Last night, (Friday, August 27) my wife, Carol, and I were looking at the near full moon.  There was a bright start to the right and a bit lower than the moon.  Carol commented that she doesn’t remember that star being on the right side of the moon.  I guessed that maybe it was a planet and then went in and fired up Stellarium, a free planetarium program that I have on my Ubuntu computer.  The “bright star” turned out to be Jupiter.  I tried looking at it through binoculars, but that didn’t work too well.  I also have an ancient telescope that I haven’t had out in years.  I brought it out, and after spending some good time trying to locate the moon, then locating Jupiter (As I said, the telescope is very old and the sighting eyepiece has been damaged for years), we focused in on Jupiter.  It was very small, but clear.  I could see four very tiny dits of light around Jupiter, that could just be reflections of something in the telescope or my eyes.  Nevertheless, I went back to Stellarium, and zoomed way in on Jupiter, and lo and behold, there were four moons visible around the large planet.  I went back to the telescope, and there were Callisto, Europa, Io, and Ganymede, exactly where they were in real life (except the telescope reversed the image).  Europa was right next to Jupiter, but it could clearly be seen in the telescope when it was sharply focused.  It was quite exciting to see, even if it was an underpowered old telescope, being used by a very amateur, amateurish astronomer.  Click a picture below to see a larger view.

- John

Jupiter taken with digital camera through telescope.

The moon and Jupiter through the naked eye.

Stellarium's view of what we saw.

How we saw Jupiter through the telescope. (this photo is from Stellarium)

Well, it happens to all of us.  Another birthday. When we are young, we look forward to our birthdays, as we get older, we don’t really care to be reminded that we are growing older.

This year, though, I was looking forward to my birthday.  Look at the pictures, and you will notice that one of the presence I got was a new laptop computer.  Yeah!  I am using it now to write this up.  It is a nice Acer Aspire 7740 laptop with a large 17.3 inch screen.  And of course, I promptly put the newest version of Ubuntu Linux on it as I use Linux instead of Windows.  Very nice!

- John

I did my first computer animation. I decided I would like to try animating part of the Mandelbrot Fractal.

Our computers run on Ubuntu Linux; and I used the following software to do my little project:

• I used “Fraqtive” to display the fractal screens.  I recorded each screen shot seperately using the screenshot utility that comes with Ubuntu.
• I then animated the screen shots using ImageMagick’s “animate” tool
• I recored the animation with “gtk-recordMyDesktop”
• I then assembled the video using “OpenShot” video editor.

Here is the small video animation of a tiny portion of the Mandlebrot Fractal.

John

Ubuntu 9.04 – code named Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23. I am always (maybe too) eager to upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu as new features are always added, making it an even better operating system. Yes, for the uninformed, Ubuntu is a computer operating system. Your computer may run Windows or if it is a Mac, it may run OS X. My computer, along with millions of others runs the totally free and open Linux version called Ubuntu.

Typically, version updates are made right over the Internet. It will download a zillion files and update everything, taking, possibly, several hours to do. I read an article on some web site that I could download the distribution and update it from a burned CD. Since I had two computers to update, I decided this might be a time savings way to go.

Click HERE to read the full post about my experience installing the Jaunty Jackalope onto our home computer.

John