Monthly Archives: June 2007

Jazoon 07: wrap-up

Just back home from Jazoon, and also back to work and to everydays hassles 🙁 . Also, the time has come to make a comprehensive evaluation of the conference. All in all, I must say I came back with a good impression of the conference, which was quite well arranged and brought along a whole bunch of interesting topics and issues. Wanna know why? Click on the link below for the full story!

Zurich at first glance

I arrived in Zurich in the evening of Sat June 23th. The following day there would be the Jazoon opening, but only the paying tutorials were scheduled which we didnt follow. Plus, I was greeted with a beautiful sunny day; therefore, I got a chance to go around sightseeing, since it was my first time ever here.

Jazoon ’07: the first two days

On Monday June 25th, a thick layer of clouds rolled in which soon brought along some downpours and a really gloomy atmoshpere. But well, the time had come to dive into the newly started Jazoon conference, so lets have a closer look at the conference. Jazoons venue, the brand-new Sihlcity shopping mall, just off the city center to the southwest, is a top-quality place with boatloads of entertainment facilities, including a big move theather where the conference itself was hosted. […]

Jazoon 2007: here we come!

As usual, time is passing by at a very fast pace. Only a few days are left until next Sunday, June 24th 2007, the opening day of Jazoon ’07, the newborn European Industry Conference on Java and related topics, which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland, until Thursday 28th. Jazoon brings together experts and professional users of Java and open source technologies from all over Europe. I will be featured as a speaker together with my long-time friend Fabrizio Giudici […]

Maximum Movie Length For Planetary Imaging

All wonderful hi-res planetary images currently taken by many amateur astronomers worldwide are all based on the same technique, i.e. selecting and aligning a lot of single frames from a single movie (typically an AVI file), which are then stacked and processed to yield the final result. The movies are acquired with a camera at average rates of 5 to 15 fps (frames per second) for durations ranging from a few dozen seconds to a few minutes; therefore, they can […]

Calculating the actual f/ ratio of a picture

Every telescope or telephoto lens has its “magic” f/number: that is, the ratio between its focal length and aperture. Although we don’t go deeper into the matter as it’s not within the scope of this article, it’s worth mentioning that the higher the f/ratio, the longer the exposure time required to yield a given picture density (i.e. how much detail we want to record). Each telephoto lens is normally used with the camera body it was built for, so that […]

Adapting a sturdy wooden tripod from a to an EQ-6 mount

The TL-110 is a sturdy wooden tripod formerly sold by Astromeccanica. It closely resembles the Baader AHT, or others found in precision measurement instruments such as theodolites. It comes with two kinds of leg ends: a set of felt pads for use on hard surfaces (e.g. pavement), and a set of sharp points for use on soft grounds like grass. Furthermore, the package includes a standard mounting plate that attaches to the tripod by means of three hex-headed screws and […]