Continue reading »]]> Last summer when Saturn used to be at its best , high in sky I looked at it for the 1st time through a telescope and I was blown away by the beauty of its rings. This is a dream come true for any kid who wants to be an astronomer. It was like a milestone.  Yesterday I was doing a stargazing session and pointed my telescope at the rising Saturn again . It was a bit faint but I could not resist seeing in my own eyes again. It was about magnitude 0.7 yesterday.

I was using my Orion 90mm StarMax Table top due to lack of man power for carrying the large telescope. I used an eyepiece of 10mm to get magnification about 125X. Rings were very sharp and probably I also figured out the Cassini division. I could not locate the 9.7 magnitude Titan because it was near horizon and city light was blocking it.

I don’t  have the adapter for A-Focal photography yet but I took multiple shots with my digital camera succeeded in few of them and the sharpest I could take is as follows . I got this picture with ISO 1600, Exposure 1/40 and Aperture 3.3 and focus set to infinity.

The above picture covers Mars at the top in Leo and Saturn at the bottom in Virgo, I will post the annotated one soon.

Continue reading »]]> Today it has been exactly one month since I got my second apple device iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G 16 GB. First Apple Device was an iPod 5th Generation with 60 GB Space. Till now I am happy with the the iPad. I am not only blown away by the UI and Graphics but also the superior design and intuitiveness. I am definitely proud owner of the most desirable gadget of this time and the last product released by legendary Steve Jobs.

I love the following per-loaded feature in particular

1. Safari , one of the best browser on earth.
2. Google Maps at its best in iPad 2, made for each other.
3. Front camera is super while using Skype.
4. iBooks, PDFs looks awesome.
5. Works as Picture frame even when locked.
6. Facetime Quality .
7. Keyboad Splits wonderfully for typing while holding in landscape mode with thumbs
8. Push Notification , every news , calendar and Facebook post is right there at the top

Following are the things I did on iPad to suite my needs

1. All the apps I usually use for desktop like Dropbox , Google Maps etc
   
   
2. OPlayer HD lite for streaming movie files from computer using FileZilla FTP server and watching them in TV using a composite cable and adapter . Flex player is an ad free alternative but it can not stream or play in TV
3. Bought Stellarium-XL for Sky watching , its like Google sky map plus all feature of the Stellarium desktop version.
4. Installed the VPN setting for work, work seamlessly . I still have no solution for VPN in Android

I also bought a smart cover for iPad 2 , which beautifully sticks to the screen and useful as stand while typing and watching movies.

Continue reading »]]> Its strange how the permalink of the post was generated and completely changed the meaning. I neither celebrated new year’s day nor thought about resolution . I did not celebrate because it is not the only way to mark or measure the “new year” and no resolution (reminds me old joke about resolution of 800×600) because its never to late or early to change your habits. One should do it right away.

But celebration is good, especially for those who just need a chance to celebrate , whatever may be the reason.

Continue reading »]]> Problem

Lately I have been working on the Mozilla Firefox ‘s Android Version Fennec. And Linux was the most preferable place to setup the development environment. When I had created the VirtualBox Machine last year I never thought that  disk space requirement will grow more than 10 GB. While upgrading the Android SDK itself I ran out of space and as a work around I had to delete the older version of flatforms (Android-8 to Android-12). I needed only Android-13 and above. However while building it I faced shortage of disk space again and this time I had two choices , either tweak the existing virtual disk to increase the size or re-create the machine. re-creating machine is a costly option as I had to setup everything in that machine. This is why sometimes I believe virtual disk is better than native installation. At least if you take back up of the virtual disk and it will work for life long , even if you change the hardware.

Solution
I took help of the VirtualBox forum and came to know about a solution as follows.

1.Resize the virtual disk

D:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage modifyhd D:\VM\Ubuntu\Ubuntu.vdi -
-resize 20480
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100%

2.Download the Gparted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ ISO
3.Add the ISO as Virtual DISK Boot from the it using the same machine in Virtual Box
4.Resize the primary partition which is has low space and extend it to the unallocated space
5.delete the swap and then extend the first partition and make sure to leave enough at the end to add the swap back.

Thats all.

Continue reading »]]> This was last eclipse of the year. I had already missed the longest total lunar eclipse this year on 15th June because of bad weather. Unfortunately this time also it was cloudy when the eclipse started. However the sky became clear even before half of the moon was covered by earth’s shadow. Also I was at a place which was bit far from the city light, hence managed to capture some nearby stars also.

My friend and colleague Nikhil Tungare managed to take the full montage of the eclipse with Cyber Towers in the perspective.

He has also taken an amazing picture of totality.

I am waiting for pictures taken by few other photographer friends of mine and will post soon. Here is the album of few of other phases during the eclipse.

Continue reading »]]> It had been a while I bought a couple of telescopes but I had not used it outdoors yet. I had been using them only from my building terrace which is full of light pollution. I wanted to go out , at least with the small table top telescope. With encouragement from couple of my friends Srini and LSP we went to a nearby place where sky was relatively dark and one could see stars up to magnitude +4.5 (Naked eye limit in the darkest sky is about 6). This was just enough to see the the couple of stars (mu And and nu And) in Taurus which can be used to locate the M31 (Andromeda Galaxy, the only naked eye object outside our milky way ). We reached around 11pm on 17th Jan at the spot. I was expecting the moonrise at 12 midnight but to my surprise, the horizon was so low (we were at a higher place) that moon appeared at 11.30 itself. It was large and orange colored. We started setting up telescopes quickly to avoid moon light glare in sky. We only spotted very few objects as it was 1st session of this kind.

LSP immediately got busy shooting moon with his excellent photography skills and professional camera and lenses. Here is a 10 minutes exposure photo taken by him. All of us appear as faint shadows  as we kept moving around , in front of the camera

A long exposure photograph for 10 minutes. One can see our setup of telescopes and the rising moon in the background. I guess the trails in the top right are produced by the stars of the Orion constellation.

We looked at Moon,  Jupiter , four of its moon , Orion Nebula , M45 through the telescope with various magnification e.g. 50X and 125X, 225X using various eyepiece. Everybody except me were lucky enough to see some meteors of annual leonid shower also. I managed to take some long exposure photos of Orion , Canis Major , Canis Minor , Persius Taurus and Cassiopea.

We also tried some afocal photography with highest magnification. LSP was successful in taking a very sharp picture of moon and its craters after several attempts.

This is by far the closest I've seen of our Moon. Now count the craters there!! -LSP

Finally when constellation Leo rose  , we expected some more meteors but shining moon made lot of them invisible. Then the red planet Mars rose very close to Regulus (brightest star in Leo).

Continue reading »]]> My first telescope was a Celestron PowerSeeker 127EQ which was quite big to carry. I recently bought another small one , Orion StarMx 90mm table top. Thanks to my friends for delivering it all the way from USA to my house. This is a portable telescope with 90 mm of aperture which  good enough to see bright nebulae. This has a Maksutov-Cassegrain design because of  which it has a high focal length of 1250mm even tough the size of the main tube is small .  It does not have a tripod but can be mounted on ordinary photo tripods. The mount is alt-azimuth, i.e it move horizontally and vertically. It comes with a battery powered LED red dot view finder without any magnification , which makes visible naked eye  objects easy to center even with low focal length eyepiece with high  magnification. On the other hand my old telescope had a cross hair based finder-scope with some magnification which sometimes makes it difficult to spot objects because low field of view without adding to the brightness. This telescope came with two eyepiece one with 25mm focal length ( 50X magnification )  and another with 10mm (125X magnification)

I tried to do some afocal-photography using the telescope and my digital camera and managed to take the following pictures, which turned out to be better than the ones from 5 inch Newtonian telescope.

Overall , the clarity was marginally better in this telescope as compared to the previous one for the bright objects like moon and Jupiter even tough it’s aperture is  smaller. Also since this one is portable I can take this to nearby darker places for better viewing.

Continue reading »]]>

Google Hangout has been a coll feature where people can do video conferencing for free and it is totally web based. I have been a regular listener of AstronomyCast who were recording their episode 236 live in a Google hangout session on 24th October 2011. It was great to be in the live recording session with Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain along with other people having interest in astronomy. The interaction session before and Q&A session after the recording was great. Here is a clip I had recorded during the session.

The topic of this episode was “Einstein was right” . Pamela and Fraser cited many evidences which tells us how accurate the predictions made by Einstein’s general and special theory of relativity were  You can download the podcast mp3 here or listen in the following player. if you want to join the next recording session , you can Circle Pamela or Fraser so that they can invite you the hangout session.

Continue reading »]]> After a long break finally Oracle Hyderabad team were invited to ICRISAT for a friendly match inside the ICRISAT campus on 22nd October Saturday. After so much of practice at our campus nets our team was desperately looking for some practice match (even if it was on mat). We played there last year and beat them with considerable margin however they claimed that their star players were unavailable and finally we had to give them couple of our players to play from their side. That was eventually my last match in that season before I got busy in some courses in IIIT. I had ended up in a high note with a couple of wickets in the same over. This time they were ready with full strength but we had couple of our key players like Captain and Vice-Captain missing. However our line up looked on good paper with a lot of batting depth unlike other tournaments where a lot of bowlers are available and usually bowlers are seen in the bench.

ICRISAT is my second most favorite ground in Hyderabad not only because it has  a lot of greenery around but also one can do other activities like swimming and lawn tennis in the campus. Infosys cricket ground tops my list hence we call it South Africa in our team.

Finally match started around 10 AM local time . It was bright sunny day with an average of 32 degree centigrade.  Oracle won the toss and batted first to set a target of 133 in allotted 20 overs.  Thanks to Debraj who batted in the lower middle for a change and helped to reach this decent total. Ankit hit a couple of big shots to get some quick runs and Sriram almost carried the bat through the innings. The ground was big with a lot of big and hard grass. Hence boundaries were difficult to hit.  ICRISAT despite  getting a good start kept loosing wickets , thanks to back to back wickets by Raja. Finally ICRISAT were all out for 120 with 5 balls to spare when I got the last wicket in the first ball of the last over of the innings. Our overall performance was good but we gave a way too many wides.

We are looking forward to match again in next Saturday !

Continue reading »]]> Today I spoke on creating RESTful  webservice using JAX-RS at SiliconIndia JAVA conference held at Green park Hotel Hyderabad. It was great to see the professional audience and top people from the Industry like Lalit Balchandani, Jay Pullur , Shastry Kuppa and Ashish Sarin speaking about JAX-WS, Spring Rooand Agile project management. There were also sessions touching cloud computing topics like BigData and Mapreduce.

The chief sponsor Tata Mcraw-Hill Presented me the book “ANDROID, a programmer’s guide by Jerome DiMarzio.