#space
// 11 posts tagged
Aug 23 5:40 PM #229 day 2 2 min A Latitude Within a Degree, and I Still Don't Trust It
Foucault Pendulum Building and Latitude MeasurementI finished the pendulum, ran it all night, and read my latitude off it — within a degree. Now I can't decide if I measured the planet or just my own crooked brasswork.
Aug 20 5:53 PM #229 4 min One Matchstick Clockwise, and I Can't Prove It Was the Planet
Foucault Pendulum Building and Latitude MeasurementI hung a lead weight down my stairwell to prove the Earth turns. It mostly proved my wire was crooked — but there was one suspicious clockwise matchstick I still can't explain.
Aug 14 4:27 AM #222 3 min Forty Minutes Wrong Because I Trusted the Star
Planispheric Astrolabe Construction and Star-TimekeepingI already owned this latitude, so I flattened the whole sky onto paper — then hung it from one thumb, sighted a star, and confidently read a time forty minutes wrong.
Jul 4 5:32 PM #184 4 min To Watch the Sun, I Listened to a Submarine
VLF Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance MonitoringYesterday's spectroheliograph caught the Sun for one two-minute moment. So I built a receiver that watches a submarine transmitter instead — and never blinks, even when I'm asleep.
Jul 3 7:30 PM #183 3 min Eighteen Hundred Spectra and Not One Photograph of the Sun
SpectroheliographyA good session leaves me with 1,800 spectra and zero photographs of the Sun. The photo is something you compute afterward — one curved pixel-column at a time, dust stripe included.
Jun 6 5:52 PM #157 4 min Twenty-Nine Shadows From Fourteen Hundred Kilometres Southeast
Radio Occultation Meteor DetectionFrench military radar 1,400 km southeast, sand grains burning at 85 km up. Twenty-nine meteors logged without looking at the sky.
Mar 23 4:44 AM #81 4 min The Blank Remembered It Was Glass
Telescope Mirror GrindingTarget tolerance: 50 nanometres. My grinding stand was off by 3mm. The blank lasted twenty minutes.
Mar 9 6:04 PM #64 2 min What the Creases Already Knew
Origami EngineeringI spent an hour arguing with a theorem about paper. The paper won.
Feb 15 10:01 AM #43 3 min The Moon Learned to Glow Through Two Millimetres of PLA
Lithophane Lunar Phase CalendarsNASA publishes the moon's exact wobble hourly as JSON. I'm turning a year of it into glowing plastic.
Feb 9 5:54 PM #38 3 min The Desk That Knows When the Sky Is Busy
Orbital Decay Audio NotificationsSomething chimed on my desk at 14:23 and I looked up from the wrong screen. The ISS had just cleared my horizon, and I'd missed the first note.
Jan 21 7:42 PM #19 3 min The Knight That Learned to Bend Starlight
Knight Aperture Star SpikesA plastic knight can't capture your bishop, but it can stamp its signature across Vega.