Winter is usually a great time for astronomy with longer nights and the sun setting at a reasonable hour, with the forecast for last Friday as clear until 12am I thought I’d put in a few more hours imaging. I hadn’t realised it was a waxing gibbous moon until after I’d lugging all the gear outside and started setting up.

A nearly full moon, combined with a slightly hazy sky limited the choice of objects severely. The moon was out of the question, as I’ve yet to buy a moon filter, even on the lowest exposure setting of 0.001 seconds the ccd chip was becoming fully saturated. So I turned instead to the Orion Nebula, M42.

At magnitude 4.0 the nebula is visible as a fuzzy gray blob to the naked eye, just below the belt of Orion. I took a total of 90 exposures (81 usable) at 15 seconds each in an attempt to not burn out the central core on the 15 second exposures, whilst bringing out the fainter detail.

• Exposure Time: 15×81s Avg
• Date: 2007-11-23 23:47:55 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 15×15s Median
• Apparent Dimension: 85×60 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 4.0 mag

Since it looked neat, I’ve uploaded a pseudo colour version, this isn’t in anyway the true colour of the Orion Nebula, I don’t have any colour filters yet

I believe this is my best image to date. Although it’s still not quite in focus, the exposure was perhaps too long resulting in a burnt out core. Not to mention the moon/haze made post processing a nightmare with a bright central light gradient to remove.

Collimation of the scope is still slightly out. I spent an hour before taking this image to improve it a little, but it’s going to take stabler skies before I can collimate at a reasonable magnification. I think the sky stability and lack of good collimation is partly to blame for the difficulty in achieving a good focus.

I’m looking forward to re-imaging this object on a moonless night to see how big an improvement I can achieve.

The usual clouds that seem to be permanently situated above the UK parted for a few days, which finally coincided with a few evenings I had spare. The LX90 hasn’t seen the night sky since way back in March, when I last had it pointing skyward for my first real attempts at collimation.

The seeing over the last few nights, has still been poor, with stars twinkling away making achieving critical focus very difficult. The collimation adjustments from March do seem to have improved things, although I still think finer adjustments will be needed on a night with better seeing.

On the first nights outing, Polar alignment was woeful and gotos were constantly 1/4 fov in the finder off. Still, I managed to image a few objects, the two most notable been a double star cluster in Persei and M33 a spiral Galaxy in Triangulum.

h Persei Open Cluster

• Exposure Time: 6×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-08 02:44:37 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 7×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 30 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 4.3 mag

The image above is h Persei (NGC 869), which along with Chi Persei (NGC 884) forms a double cluster. The full double cluster was a little too large to fit into the tiny fov of my CCD camera, I’ve not calculated the exact fov yet, but it’s somewhere around 30 to 60 arc minutes.

Open clusters are interesting objects as they contain hundreds, sometimes thousands of stars, all of which were born around the same time and are still gravitationally bound (however loosely) to each other. This is in contrast to Globular Clusters (such as M15 which I imaged on Monday and will upload later) which are strongly bound and often contain millions of stars in a tightly packed ball, making them stunning visual objects.

M33 Spiral Galaxy in Triangulm

• Exposure Time: 15×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-08 02:12:17 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 7×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 70×45 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 5.7 mag

I’m quite pleased with the M33 image, the stars are reasonably well focused and the spiral arms are fairly visible. It’s far from a perfect image, with a good proportion of the outer arms not visible, but considering the skies were a little hazy and how blurry my previous images have turned out, I think this is a huge improvement.

Also just about visible on the edges of M33 is NGC 604 a diffuse nebula.

I also imaged M31 the great Andromeda Galaxy, however after underestimating the sheer size of it, the image ended up containing only the bright core and a few dust lanes.

At the start of this week I also managed a third night imaging several objects, M15, M101, NGC7780, NGC 281 (Pacman Nebula as well as a poor image of M42 taking during early dawn. I should have these processed and the best uploaded to this post later this week.

M15 Globular Cluster in Pegasus

• Exposure Time: 15×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-10 23:48:16 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 15×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 18 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 6.2 mag

GID 23 took place a few weeks ago on the 11th/12th of August.

It all began at approximately 11:01.34pm Saturday night, with nearly half of GID#23 already gone and yet I still had no idea what to do. Tom suggested I team up with him to do something similar to the original Teaminator.

We had no idea what the game was going to be about only that it had to involve Tea. A large part of the core code was already in place from previous GID’s Tom had done, which left us free to concentrate on more game specific issues.

The result by the end of Sunday was larger than expected and shows clear signs of the games and tv show we drew inspiration from; Monkey Island, Dizzy and Open All Hours.

I finally got around to playing Treasure Island Dizzy the other night, which I used to have for the C128 (or was it the Amiga, I forget which). It’s strange going back and playing games which I played many years ago. Some games I remember as amazing, and yet on playing them again all the fond memories of how good the game was, which you’ve over the years raised onto a pedestal of “how games should be”, comes crashing down as you suddenly realize you’ve built the game up to be more than it really was. Fortunately that isn’t the case with Dizzy nor Monkey Island (which I’m also part way through replaying)

I had forgotten just how HARD older games really are. Most games these days you can pickup and play for some time before you die, try playing Dizzy for more than a minute without dieing several times!

The GID did highlight a few areas of the Engine which could do with improvements, which has resulted in a complete overhaul of the dialogue system to now use a node based tree structure. This enables dialogue to be constructed through a parent/child relationship of dialogue and dialogueItem nodes.

Special purpose nodes can also be inserted into the tree allowing actions to be performed on the display of specific dialogue or the selection of a dialogue option. New node types will be added in the future to support a variety of actions, for example, enabling a quest, playing an animation or transitioning the camera. A general purpose callback node functions as a stop gap until new node types are available.

The Quest system has also seen a significant improvement along with the addition of an NPC Editor

Brew Isles can be download via the GreatGamesExperiment.

Is the campaign for dark skies finally having an impact?

This morning we had a leaflet from Southern Electric informing us that our street lights and those around Leeds are going to be replaced. This in itself, isn’t all that interesting, it’s the type of light fitting they’ll be using on the new lamp posts that is.

older designs which throw light in all directions, do not meet modern illumination standards.

Hopefully they’ll not be just doing the minimum to meet the current lighting standards, but going all the way with full cut off lighting. Across the entire of Leeds, this could have a pretty dramatic effect on the amount of light pollution and see the return of dark skies. Hopefully neighbouring cities will follow suit.

I’ve a keen interest in Astronomy, so any moves which reduce the amount of light polution, are welcomed. Although sods law will probably result in the location of the new lamp posts directly overlooking where I setup my scope

First off, since I’ve not blogged for a while about anything Game Dev related, I thought I’d mention why.

Myself and Tom Bampton have been working on a fun side project since late last year which we’re wanting to keep under wraps a little longer, however, there’s a ton of material to blog about once we’re far enough along to make it worth discussing. Also I’ve been working on Shelled 2 which I can’t really say anything about other than it’s coming along very nicely

GP2X Competitor

Anyhow, a few things have recently caught my eye that I felt were blog worthy. The first is a semi rumor, possibly vaporwear but interesting enough to hope it isn’t. There’s a pretty lengthy thread going on over at the GP32x.com forums regarding a new handheld device under development. The reason I’m saying this might be vaporwear is it’s not clear WHO that company is, only that several prominent gp2x community members who were very active in the development of software for and/or the distribution of the actual gp2x hardware, appear to have a reasonable amount of input into the new device.

I’ve not really talked about the GP2X much since buying one way back, but it’s a great little device and quite fun to program, well worth the price compared to any other handheld currently on the market.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. It’s not. For example the joystick is a little awkward to use and the lack of d-pad support makes some games awkward to play. The volume control is software based and inconsistent, even on the lowest setting it’s way too loud for my tastes when using headphones, the setting one step lower is mute.

Still, when you consider this device is first and foremost a media player, which it does very well I might add, it’s not a bad piece of hardware and the community has worked wonders turning it into a reasonable gaming handheld.

It would however, have been nice to have better hardware support aimed at gaming and this is where the new device sounds to be a step up, with 3d acceleration, higher res screen, touch screen, more memory and wifi. All of which will increase the possible capabilities well beyond that of the GP2X which already has great emulator support and homebrew capabilities.

That said, I already have a GP2X that I’m more than happy with, the new device could just be a joke (or never make it into production) and there’s another gadget that has caught my attention more that the possible GP2X successor has.

OpenMoko

I’m not really into mobile phones, the last phone I bought was a nokia 3210 although I’ve since upgraded via a hand-me-down from my brother to a newer nokia. Even so, I very rarely use it. That may be set to change with the pending release of the Phase 2 device from the OpenMoko project.

Currently you can buy the Neo1973 (GTA01 rev.) phone which has been designed specifically for the OpenMoko project. Now the idea of fully Open Source mobile phone is very very interesting, however it’s the phase 2 hardware (GTA02 rev.) that interests me even more.

Adds to the Phase 1 phone:
* 2D/3D-Graphics-Accelerator
* 2 Accelerometers (model and number is uncertain)
* Faster CPU - S3C2442/400
* WiFi: Atheros AR6K (see also [4])

The possibilities for development on this from low level hardware hacking and coding through to end applications and games is mouth watering, at least for a programming/hardware geek

The fact that the current version on sale has the disclaimer:

What you CAN NOT expect yet
* reliable means of making phone calls, esp. not from the UI
* reliable means of sending/receiving SMS, esp. not from the UI

and the list goes on… would make most people think twice about buying a “phone” that can’t really be used to make calls yet. But I’m sure any geeks reading this will find that only adds to the attraction.

The Phase2 hardware with it’s higher res screen would make a great replacement for my current phone and Palm Tungsten C, which I use for reading ebooks and appointments. Given that it’s totally open source you can bet someone will develop most of the common apps and any that are missing will make for a good project to work on. Roll on October….

For a change the skies were relatively clear on Monday night so I took the opportunity to take the scope out and take a few images. Unfortunately I made a few mistakes during setup that resulted in woeful polar alignment giving a 5 second max exposure time before star trailing became apparent, compared to the usual 5+ minutes I’ve acheived with previous drift aligning… With fog rolling in I had little time to correct it and instead made do.

Despite using the fastest exposure time my ccd camera was capable of 0.001s, the moon was still over exposed. Really a filter will be needed to reduce the light gathered by the scope for future attempts. Still with a bit of post processing I’ve managed to isolate the overexposure to a smaller area.

• Exposure Time: 1 x 0.001s
• Date: 2007-03-27 00:42:07 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 2×0.001s averaged

The second image was taken through the first wave of fog and suffered for it, especially with it been a 1/2 moon and limited to 5 second exposure times If I’d noticed the fog coming in, I’d have packed up before the corrector plate became saturated, the dew heater didn’t stand a chance

Still, you can just about make out the spiral arms of M51 and the companion galaxy above as well as the effects of the moon and fog despite post processing attempts to clean it up I plan to reimage this pair of galaxies on a fogless night with more suitable exposure times to really bring out the detail.

• Exposure Time: 20 x 5s aligned and stacked
• Date: 2007-03-27 01:26:36 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 1×5s

Tuesday was again a clear night, but yet again fog rolled in early. Knowing the nights imaging would be short, I decided against setting up for photography and instead spend the time collimating the scope to get the mirrors aligned correctly, which after allowing 90 minutes cooldown didn’t leave all that long.

Seeing was only good enough to collimate with a 12mm eyepiece, still I felt it improved views of Saturn and the moon considerably unless it was a placebo effect, guess I’ll find out next time I the ccd camera is setup. I’m sure given a night with better seeing allowing a 6mm eyepiece to be used, I could improve on the collimating further, which I’m hoping will improve the problems I’ve been having achieving a good focus whilst imaging.

Not only are Baen Books selling DRM FREE EBooks, but they’ve gone a step further by providing the first and sometimes second book in several series for free. Not a bad idea considering if you like the first book in a series it’s likely you’ll want to read and thus purchase the rest of the books in the series.

Here’s what they have to say about this:-

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We’re calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a “matter of principle.” This all started as a byproduct of an online “virtual brawl” I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was….

You can find out why on the Baen Library Intro Page as well as the complete Baen Catalog

Another interesting part of the Baen site is the “Webscription eBooks”, which for $15 gains you access to 4 books. What’s novel about this is that you get access to the 4 books 3 months prior to their official publication, not the full book mind, just the first 1/3, then a month later you get the 2nd 1/3 and finally 1 month before official publication you can download the full book. All for a single payment of $15. Of course you can continue to pay $15 per month and every month gain access to 4 new books.

The idea of getting early access to only part of the book isn’t really something of interest to me, however if you’re a big fan of some of the authors that use Baen publishing, then the prospect of getting your hands on part of the book 3 months in advance as well as the complete book 1 month in advance of its official print publication may be quite appealing.

Still, the reason I decided to do what amounts to a sales pitch for Baen Publishing, is that they’re doing something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. DRM less publishing.

Considering when you buy a book in print you get to read that book and won’t find that you’ve lost access to it one day because you’ve upgraded your coffee table or had to change the model of your reading glasses.

Yet with EBooks, we’re expected to accept that if the maker of the software used to read the encrypted, DRM ridden books, stops been made or isn’t available for a future PDA we may buy or perhaps new OS (vista?), we would lose access to all our library of books.

With DRM less EBooks, this isn’t an issue. Buy once, archive it in a few format such as mobipocket reader, txt and html and you’re pretty much safe to assume it’s going to work or at least be importable into a wide range of ebook readers in the future. Even if it means converting the EBook into a proprietary format to get it onto your PDA of choice. The fact that you have a clean archived version of the book (html/txt etc) means you can continue to convert the book and never lose access to it. No need to worry about replacing broken PDA’s with new models, or perhaps if Sonys EBook hardware ever takes off, moving your library over to a new device.

Not only is the lack of DRM a big big plus, but the prices on the print and ebooks are reasonable too.

I’m sure it’s going to take time before EBooks take off en-mass, assuming they ever do. But I personally will never purchase an EBook that contains DRM, so I can honestly say I hope Baen books are around for a long while, I imagine I’ll be visiting their site a lot more in the coming years.

If only other ebook publishers would follow suit, it wouldn’t kill them to drop the DRM and it’d be nice to see EBooks cost less than their printed counterparts (I doubt the cost savings are been passed on to the authors! Maybe I’m just jaded)

Baen Publishing is doing DRM less ebooks, music.podshow.com is doing DRM less indie music and Stardock are making copy protection free games (well they use serials, but it’s at least a non-Draconian form of protection) All three are placing their trust in the consumer rather than assuming everyone is a criminal and really deserve as much success as they can get.

Another Christmas has come and gone, with the new year just around the corner. This year, like last year, has flown by, 11 months since we came back from our Holiday in Florida yet it doesn’t feel that long ago.

Christmas was good fun as always I bought my brother and his girlfriend Guitar Hero II, turns out my parents also bought me it for Christmas too, so Christmas day was filled with Rock’n'Roll co-op guitar playing It also meant I didn’t need to hope they’d forget to take their guitar with them when they went home

Its one very addictive game, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it until it was mentioned on IRC a few weeks ago. I can’t think of anyone in the family that has played it and not had good things to say about it or gone out and bought it.

If the 360 does get Guitar Hero in 2007 as I’ve heard, then I may finally get a 360, at least if you can download additional songs over and above those that ship with it via Live.

The only disappointment this Christmas has been the lack of any Snow, not counting the giant inflatable snow globe in our back garden. I’m sure we’ll see some in the coming month(s), but it’s still not the same as having a white Christmas. Maybe Christmas 2007, although I’m not holding out much hope.

Here’s to a good new year

For anyone that hasn’t already seen it, I’ve posted a Shelled! postmortem over on the GarageGames Site. You can also download the PDF version.

You may have noticed the books on the right hand side of this blog. I thought it was about time I started listing which books I’ve read, I’m reading or I’m planning to read. Hopefully I’ll give a short review of each once I’m done. For those in the UK I’ve added a link to the Amazon page for each book too, yes I’m after the affiliate commission but I’ll only recommend books I’ve read and found useful. Besides which, it would seem most people that read this blog are not UK based anyway.

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

PS: Guitar Hero ROCKS! Go buy it

Shelled! is finally out the door and it’s FREE! For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, head over to www.shelledgame.com to read about the game and download it.

I played for a few hours the other night, with 5 other people, great fun. Very easy for the odd grudge match to develop when you get shelled by another player The poor AI always take a pounding in round 1 while everyone tries to stock up on cash for those nukes and high fives.

Out of all the shell types, there are only two I find I don’t use at the moment. Every other shell has its uses depending upon the terrain. Slider shells are useful on very hilly terrain, high fives are great for a quick fly by shelling, the machine gun works great as a defensive shell when your jets have overheated and you have a tank inbound. The use for the leveler isn’t obvious at first, but it can give a slight advantage on a few levels, I’ll leave you to figure our which and how but a hint is the rocket comes into its own on the same level.

You could play Shelled! using nothing other than the default shell and do fairly well, but if you happen to play another human player that has discovered fly by high five shellings, you’ll be in for a hard time making first place!

The game has a few nice tactics, which may at first not be apparent, after a while though I’m sure most people will work them out. Remember the machine gun is your friend, turtles with rocket jets are meant to fly and although the nuke is costly, nothing says good night better than a direct hit with one

I’ve had a great time developing Shelled! and wanted to say what a pleasure its been to work with Joshua, Andreas and everyone else on the Shelled team.

Happy Shelling