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Showing posts from July, 2012

Stacking in Astronomy

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Stacking, as the name suggests, is the process of putting one picture on top of another. there might be varied motives behind why one would do this. In the context of astronomy and astro-photography, stacking is done in-order to reduce the noise in the picture and achieve the actual diffraction limited resolution images and to negate the effects of the atmosphere.  As is known, the earth's atmosphere is very turbulent and an unknown/un-noticed effect is that light bends when it passes through this turbulent atmosphere. while it might not be obvious naked eye, the effect of a turbulent atmosphere is quite obvious when you look at a planet or a star through a telescope. Here you can see an example of the effect of of turbulence on pictures of the moon.                                            -   source  (i didnt ask for permission though) .    As you can clearly see, these pictures are not consistent with each other.  You can read up this article on  Astronomical Se

a rocket launch!

3, 2, 1 and Blast Off! Tons of metal tear through the skies, moving up towards the heavens on a pillar of smoke. I dont know if you realize it but there is incredible beauty with which that rocket embarks on it's journey to outer space. during the couple of minutes it takes for the rocket to climb to outer space and deploy the shuttle or satellite, i feel joy, happiness, i see beauty and most of all, i feel alive. and all this from watching a live web telecast. i think i'll have a heart attack if i ever see a launch with my own eyes.  i had come upon a link last summer to watch the live webcast of the Space Shuttle Atlantis's last journey. For 5 hours that day i had shut my windows, locked my door, put the speakers on full and was looking at a motionless screen for 3 hours, looking at the pre-launch tests and reports on previous shuttle launches and interviews from astronauts. and finally, i got to watch 2 minutes of sheer awesomeness as the shuttle lifted off. 2 min

Why Linux is awesome!

Well, im not a windows hypocrite. Or atleast im not still one. And i've been procrastinating from doing many things on windows. I've been putting off learning python though i have v2.7 installed on windows, i've been putting off learning latek though i have texlive installed and well the list goes on for quite a while, though this has been one of the most productive summers of all time. But everything changed today. I woke up at 6 in the morning, even before the alarm rang. And having read this  article  on minimalism, i had started cleaning my hard drive of all the crap i had downloaded* and i eventually had enough space and the right number of partitions to install ubuntu. I already had a bootable pendrive**, using which i can run ubuntu and then install it on my comp. so, the installation is done, and not even a day has passed, i have configured all the settings like proxy, my dual monitor settings, downloaded all of the updates in 1 hour (which literally took me

Collecting Data from the Radio Telescope

So, continuing from the previous part - Building a Radio Telescope, this post will cover the data collection and analysis part of my project. BTW, this post will be very intensive in terms of technical language used. So, be warned. But i suggest you read through it anyway ... There are surely a lot of different ways to go about saving data from a radio antenna and use analyse the data on a computer but well, i couldnt find them. And the method of data collection mentioned  here ,  where they use a modulator and down convert the original signal to the range of Hz and feed this signal into the audio jack of a computer. And using the relevant   Sky Pipe   soft ware, you can analyse this signal for radio bursts from the sun and signals from jupiter. You can save this data from the program onto .png files or .txt files, archives of saved data which are available  here But, i don't think that this is an efficient way to save and analyse this data. So, i suggest another method, whi

Posting your Bookmarks onto a webpage.

Well, a while back i saw a professor's website displaying his bookmarks and interests and i've been wanting to do that for quite a while now. I regularly use bookmarks and i personally think that sharing bookmarks is one of the easiest ways to share and discuss interesting websites, pages and posts. So, here's how-to.  Firstly, you should have bookmarks.  Now export these bookmarks (on whichever browser) and save them as a .html or a .htm file.  Open this saved file by double clicking on it in some browser After having opened this page, in which you will see your bookmarks, right click and check for page source, which will be the HTML code pertaining to this .html file.  Copy this HTML code.  Now create a new post, a page or whatever on a site where you want to upload your bookmarks to. Instead of the usual text editor, use the HTML editor and copy the previously mentioned HTML code (pertaining to the bookmarks) here.  Save the page and viola, you have a page w