Sunday, May 21, 2017

22° Halo around the sun for half a day

Amazing.. the 22° halo could be seen almost the entire morning. I was able to experiment with my camera settings and the picture below was taken with following settings : f/10 18mm ISO100 1/4000s



More Pictures on 22° Circular Halo


Some more pictures of the 22° circular halo around the sun which could be observed this morning @Averbode.

22° Circular Solar Halo @ Averbode

WOW! First time ever I'm witnessing a full halo around the sun. Before, the halo was not entirely full but this morning the 22° halo was circular. A fantastic phenomen easily seen with the naked eye but difficult to photograph.


Hidden Figures


This movie tells the story of three African American female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the space race. Katherine Johnson was part of the Space Task Group and was the first woman getting credit as an author of a research report within the Flight Research Division of NASA. Dorothy Vaughan was the first black supervisor at NASA and working with the IBM7070 using programming language Fortran (which I also used during my engineering degree late 80's).
Mary Jackson became the first black female engineer at NASA and did major contribution towards wind tunnel modelling.

An very interesting movie giving background how things were done during the space race. Today we have computers... at that time all was done using manually!

Bigger Can for Solargraph


Uptill now I always used 500ml cans for making my solargraphs. During my visit in the US I found a bigger can with a volume of 710 ml or 24 Ounces. I will prepare both cans for my solargraphs and expose them  between June and Decemeber. I really hope this 710 ml can is able to capture the sunpath entirely.





Saturday, May 20, 2017

Urania Closing the Year

This morning Observatory Urania organised their annual closing meeting. After the presentation on administrative aspects a very interesting overview was given on art and astronomy from ancient history uill today.
Once completed, participants from last year's lectures received their certificats ... including myself as I attended Astrophysics.