Shooting Stars

We saw at least six shooting stars tonight.  I was surprised at their reddish glow. I wonder if it was space junk falling back to earth?

Can't get a clear picture of the moon either!

Big Spider

This is a big spider living on the deck:

Not sure which one it is, but this page has a listing of spiders.  It looks closest to an orb spinning spider such as this one

First Moon Photo with Celestron Firstscope

Today was cruise weekend in Saskatoon:

A bumble bee was taking nectar from one of the sunflowers:

Russian Mammoth Sunflower

And, on the day after Neil Armstrong died, we took our first picture of the moon with the Celestron Firstscope and a Canon Powershot 560.   Used the lowest power eyepiece with the moon filter, set the camera to high ISO and zoomed in to take this somewhat blurry shot:

Have to figure out a way to get more professioinal results!  Not much luck seeing much else well tonight -- need more practice with this telescope.  It's only maximum 200x magnification.

Dobsonian Reflector Arrived

The Celestron Dobsonian Reflector Telescope I ordered from Boreal arrived after lunch today.  I decided on the Celestron Firstcope after reading this excellent page from a store in Alberta.  However, the best price I found in Canada was from Boreal Northwest.  I also got the accessory kit and the total shipped to my door was $105.10.

We viewed the moon this evening, but it got cloudy and we had to give up for the night.  I did take a picture of a street light though its lens:

As usual for an astronomical telescope, the image is inverted.

The Russian mammoth sunflowers are in bloom too.  One of them is over 7 feet tall.

Using Audacity for Spectral Analysis of Audio

Audacity can be used to identify harmonics generated by a toy tube which is swung around at various speeds.  The faster you swing the tube, the higher the frequency heard.  Click here for a PDF of the details of how to do this.  Click here for the audio mp3 that was used to do the analysis.  I have also posted the analysis of a toy tube to my wiki.

Video Editing on Windows 7

Folkfest 2012 is now past and I had the task of burning some DVDs from the footage I took with a Canon FS100 standard definition camcorder.  I tried Windows Movie Maker and discovered that it calls up Windows DVD Maker after it's finished rendering.  The strange thing was Windows Movie Maker leaves a black border around the video!  The rendering quality was also quite crappy. Windows DVD Maker doesn't auto detect chapters very well.  Obviously, Windows video editing (the basic stuff that comes with Windows) cannot compare to iMovie which comes with Max OSX.  You would think the programmers at Microsoft would work harder to close the gap on this one!  But, MS wouldn't even include an MPEG2 decoder with Windows OS (too cheap to license it!).

I had some bad experiences with Premiere Elements 8 hanging on me (Windows 7 Pro 32 bit). Premiere Elements 9 is quite a bit better (loads a lot faster too), but it wasn't too great.  I had Pinnacle Studio 10 and it crashed all the time in Windows Vista Home Edition 32 bit.  So, I decided to download Corel Videostudio X5 and try the working trial.  Working on a Lenovo X220 Corei7 notebook with only 4 Gig of memory, it hasn't crashed on me yet (Windows 7 Pro 64 bit).  It was pretty easy to use and I got better as I authored the 2nd DVD.  I went with Corel because it's Canadian and Videostudio is written by Taiwanese programmers (Corel bought Ulead).  It's only $70 from Amazon.ca and I may very well buy it.  A good Windows 7 video editing experience for a change!

Making the main thing, the main thing

This was the subject of Pastor Ben's message (from Cincinnatti, OH) this morning.  The main thing for churches should be spreading the gospel and bring people to Christ.  He challenged the church to test every program and activity it does to see if this is in line with this basic precept.  He was a very direct preacher and warned against letting the societal norms creep in (and I suspect, corrupt) the mission of the church.

Visit to Hamilton

We went to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum at the Hamilton Airport today.  You are greeted with a CF-104 at the front:

CF-104 Starfighter

There are several interesting aircraft inside.  You can even climb in when volunteers are available to supervise.

CF-5 Freedom Fighter

This is a CF-5 Freedom Fighter.  Taiwan actually still has some of these in service - a sad commentary on the state of their air force.

Next, we went to Greensville and visited Webster's Falls.  Flamborough County (now part of Hamilton) has several natural gems and this is one of them.

Webster's Falls

Black Locust Tree Bark