Serge's World

A few weeks back, I processed a few images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which I posted here

Using the same procedure as I did for my previous images, I downloaded a set of images from the IRAC Map instrument, which takes 4 simultaneous exposures at the 3.6μm, 4.5μm, 5.8μm and 8.0μm wavelength bands.

I then proceeded to artificially colour and merge the images, with each image tinted to blue, turquoise, orange and red, respectively, thus spreading out the bandwidths available across the visible spectrum.

NGC 6744

• Spiral galaxy in Pavo
• Apparent magnitude: 9.14
• Apparent size: 20.0’ x 12.9’

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Today would have been Noisette’s 13th birthday, but unfortunately, two weeks ago, on the 26 March 2017, we had to say goodbye to our faithful friend. It has been really hard to deal with her loss, with the house being dreadfully quiet without her constant presence, but I am happy that she is now painfree. Noisette lived a good, and long life for a dog, and we will remember her fondly forever.

She was originally my mother’s dog, who got her as a young puppy in 2004. I was always on the scene at that time, and Noisette loved me being there, because I used to take her on daily runs at the Johannesburg botanical gardens, where she was able to do her favourite thing in the world - chasing after her ball. She loved going so much, that one afternoon, she decided that she wanted to go, but I was doing something else, so she jumped up onto the dining-room table, grabbed my sunglasses in her mouth, and brought them to me, as if to say, “Here you go, now let’s get going”. She got scolded for this, but at the same time, it was so endearing.

Not too long after, we moved to Cape Town, where we traded the botanical gardens for daily runs on the beach, which made for one very happy (and smelly) dog.

When my mother moved to Europe in 2008, I adopted Noisette, and she stayed with me and Claudia (now my wife), officially becoming ours. Since then, she has been a constant companion to us. She was always around, and even slept in our bed each night, cuddling as as close as she could.
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After a miserably cloudy winter, spring is back with a vengence, with some nice clear evenings. Last night, the weather cleared up at the same time as the moon was well-placed for some imaging.

The moon was at exactly First Quarter, and therefore, 50% illuminated.

The image is a composition of 9 monochrome images, without filters, taken between 22:33 and 22:51. Each image was stacked from 30 second videos comprising around 500 frames each, using between 25 and 50 percent of the best frames per video, depending on the image quality, resulting in a total of around 2000 frames being used in hte complete mosaic.

The seeing was rather turbulent, especially towards the end of the session, when the moon started disappearing behind my chimney, but I was able to get some decent results, none-the-less.

The images were stacked using Autostakkert, and then manipulated with Registax 6, finally stitching them together, and applying some filters using Gimp.

(Click on image for full size - 2500x2500 pixels)

Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount.

Sunday afternoon we had to say good bye to our beloved Noisette, who slipped away in our arms.

She was fine the day before and even enjoyed her long walk to the heath, but that night began to look ill and in the morning we took her to the emergency vet who told us she had a large mass on her spleen or liver causing abdominal bleeding. Our only options were risky surgery likely to kill her or to put her down..

With her age and her other health issues, such as her diabetes, we really only had one option.

I was going through our photos of Noisette, and put together this tribute video with some of my favourites.

I miss her presence around the house immensely. She was the best dog in the entire world.

The Spitzer Space Telescope is one of the space observatories orbiting the Earth, and specialises in the infrared part of the spectrum. The telescope is run by NASA, and was launched in 2003.

As with the other NASA space projects, the raw images from the project have been released into the public domain, allowing anyone to process the images further.

Two sets of images I started with were two galaxies, NGC 4448 and NGC 4490. For both of these images, I used the same process. From the Spitzer Heritage Archive, I downloaded a set of images from the IRAC Map instrument, which takes 4 simultaneous exposures at the 3.6�m, 4.5�m, 5.8�m and 8.0�m wavelength bands.

I then proceeded to artificially colour and merge the images, followed by a little bit of fine-tuning in the images.

The Cassini-Huygens project is a space mission to Saturn launched in 1997, as a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The space probe reached Saturn in 2004, and is still operational and sending images back.

The raw images from the project have been released into the public domain, allowing anyone to process the images further. The released images are updated continuously as they are received from the probe.

So, I thought I would take a look at processing some of the images, choosing a set of images of Saturn taken on 21 Jan 2007. I created two images fro mthe raw data - one image showing a true colour image of Saturn, and another showing the same view using filters in the Methane band

The Methane image, below, is a false colour image created from two frames taken using the MT2 and MT3 filters, which are narrow band filters centered at 727 and 889 wavelenths.
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A few months ago, I wrote a post about the family tree visualisation app I wrote using Unity, and followed up with the live web demo.

The app used to show the 3D visualisation of the ancestry of a selected individual, based on an imported Gedcom file. This is still the main mode for the application, but have now also added a dual tree mode, which shows the visualisation of two root indivuals side by side. Shared ancestors are grouped together in a subtree, allowing you to easily visualise common ancestry between two people.
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A while back, I posted about the family tree visualisation app I wrote using Unity. The 3D world is ideal to visualise how the individuals relate to each other, but it does not replace good old-fashioned ancestral and descendant reports.

As an expansion on the Unity project, I have created a new Windows project in C# based on the code from the Unity project, which allows you to generate one of several reports based on an imported GEDCOM file.

The GEDCOM parser and C# data structure is essentially identical to the Unity project. Once the data has been imported, we process the data according to the report we want.

The following reports are implemented in the application:

• Full Ancestry - Generates a detailed ancestry of the root individual, iterating through each generation back in the tree as far as it goes or until it reaches the maximum depth set. The data includes date and place of birth and death, spouses and children of the individual.

• Abridged Ancestry - Generates a more abridged ancestry of the root individual. In this report, all ancestors are shown, as for the full ancestry report, but it shows a lot less information, making the report more compact.

• Leaf Ancestors - This report only includes ancestors which have an unknown parent in the tree. This is useful to find out quickly which ancestors need more research to find new ancestors. This gives the full information for the individual, much like the Full Ancestry report

• Abridged Leaf Ancestors - The same as the above report, but just like the Abridged Ancestry report, it gives less information on individuals.

• Generation Summary - This report lists the number of unique individuals per ancestral generation.

• Descendant Report - This is the opposite of the Full Ancestry report. It lists all descendants of the root individual.

• Ancestor Place Report - Generates a list of places listed in the GEDCOM, listing all the individuals with a birth or death associated with that place

• Shared Y-DNA Report - This report finds the most distant paternal ancestor of the root individual, and then generates a descendant report of that ancestor, listing all male descendants, which all share the same Y-DNA.

• Shared mt-DNA Report - Similar to the Y-DNA report, this report finds the most distant maternal ancestor, and then generates a descendant report listing all descendants which share the same mt-DNA. This report includes both male and female children, but only recurses deeper into the female branches of the tree, since mt-DNA is only passed along the female line.

Last month, I posted about the family tree visualisation app I wrote using Unity. I have now made a lot of improvements, and, in addition, created a web demo as well.

The web demo allows the app to be demonstrated from within a web browser without having to run it locally. The big disadvantage of the web demo, is that the Unity web player doesn’t allow loading of external files, so it cannot be used to load any GEDCOM file, which the desktop application allows you to do. However, to demonstrate the application, the demo comes pre-loaded with my ancestry.

To navigate through the scene, moving the mouse while left clicking pans the view, while right-clicking rotates the camera. The up and down arrow keys moves the camera forwards and backwards.

Hovering over one of the indivdual spheres brings up a detailed info pane for the person.
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The Highland Park 26 Year Old Single Malt is an excellent whisky. The balance of flavour is incredible. It has peatiness but not too much. It is dry, but not too dry. It fruity and woody notes. Overall, it feels like dozens of distinct flavours all complimenting each other, while at hte same time being amazingly smooth, and even with a relatively high alchohol content of 47%, it feels less harsh than most other whiskies.

The Highland Park ranks as one of my all-time favourite whiskies.