs ought to be highly applicable. But always check the summary for accuracy; it is only a rough guide.

Permanent link to this entry

The comet retreats

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS C/2023 A3 is now a seventh-magnitude object (hard to see even with binoculars) in the constellation Serpens, but it still looks like a comet, not a blob. Here you see it next to two star clusters, with the star clouds and dark nebulae of the Milky Way faintly visible in the background.

Stack of 9 15-second exposures, Canon 60Da, ISO 800, with Olympus 100/2.8 lens (vintage 1977) at f/4, on iOptron SkyTracker. Usual processing with PixInsight, including spectrophotometric color calibration, gradient removal, and BlurXTerminator. This lens pairs well with BlurXTerminator because its aberrations are small and of a common type.

Permanent link to this entry

Saturn with dark rings

Notice how dark the rings of Saturn are in this picture. They are usually as bright as the ball, and sometimes brighter. But at the moment the sun is shining on them nearly edgewise. To be more precise, the sun is about 2 degrees north of the ring plane, and we are about 5 degrees north of it. (North is up in the picture.)

Taken in rather unsteady air with my 8-inch telescope at f/10 and my new ToupTek 678 camera; stack of the best 50% of about 5000 video frames.

Permanent link to this entry

Moon: Copernicus, Eratosthenes, Apennines

The wide field of the 678 camera also yields impressive pictures of the moon even when the air isn't especially steady. This is a stack of the best 50% of about 2000 video frames.

7 × 7

Today it has been 49 years since Melody and I first met. I brought her flowers today to mark the occasion. And I hereby incorporate by reference all the good things I've said about our meeting and our long life together. Here and here and here are more of the story.

Permanent link to this entry

Life under an unsatisfactory president

Fellow Christians: I know you didn't all vote the same way. I don't want to debate how you should have voted.

But I challenge those of you who voted for Trump to become, now, his most demanding critics. It's your right and your duty.

You don't owe him loyalty. He works for the American people, not the other way around. If you had a role in putting him in office — hiring him for his new job — then it's your job to demand the best of him, insist that he shape up, and make it clear that he got your vote only by the skin of his teeth, and now you want him to do better than he said he was going to.

If you voted for him as the lesser of two evils, then you should have no problem criticizing what is bad about him. He's been elected. You're no longer helping his opponent if you criticize him. You're helping your whole country.

If you think you shouldn't criticize Trump, something is wrong with you. We American voters should always criticize our elected officials, all the time. They work for us, not the other way around. We should always be asking them to do better.

And if you didn't vote for Trump, nonetheless he works for you, too, and, as a voter, you have authority over him, the same authority that voters always have. Use it, or at least don't let it be forgotten.

I want to warn, by the way, about a kind of bad Bible interpretation that I often see. Do not equate our president with some kind of king set over us either by divine right or by sinful secular authority. That's not how a democratic republic works. We are not subjects of the president. Our loyalty is to our country, not to its elected general manager. As Alexander Hamilton put it, "Here, sir, the people govern."

Permanent link to this entry

What it's like to attend an evangelical church during the Trump era

I want to share with my non-Christian friends something important about what it's like to attend a doctrinally conservative (evangelical) church these days.

Contrary to the impression some people will give you, church services are not Trump rallies. Candidates are not mentioned in the services; we have much more important things to do! Where I go, I don't even see campaign stickers on people's cars. Wearing a campaign button to a service would be very bad form. If asked, most of the congregants would probably say that neither candidate is all that good, and you should decide for yourself which is the less bad choice.

I think the church I attend qualifies as "evangelical" as the word was used before it became political. It certainly has that word in the name of its denomination (ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians).

All that I have said is equally applicable to several other churches I know well. I have actually not encountered a church that has replaced Christianity with Trumpery. I have encountered such individuals, and I suppose they must dominate some churches. But not nearly as many as the media seem to think. I wish all journalists would visit normal, healthy churches and see what really goes on there.

I also get the impression that the people who have replaced Christianity with politics are not attending church and perhaps never were. We certainly have had a sad trend of people telling the world that the Christian message is someone's political platform. But it's extraneous. Mature Christians don't make that mistake.

Permanent link to this entry