Serge's World

This last week my brother visited for a few days from Ireland after he recently moved there, and this gave me the opportunity to pull out some of the whiskies I have in my collection. I love single malt whiskies but tend to only drink them when I have a fellow whisky drinker over.

Enjoying my whisky in small batches spread out over time means that I tend to forget the flavours and notes of some of my bottles, and so I figured I should keep track of the whiskies I have tried. So, first up, here is one of hte whiskies my brother and I enjoyed this week - The Macallan 12 Year Old.

The Macallan is a Speyside single malt aged in sherry oak casks, and is one of the milder whiskies in my collection. It has an alchohol level of 40% making it one of my ligher bottles. The flavour is smooth with generous notes of sherry and rather sweet undertones.

This is not the type of whisky that will knock your socks off, and goes down easily, making it a rather easily accessible whisky.

Living in a country with a very low elevation and frequent cloudy nights, I find it is important to have accurate weather reports to plan viewing sessions with my telescope. The average weather report is not enough, however, since with a combination of the low elevation and light pollution, on most nights which you are lucky enough to not have any clouds, the seeing is still frequently absolutely terrible.

Over the last few years, I have been trying to find a reliable astronomical seeing forecast, and have found a few, but most have been pretty basic. Yesterday, however, I found what looks to be the best forecast I have come across. Meteoblue offers a 3-day forecast for astronomical seeing, available for free on their website.

This forecast not only includes the obvious seeing indices (the reason for going to the page, after all), but also the level of low, mid and high level cloud cover, atmospheric conditions, ground temperature and humidity, as well as visible celestial bodies. These forecasts are given in hourly intervals.

Including the Moon and planets in the forecast, with their altitude and azimuth for each hour, also helps out in planning viewing sessions, as you can cross-reference the best seeing with the best position for planetary and lunar observations.

The forecasts are also available for any location around the world.

This page is definitely going to remain in my browser bookmarks.

For doing statistical analysis, it is often useful to have good random sample data. The method below is able to generate a dataset of randomised numbers which fit into a normal distribution.

The normal distribution, also known as a bell curve, due to its shape, has the property that 68.27 percent of the values within the distribution fall within one standard deviation from the mean, and 95.45 percent of values fall within two standard deviations, all centred on the mean.

With the parameters of the method, samples specifies the number of values to generate. Mean and standardDeviation specify the parameters of the normal distribution we want, and finally, accuracy specifies how closely we want ot match the curve.

The value for accuracy can be any integer greater than 1. The higher the number the better the results, but takes longer to process. I have found good results in the 1000-10000 range in testing, while even going as low as 1 gives acceptable results in osme cases.

So how does the code work?
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A few years ago I came across a blog post on Distractionware by Terry Cavanagh explaining how he created a 1x5 pixel font using sub-pixel rendering.

Before explaining about the font, let’s first talk about sub-pixel rendering. Sub-pixel rendering is the process of drawing on the screen by taking advantage of the fact that a single pixel on screen is actually made up of 3 separate coloured pixels.

In an LCD screen, these three sub-pixels, coloured red, green and blue, are laid out horizontally, repeating for each whole pixel on-screen, as indicated below.

By using one of these three individual colours we can then draw onscreen at resolutions higher than a whole pixel. This technique is used to create the 1x5 pixel font. Using the sub-pixel rendering, we are able to create a font which, in effect, is 3 pixels wide and 5 pixels high, while only using 1 physical pixel width.

The version of the font demonstrated on Distractionware was written in C++, so I borrowed the idea, and wrote a C# version of the font using the same technique. Below we can see the result.

And by zooming in on the output

As you can see, the results are (just barely) readable. It is not the most practical of fonts, but the technique does produce results surprisingly more legible than you would expect.
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A few months ago, I got had a DNA test done through The Genographic Project, hoping that it would fill in a few blanks in my family tree.

Up to this point, I have made considerable progress on my ancestry on my father’s side, which is almost purely Belgian, comprising a mixture of Walloon and Flemish ancestry. On my mother’s side, things are a bit more complicated, with a several relatively recent immigrants, including my Jewish grandfather, who was born in Egypt but whose family was originally from Belarus, and a few German immigrants. The rest was a good old South African mix.

The biggest mystery though was the ancestry of my maternal great-great-grandmother, Johanna Jacoba Bender, born around 1868, and married to Abraham Michael Reid.
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One of the standard books of algorithms for astronomical calculations is the book Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus. This book was first published in 1991, and is considered on of the references. It covers everything from celestial coordinate conversions, planetary positions, calendar conversions, binary star positions, eclipses, conjunctions, and much, much more.

I made extensive use of the algorithms in the book when I was busy implementing Night Sky Tools, a comprehensive astronomy app on Android, using Java. I no longer mantain that app, having sold it, but still find astronomical calculations fascinating.

That is why I was delighted to discover a comprehensive C# implementation of the algorithms from the book on Github by Joe Sauve. The project was last updated 5 years ago, but appears complete. I am pretty certain that I may find a use for this project in the future.

With some clear skies and no moon last night, I used this opportunity to make my first attempt at photographing a deep sky object using the ASI120MM camera. This camera is designed for planetary and lunar imaging, but it can be used for deep sky.

The local conditions are not ideal for deep sky, with the high light pollution levels, so I opted to go for a relatively easy and bright object, thus choosing M15, which was well positioned in the sky.

M15 is a bright globular cluster in Pegasus with a magnitude of 6.2, and roughtly 18’ diametre.

I generated the image by taking 84x20 second monochrome exposures, and then stacking the best 24 exposures into the image below using SharpCap, Autostakkert, Registax and Gimp to process the image.

The results are not overly fantastic, but with this being my first attempt I am relatively pleased with the results.

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

I got up at 5am this morning to get this image of the Moon. The Moon is a waning gibbous Moon, almost at last quarter.

This is the highest resolution image I have been able to make of the Moon so far. The image is a composition of 8 images, each of which is comprised of 800 stacked frames, making the image below comprised of around 6400 individual frames.

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

(Click on image for full size - 2472x2820 pixels)

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

Good old fashioned finder charts have become a bit less frequently used these days when it is easy to control your telescope from one of the many planetarium and charting software available, but sometimes it is useful to have a proper finder chart at the telescope.

I have ported fchart by Austin Riba, written in Python, which he forked from the original project by Michiel Brentjen, to C#, and extended it slightly.

The application allows you to generate finder charts for any part of the sky, and includes the full NGC and IC catalogues with quite a number of deep sky objects more. The app allows searching for objects, and will centre the coordinates on that object, or coordinates can be entered manually.
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So, after several years of letting my previous blog die, I am reviving it here on GitHub Pages.

This blog will focus on my myriad of hobby development projects, as well as my other interests, such as astronomy and genealogy. I also intent to revive some of my favourite posts from my old blog, and repost them here over time.

Watch this space!