Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm TeleVue eyepieces, Paracorr. New objects observed: NGC 6882, NGC 6885, NGC 7062, NGC 7296 Previously viewed objects: Coathanger (Cr 399), NGC 7082 The skies were looking pretty good this evening, so I ended up taking the telescope out. The moon’s getting bigger, and this will probably be the last night for a while that I’ll be able to go out observing for at least a couple of weeks.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 6mm, 12mm TeleVue, Paracorr, plus looking through some other people’s telescopes New objects observed: NGC 5907, NGC 4631, NGC 4656, NGC 4627, NGC 5273, NGC 5557, NGC 5529, NGC 7000, NGC 7217, T Lyrae Previously viewed objects: Messier 57, Messier 81, Messier 82, NGC 3077, NGC 7331, Messier 51, NGC 5195, Messier 7, Neptune, Messier 8, NGC 5866, NGC 7318, NGC 7320, NGC 6940, NGC 6910
Version 2.18.2 of bsdgames-osx has been released to address more string handling problems in rogue. In testing, rogue no longer segfaults at or after level 3. The homebrew formula has been updated again.
I’ve released bsdgames-osx 2.18.1, a minor update fixing a memory allocation problem in rogue. The homebrew formula has been updated accordingly.
Since I’ve made a 2.18.0 release of bsdgames-osx, I also went and make a bsdgames-osx homebrew formula to install it as well. Just plunk it in /usr/local/Library/Formula and run brew install bsdgames-osx, and you should be up and going. If it doesn’t go smoothly, of course, I’d like to hear about it; probably the best way to report issues is through Github. The 2.18.0 release (the number was chosen to be similar to the Debian bsdgames version) isn’t a huge change or anything.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm TeleVue eyepieces, Paracorr. New objects observed: NGC 6229, NGC 6633, NGC 6934, NGC 7006 Previously viewed objects: Messier 13, NGC 6207 An unexpectedly good night. It was clear, but the area around Mt. Rainier was looking quite hazy on the bottom, and the other mountains were hard to see through the haze. I went out to see how the sky looked around midnight, though, and it looked pretty good, so I set up and knocked a few objects off the Herschel 400 list along with observing M13 once again (which is always pretty striking).
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about old-timey computer stuff, and I got a hankerin’ to play some of those old BSD games. No one had ever gotten around to getting OS X versions of the games up on the Internet, though (while some have started, no one ever seems to have finished and put their changes out there), so I spent a little time this evening and got most of them working.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been working off and on on porting xiafs, an ancient Linux filesystem and competitor to ext2 that lost out and was dropped from the Linux kernel back in 1999, to a modern kernel. I’m happy to say that I’m able to announce the release of modern-xiafs on github. Currently it works with the 2.6.32 kernel that shipped with Debian squeeze, but I intend to get up up to date with the latest kernel versions shortly.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm eyepiece, Paracorr. New objects observed: none Previously viewed objects: Messier 81, Messier 82, Messier 3 Not a good night, it turned out. Mt. Rainier looked pretty good from my window, so I thought I might be able to pull off some quality observing, but it was not to be. I initially tried looking for some Herschel 400 objects, but wasn’t having any luck there. To get a feel for the overall quality of the night, I looked at Messier 81, 82, and 3, since they would be in pretty good positions and should be fairly easy to find.
We all have to eat sometimes, even me. One thing I particularly like is hot and sour soup, but not the weird thick kind with egg in it. A long time ago, I found a recipe for the kind that’s thin, hot, and sour, but I’ve never been able to find it again. I remembered enough of it to at least be able to make the soup, though. Now, I’ll share my rather informal recipe with you.