Author Archives: emmanuele-sordini

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 […]

Here comes the Sun (Grid)

Got a very demanding computing task? No need to worry: you can always take advantage of Sun Grid. Or better, up until recently you couldn’t, as this facility was available only to US citizens or people living on US ground. However, the situation has recently changed as Sun has opened up its gates to 24 countries throughout the world.

JUG Genova meeting: a success!

On May 8th, 2007, another meeting of the newly founded Genova JUG took place in the local NIS office. This was definitely the most crowded meeting ever for our JUG! This meeting featured: A presentation on build automation by Carlo Bonamico; A presentation on testing by Angelo Lupo. The meeting happily ended in a nearby all-u-can-eat pizza restaurant. 🙂 Next meeting is scheduled to take place in the first half of July 2007.

Some thoughts on Java 2 Micro Edition

Recently, I’ve had my first crack at writing a J2ME application. That was quite a disappointment. Check out the whole post to see why…

Total Lunar Eclipse of March 3rd, 2007

On March 3rd, 2007, a total lunar eclipse took place with very comfortable timing for Western Europe: starting at about 9.30pm local time, maximum eclipse right after midnight, with the last contact with Earth’s umbra around two o’ clock in the morning. The map below shows all parameters for the event. (Please note that all times in this article, except for the map from NASA, are in Central European Time, or GMT+1h).

I made it! (My first astronomy article)

Here it comes. My first astronomy article ever will be published in the upcoming March 2007 of the Italian Coelum magazine. This is really good news to me.

Bluetooth Blues

While native serial ports have almost disappeared from modern laptops, COM port-mapped devices are very popular: USB ports, USB-to-serial adapters, Bluetooth devices, virtual devices, and so on… all of them are viewed as serial ports under Windows. Every time a new driver is installed, one or more COM devices are added and remapped to the first COM number available: this quickly causes the COM port number to shoot through the roof. As for my laptop, there have been quite a […]