Posted without comment

It's been a long time and I had forgotten why I stopped doing it

Arguing with conservatives I mean...

So against my sober better judgment I went over to Discussionist and made myself a screen name and plunged in, started arguing with the other side.

It's too easy, if you're reasonably good at this stuff and have your facts, rhetoric and snark down pretty well after a while the replies start slowing down and eventually they come to nearly a complete halt.

That's the way it used to play out back in the day when I could find a conservative site that didn't automatically ban liberals. Currentevents was one of my hangouts for while and it got to the point I could post almost anything no matter how inflammatory and not get replies from conservatives. I posted for a while at Reihlworldview too and basically the same thing happened there, conservatives just stop replying to you if you're not nasty and stick to facts, logic and maybe a little snark to lighten things up. There were more sites I went to but those are the two I can remember for sure the names of.

It's kind of fun for a while but it's a bit like pulling the wings off flies, it feels a bit cruel to taunt people who can't really fight back. I guess that attitude is why I'm a liberal and not a conservative, they'd never say something like that.

Detect known exoplanet with a DSLR and telephoto lens

Here's some science you can try at home, kids!

It's amazing what you can do with enough raw computer power and extremely modest instruments.

http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/6526774/page/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/fpart/1#Post6527906

My target was HD189733b, which seems to be one of the easier transits to capture. It is also right next to M27, making it easy to find. I used the ETD (exoplanet transit database) site to determine transit times for my location. For my location, WV, there was a transit starting at 3:45am local time, ending at 5:35am local time on May 13th.

I used an unmodified Canon t3i and a Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 telephoto lens stepped with a 72-52 step down ring to about f/5.7. I took 15 second exposures every 30 seconds at iso200.

I then loaded 272 canon raw files into iris to register and align the images, and then used the automatic photometry tool in iris to generate the raw data. I used 4 reference stars on plus the HD189733 target star. I then ran 5 reference stars for a baseline. Here are the resulting light curve plots.

Meteorite trail photos

I've been going through my sky shots that I took for my contest entry and so far I've found two meteorite trails out of maybe five percent of the total shots I've looked at so far..

Nothing spectacular but they are kind of hard to get...