Polls are beginning to close. Everything I’ve been working on for the last eleven months or so has been building up to this evening. Shaving down slow queries, optimizing perl, writing and improving Chef cookbooks, building custom Debian packages, even some C work. All these things and more were for tonight. We weathered one storm last week. Now, as they say in retail, it’s time for Christmas.
It’s not all astronomy, programming, and devops around here. A few weeks ago, I got to see the Seattle Opera’s production of Fidelio. If you’re not familiar with Fidelio, go read about it over at Wikipedia and come back. Fidelio is a curious opera in some ways. It is both Beethoven’s only opera, and the only rescue opera commonly performed today. It is, however, an excellent opera, and well worth seeing or listening to if you have the chance.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm TeleVue eyepieces, OIII filter. New objects observed: NGC 1027, IC 1805, NGC 6823, NGC 6834, NGC 6866, NGC 6905 Previously viewed objects: Coathanger (Cr 399), NGC 6910, Messier 57 A somewhat hazy night here, sadly. It ended up being one of those nights where you mostly look at open clusters because that’s mostly what you can see. I did at least observe some more of the Herschel 400 open clusters (and some were even challenging), and for the heck of it looked at M57, because I haven’t for a while.
A while back, I started working through the Herschel 400 catalog, because I only had seven Messier objects left to observe and none of them were currently in the night sky. That was back in August. How have I been doing since then? NGC 40 NGC 129 NGC 136 NGC 185 NGC 205 (Messier 110) NGC 225 NGC 278 NGC 381 NGC 404 NGC 436 NGC 457 NGC 488 NGC 598 (Messier 33) NGC 637 NGC 654 NGC 659 NGC 663 NGC 869 NGC 884 NGC 891 NGC 1023 NGC 1027 NGC 1501 NGC 1502 NGC 5195 (Messier 51b) NGC 6823 NGC 6830 NGC 6834 NGC 6866 NGC 6905 NGC 6910 NGC 6939 NGC 6940 NGC 6946 NGC 7479 NGC 7606 NGC 7686 NGC 7789 This is currently a total of 38 objects, which isn’t too bad for about a month and a half.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm eyepiece New objects observed: NGC 7606, NGC 404, NGC 488, NGC 1023, NGC 891, NGC 7479, Palomar 13 Previously viewed objects: Messier 31, Messier 32, Messier 33, Messier 110 Location: Sunrise, up at Mt. Rainier. This was not the best night to have gone up to Sunrise, but it’s unclear if I’ll be able to make another trip up this year, so I went last night. To get a feel for how the night was going to go I found M33 and was not encouraged; it was rather faint, despite being at 45ยบ altitude.
I decided to finally get this ol’ site moved to an EC2 instance. It has pretty low resource usage, so normally something like S3 would be just fine, but since my particular Octopress blog has some unusual rewrite rules that it needs for the foreseeable future, an EC2 instance it is. At least it’ll be a chance to get more familiar with some of Amazon’s services and whatnot, although if a way to conveniently do the rewrite rules somehow in S3 pops up, I may switch to that.
It’s a bear. For some ungodly reason I was having a really hard time building perl’s Data::Alias on Mountain Lion just now, where trying to build Data::Alias kept blowing up with errors about RETURN_PROBE. The problem proved to be frustratingly ungoogleable, but eventually I found the solution. Add the line #undef USE_DTRACE" to Alias.xs at some point before #if defined(USE_DTRACE) && defined(PERL_CORE) in Alias.xs, make clean, re-run perl Makefile.PL, make, make install.
A common complaint out on the Internets about Octopress is that you have to put all your third party plugins into the plugins/ directory in your Octopress repo, which many people find rather annoying because often those plugins have their own git repos you might want to track. It turns out, though, that there’s a way now that you can load Octopress plugins from multiple directories. The jekyll gem installed by bundler by default doesn’t have this feature yet, but if you install the one from github it works.
This is not a huge update for mod_mcpage, but it changes the receive timeout, and adds configuration options for auto ejecting hosts, the server failure limit, and the retry limit. This fixes a problem where if a memcached server goes down lighttpd + mod_mcpage would wait way too long before giving up on memcached. The README.mod_mcpage has more information on how to use the new options. The repository is, of course, at https://github.
Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm Tele Vue eyepieces, OIII filter. Once again, no ParaCorr this evening. New objects observed: NGC 40, NGC 278, NGC 7686, NGC 7789, NGC 6940 Previously viewed objects: Messier 31, Messier 32, Messier 110, NGC 185, NGC 6939, NGC 6946, Messier 51, NGC 5195 New Location: Paradise, up on Mt. Rainier. My eight year old daughter has been wanting to come with me on one of my observing excursions sometime.