I've spent a good deal of time in the last few days searching for a good library to draw star charts (finder charts) that I could use to integrate with AstroChallenge. While there are plenty of utilities to create star maps, they mostly consist of desktop software or websites that are not open source.

Eventually I found fchart which resembled was I was looking for. A set of python scripts with minimal dependencies that would output star maps! This I could use.

After much ado, the latest map from GraniteMaps is now available. This map covers 2 distinct areas; The first is Soquel Demonstration Forest, well known in the mountain biking community as having miles of challenging, technical singletrack. The other is the Forest of Nisene Marks which shares a ridge with Demo and provides trail users of all types some of the most pristine redwood forest trails available in California.

This new map is much improved over the last version for Santa Cruz by having a brand new base layer. This is a custom topographic map I designed myself (detailed in this post) which combines OpenStreetMap and SRTM data to create a concise, easy to read map. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks everyone for your kind words and support! The reception I received for the Santa Cruz map was fantastic, far exceeding anything I could have imagined while creating it!

www.granitemaps.com

I've been working on new project recently called AstroChallenge. While the details of what exactly AstroChallenge is will have to come later, rest assured, it has to do with Astronomy.

One of the bits of information I'm interested in is whether a particular celestial object is visible in the sky or not. Given an observer's latitude, longitude and elevation and an object's right ascension and declination it becomes a straightforward calculation.

I met Amalia at the Thessaloniki Pythess (Python) meetup (at which I gave one awkward english presentation) which had migrated to a lounge under the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. I thought the museum looked pretty cool, so I decided I would go the next day. I propositioned the group to see if anyone else was interested in joining me, Amalia was the only one brave enough to to say so.

We spent a few good hours at the museum and various other historical points of interest around the city. While walking down some buzzing, narrow street Amalia told me a great story about how it is that Greeks came to find themselves in Greece:

Here I am in Istanbul (not Constantinople) the city on the Bosporus, the ribbon of land separating Europe from Asia and the Black sea from the Sea of Marmara and thus the Aegean to the East. As my plane glided downward and spiraled towards the glittering city I thought about the Golden Fleece and if it had seen a similar view on it's journey from Greece to Turkey 3 thousand years ago.

The goal of GraniteMaps is to provide accurate and educational maps for people participating in outdoor activities, so a large part of the project is creating maps that are pleasing to the eye.

The map displayed in granitemaps is actually two layers: the "base map" and the trail layer. The base map is is responsible for displaying the details of the map's area such as land boundaries, rivers/lakes, major roads and elevation. The trail layer is an overlay of the actual trails and points of interest.

My coworker recently complained to me how hard it was to find a simple "Hello World" program in AngularJS. I did a google search and found that indeed, all the simplest examples still asked the user to set up a bunch of boilerplate, file structure, etc.

Here is the simplest Hello World in AngularJS I could come up with, and it still shows 2 way binding:

This will most likely be my last "Photographing X space thing" where X is some object we studied in Observational Astronomy at Cabrillo College. The first was Comet Jacques, a small icy object moving within our solar system. Next up was the beautiful Great Nebula in Orion, a star factory near to us in our own galaxy. Here finally we have the Triangulum Galaxy one of the closest galaxies in our local group.

It was a bit low in the sky, so the photo turned out slightly noisy. Overall, I'm again pleased with the result.

Astronomy 8A at Cabrillo was a great experience and I would recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in Astronomy. Hanging out with cool people 3 hours once a week, playing with telescopes, and taking photos on the big one in the dome? Yes please, will do again.

The winter skies bring new treasures. The Great Nebula in Orion, also known as Messier 42, or just the Orion Nebula, is one of the brightest nebula in the night sky located in, you guessed it, Orion. The nebula is actually visible to the naked eye: to find it look at Orion and locate the 3 "stars" that make up his "sheath". The middle star is not a star, it is the nebula.

Being so bright, M42 is one of the most photographed objects in the night sky so it was just a matter of waiting for it to be high enough for us to shoot at Cabrillo College. We took a series of 5 minute exposures, and after a bit of processing this is the result. It is a bit out of focus, but strikingly beautiful nonetheless.

This is Comet Jacques. There are many photos of it online, but this one is mine.

This photo was taken on September 23rd, 2014 when the comet was about 1AU from earth, using a SBIG ST2000XCM color CCD camera mounted on a 12" Meade LX200.

It was a little late to be photographing this comet, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to caputre it. And with all the excitement about the Rosetta mission recently, I thought it would be a great time to fix up the image. So here it is.