Light Pollution Map for Target Area

 

Purple is bad: Bortle class 6. Surrounding zones are class 5, then class 4.

What is Bortle?

If you have never been to a Bortle class 1-3 sky, you have missed so much.

The Explore Scientific iEXOS 100-2 Mount I Bought

I bought this because I wanted a small easy to transport mount for public astronomy with my Televue-85. That it was a goto mount just made the.$300 price all the better.  It is very well made so I was very disappointed when it started behaving erratically a few days after it arrived  

The factory said it was fine. When it came back, i suspected the problem was that it needed more than 12V to operate; goto mounts demand a lot while slowing across the sky 

It now appears that the intermittent problems that I am seeing hs because the bundled ExploreStars app is, in the words of SuperGrok, "abandonware": software free but largely forgotten by its authors and supported like they no longer remember their child. It works but unreliable enough that few people use it.

What most owners of the mount use are ASCOM (a standard free Windows driver package) or INDI (the Linux equivalent). Planetarium programs such as Carte du Ciel and Stellarium can control the mount through the ASCOM drivers telling it where to go (ditto for KStars in Linux). So using a laptop, not a tablet or cellphone. This takes away much of the simplicity of a small tablet.

Kstars under Linux is pretty clumsy to control the mount. Setting these up under either Linux or Windows is clumsy because you are either on the Internet reading instructions or connected to the mounts server, not both. Lots of disconnecting and reconnecting. I ordered a USB WiFi adapter so that I can have both open at the same time. I have done this before in the 1980s where I set up a PC with two Ethernet cards to create a LAN analyzer, so i know it can be done.

In any case, if it turns out to be too clumsy to use for goto, it is still a nice compact mount for public astronomy. 

UPDATE: I spent some time with the manual for Explore Stars (which does not match the app), some time with SuperGrok, and some analyzing what it seems to want to do. I think i have ExploreStars app figured out. I will try this tonight.

UPDATE 2: Up too late gathering documents for the HELOC.

HELOC

I have been looking at a way to get a bridge mortgage as a backup in case closing of current house is delayed past closing date of new house.  My credit union loan officer made a/pretty brilliant proposal: take a Home Equity Line of Credit on the old house. If we need to pay cash when closing date arrives, we pay for it with the HELOC, then when the old house closes, it pays off the HELOC.

If there are no surprises between offer on old house and closing, we do not need to use any of it. If there are, we have a few months of hefty payments on the HELOC before sale of old house.

AI

 5/30/26 Axios:

AI tools might be hallucinating less, but they're still spitting out inaccurate answers cloaked in polished, hyper-confident language....

Driving the news: New research suggests AI note-taking tools (often called AI scribes) can help in medical settings, but only in tandem with professional reviewers.

• A Yale School of Medicine study this month found that first-year medical students who revised their own clinical notes with AI-generated drafts generally maintained note quality.
• But the AI notes themselves often omitted important details, including symptom duration.
• Two-thirds of students said the notes were "helpful as a first draft," but 21% said the note taker "may reduce my ability to learn how to write a good note."

Looking at the papers submitted by my students this last semester, I saw a lot of this: very polished prose, drawing confidential conclusions with weak or no supporting evidence. And of course, hallucinate sources.

I use SuperGrok for some tasks in the shop or for astronomy, but I have learned mostly to use it as a really good search engine. It makes enough mistakes that I never completely trust it 

Sorting Mementos and Junk for the Move

Do any of you have a cassette to digital capacity. Let me really stretch: 1600 dpi 9 track magtape?

Do They Have Frigidity Problems?

 From an open source science journal:

Glaciers are rapidly retreating worldwide duto anthropogenic climate change, with severe implications not only for ecosystems and water security but also for cultural memory, emotional wellbeing, and environmental justice. In the Andes, glaciers are more than reservoirs of ice—they are living beings within Indigenous cosmologies, ancestral knowledge systems, and everyday life. This essay explores the cultural, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of glacial loss, focusing on Andean communities who view glaciers as sacred entities..

Glaciers as more-than-human beings

Is it that hard for an editor to say, "Yes, I understand that indigenous cultures have strong mythological beliefs about glacierz but that does mean we mistake that for science. Find whatever journal Carlos Castaneda editing now for this article."

You're Having a Bad Day? Ask These Candles How Their Days Have Gone!

I used to by mistake use these to make the bearings on my Dobsonian move more smoothly. (That does not work. Clean them thoroughly instead, especially of any candle wax.) I kept them in the telescope in the last house. Think of the punishment "hot house' in Cool Hand Luke or the marvelous parody in Take the Money and Run, where the protagonist is locked in a hot house for two days with a life insurance salesman.