I will slowly move the pages from atanone dot net site, and slowly I’ll populate this site and let my other site deal with my new adventure on how to make money online, and using the money to continuesly support some charity works that I could help.

I also went to signup to join the Force Usergroup. This is the group of Users of TheForce, a software remote shutter for coolpix cameras, and companion programs. I thought may be I need to use the software later if I buy a coolpix. The site also carries digital camera astrophotograpy information and gallery. 

Finally before retiring for the night, I checked my mailbox for one last time and I could not resist to watch some of the short videos in the links Kevin Fetter has provided. At the end of this lists, I also saw the link to Kevin’s Video Setup. A quick scan of the page prompted me to add this post rather than simply bookmark all the links I mentioned here. I thought it would be much easier for me to come back to search for the link here than going through my favorite links in IE. Thanks Kevin for adding that last link. 

One thing to add, Tom has another interesting project, from Waterloo to Batton Rouge, where together with someone hundreds miles apart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, they had watched the Iridium Flare 3 minutes after Tom saw it in Waterloo, Iowa. You can follow Tom’s story here to find out more. May be we can start to track these flares across the country or who knows, how far it could go.

That’s why I turned on NASA select channel and listen to some of the voice traffic between CAPCOM and sometime between PAYCOM with the Crew and wondering if I could listen them talking about that experiment. Indeed I caught part of the conversations but most were the re-run from the real traffic I’ve already listened while I was at work. The only difference is that, I could listen at home without worrying someone was calling you from other loop. Suddenly NASA Select mentioned that the ISS will pass thru Houston. I remember seeing some of these passes on the list few days ago, so I then checked the Heaven’s Above for the Skychart from my hometown. Heaven’s above listed the magnitude at -0.3, and the path was good. I then went to CalSKY and verified the path again using the lat/long of my home. Too bad, I could not take a picture, but the brightness was much better than when I first saw it while it was only Zarya alone.

Few nights ago while preparing to take the Geminid meteor shower picture, I found out that the Bulb-setting of my Olympus OM-10 was not working. I was thinking of getting another camera that I could use for satellite photography with long exposure setting. That would be on my to do list and I will post when I find a good one. I thought this is a good site to start my search.

BTW, while I was typing this I also heard over the TV the voice of CAPCOM telling the crew that all the flight controllers at JSC went out to watch the same pass.

Disclaimer: The opinion here is mine and mine alone. 

This morning I found so many news about the Geminid Meteor Shower tonight. Here is what I found in Science@nasa that was posted yesterday:

“It’s the Geminid meteor shower,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, Alabama. “Start watching on Wednesday evening, Dec. 13th, around 9 p.m. local time,” he advises. “The display will start small but grow in intensity as the night wears on. By Thursday morning, Dec. 14th, people in dark, rural areas could see one or two meteors every minute.” …..read more

Space Daily, Foxnews,  CNN and other’s also have carried the news in the past few days. Earth and Sky even offers Top 10 Tips for Geminid Meteor Shower. I check the weather forecast, it seems that we are going to have clear sky. Hopefully I will not miss this year shower again.

At first, in order to compensate my omission, I thought I would simply add any new links I find to the personal linkpages. However, a simple link would not do any good. That’s why I decided when I started this blog that every time I visit a site, I would put a note on what I found there, then provide the link so people can visit that page easily. I tried with a ‘What’s New’ in my linkpage long time ago, but I had to edit a webpage for that purpose and that idea was soon be abandoned. While I was on John’s site, I noticed that John used the CalSKY data for all his observations. I then visited the CalSKY and I realized that it will take me few days just to surf that site alone. With the help of GoogleEarth, I then determined the exact lat/long of my driveway, and signed up as a register user at CalSKY site.

This is what I found in the Section Guide for the Satellite page on CalSKY.

Few days ago, while searching for other links, I also came across Thomas Fly’s site on computing sun & moon transit by ISS with the aid of J-Pass.  His work had been referred to by many others, such as Science@NASA or Hobby Space. 

After watching Kevin’s video, I thought about it then went to check Thomas Fly’s site. Back in June 2005, he said that his server was busted and he would be unable to generate new alert email. However, I still seeing various reports saying that they received Thomas Fly’s email alert. A quick look at this report brought me to Ed Morana’s site showing many amazing videos of ISS Transit over the moon. After jumping through few hoops and back to Thomas Fly’s site, I also saw the link to the ISS Transit forum on yahoogroups. A quick scan through the forum home showed that there were many recent information there, so I signed up to join the group. I tried to sign up for email alert at Thomas Fly’s site but the link was broken. I will post an update if I find the info from the forum.

David Ransom lost his battle with congestive heart failure, passed away on 5 November. While it initially appeared that Dave would recover, things began failing one-by-one until he succumbed. Dave’s family was at his side at the end.

Like David Cottle said, “His passing on is a great sadness for the many people he has helped over the years and his friends who knew him.

He will be sadly missed.”

I still need to learn on how to change the blog header image so I went to pick up WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide) by Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan. But it will take me a while before I can replace this blue background with my own gif image shown below.   

 

BTW, I forgot to mention, last night I also bought the Real Blog Video after reading that it has been used by a friend of  mine. It’s a 8 sessions video with almost 2.5 hours of video plus another 3 sessions of 34 minutes of bonus video. This is what my friend wrote about that video in his blog: “For $15 you get about 2-3 hours of video. I found the videos very interesting and will follow the steps outlined in them to create a new blog, I will post its results here.” I thought the content is good and I will try to change my header image once I understand how to do it.