Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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) .  ...

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...

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 m...

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...

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, ...

A Project i've been putting off for quite a while is to try and build a Radio Telescope. I've been reading up about Radio Telescopes for about 2 years but i could never get my ass moving to start building one. And well, i've finally started working on one. But firstly, let me tell you what Radio Astronomy is. The  Wiki  article is pretty detailed but basically, radio astronomy is observing the skies and studying the energy earth receives in the radio spectrum. I didnt say 'observing the night skies' because radio waves can be detected day or night, unlike in visible astronomy where the sun ruins the day time observations. Listing out the process of Radio Astronomy - Radio Sources - which emit energy in the radio spectrum. Receivers - which are able to pick up these signals. Data Analysis - for you to be able to infer something about the sources from this data.  Radio Sources - The emissions from Sun, Jupiter, The Galactic Disc and a couple of cl...

In an attempt to upgrade all the systems in out computer labs to Ubuntu 12.04, we ran into a couple of problems. Inorder to be able to connect to the central department server, the systems had to have NIS and NFS installed and configured on each of the systems. This way, students would be able to login onto anyone of the systems and still be able to access their files(no matter which system it is). So, after having installed Ubuntu 12.04, and having done the usual system upgrades after configuring the system proxy (yes, we have proxy in our college, kind of makes our life difficult when we're trying to upgrade on different versions of Linux), we move on to looking up Ubuntu Manuals and start looking for setup and configuration manuals of NIS and NFS. And well, the good thing about Ubuntu is that there are a looot of installation manuals, and the best ones we found are   Ubuntu help for installing NIS   and   Ubuntu help for installing NFS . Along with installation, ...

(this is how a lot of my blog posts will start atleast from now on. with a question!) (i think it will get you involved and make you think!)(i think!) So, how many of you travel by buses, local trains or share-autos regularly? or atleast, if you arent living in a metro and if you dont have the misery of having to travel by buses/local trains for an hour or more to reach home, i suppose you do travel by buses or trains-fairly regularly like once in a month or so-to other cities for varied purposes (personal or business) so, in these cases, have you ever talked to the another person? someone sitting next to you? someone of the same or opposite gender? someone who looks as bored as you are? im being serious! almost all of these transits will take longer than an hour, and 1 hour is a looot of time, believe me! personally, if i have an hour of time between home and college, i would read, listen to songs, chit chat with people around me. But lately, i have noticed that people, the ge...

Who is the most important person in a someone's life? his parents? his best friends? his Girlfriend / Boyfriend? or his soulmate? well after what i've seen, the one thing i realised is that the most important person in any person's life is The Critic. Yes, it is exactly what it means, the most important person in your life is the person who keeps telling you to improve and provides you with ways to improve, the one who keeps a watch on you and is mature enough to judge whether or not if what you're doing is right or if it's wrong! A person whose judgement you can trust and the gives you the wisest of choice! Not many people realise this. There is a critic in everyone's lives but not everyone is open to criticism. people are afraid! they dont want to be told that the're not doing well enough, they dont want to be told that they have scope to improve, they dont want to be told the right and wrong in their doings. and so, they shun away the critics...

What do you think is the most preached thing in the world? Excerpts from the Bible? the Qurey? the Bhagavadgita? Nope! There are a lot of people who arent religious and there are a lot of them who aren't adult enough to understand these religious texts. but still, they've all been told one thing for sure. they've all been preached that - " the best thing to do after you fall down is pick yourselves up, dust yourselves off and move on" am i lying? isnt this true? you must've been preached or must've preached this to someone or the other in your life, haven't you? (if you haven't, then dude you seriously need to do something crazy after reading this, something adventurous, something new) and well, this isn't true. atleast a part of it isnt. People think that the only thing they can do after they falldown is to just get  up, get over it. and well they move on with their lives without having gained anything from their mistake, without ...