Astronomy Stuff

[Michael Helgeson]

I think Earth is the ONLY planet that has living things. NASA is just wasting their time and the government's money putting 2XL in Mars. 

Nintega,go troll elsewhere,mainly youtube where you belong.

@ Aaron,yea I thought you might like that new bit on comcast news,def interesting stuff. If I come across others Ill def post links here.

[Pcenginefx]

So this brings up another item that I've been participating in - SETI.  Anyone else doing any active SETI number crunching here?  I currently have 11 PCs crunching radio data from SETI and am working on making a (cheap) server farm just dedicated to distributed computing (for when I decide to stop doing SETI work).  The first PC for the farm is coming in a few days and this is what I got:

$49.95 - IN WIN IW-BT611T.300SL Silver Best Performed 0.8mm SECC Japanese Steel metal MicroATX Desktop Computer Case 300W Power Supply

$39.99 - PC Chips A1G5 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
$19.99 - Wintec Ampx 1GB RAM
$34.99 - Excelstor Jupiter Series ESJ8080S 80GB HDD
$77.00 - AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Brisbane 2.7GHz CPU
TOTAL: $221.96 (with shipping from Newegg is $249.86)

What's great about this PC is that it is cheap, low power, small form factor and has a fairly powerful dual-core CPU.  For a number crunching machine this is perfect.

So why am I doing this?  Well I'm currently hooked on increasing my SETI rank for daily work units done.  I currently rank 39,308 out of about 835,000 active users..mostly because I have a quad-core and 5 dual-core machines crunching 24/7.  If you have never seen a SETI stats page, check mine out...it will show you more stats data than you can shake a stick at: http://boincstats.com/stats/user_graph.php?pr=sah&id=416925

On another note, I went back outside last night with the webcam/telescope and recorded video footage of the moon and Jupiter.  Let's just say that the video footage of Jupiter was way worse than I was expecting (no moons visible, very blurry).  I'll post up some video later tonight.

[ceti alpha]

That's awesome Aaron. I've considered doing the ceti...err...SETI thing.

[Keranu]

I used SETI for a little bit, but stopped using it because of the used up memory.

[Pcenginefx]

If you haven't tried SETI in a while (say years) then you should check it out now - it's part of BOINC (an open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing) so you don't download SETI's client anymore, but just the BOINC client, then tell it what projects you want to be part of then off it goes.  Makes it really easy to see exactly what you are doing for the project and if you want to help crunch other projects, the BOINC client makes that easy as well (for example you can tell the client to crunch SETI for 1/2 day and another project the rest of the day). 

There is also cool little add-on apps you can run with it as well like SETI Mapview, which shows you a skymap displaying what part of the sky you are crunching, as well as finished work units and the signal strength for each unit (green means no signal detected, yellow and red are sent back to SETI for followup.



There's another project that just came online called Milkyway@Home which is the research in modeling and determining the evolution of the Milkyway galaxy (http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/) but there are a ton of projects that anyone can help out computing.  For a complete list, go here (just mouse-over the project titles for a description): http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

[Pcenginefx]

"The Universe and the search for ET"...very good recent History Channel documentary!

[ceti alpha]

Thanks for posting this stuff Aaron. I think I'll -*gasp*- download this documentary and watch it tonight. I love space documentaries. I actually have a special folder in my computer/xbmc called "space documentaries". If you know of any other cool docs, don't be shy. 

[Pcenginefx]

My cheap dual-core box just came in and it's running SETI now.  Estimated workload looks good but will have to wait a few days to see what this baby can crank out.  Funny thing is that this $250 PC looks like it might match the work my $2000 iMac is doing :O

I'm using sci-fi related naming for all these new machines and have decided the first box to be named "Celestra":



And here is the nametag I created for the box:

[Joe Redifer]

You forgot to add the RAM specs.  Also the video card and sound card specs are a must.  Also the sticker needs specs for the cooling fan and maybe the all available external connectors like USB, Firewire, etc. 

[Michael Helgeson]

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-science/20080619/Phoenix.Mars/

[Pcenginefx]

You forgot to add the RAM specs.  Also the video card and sound card specs are a must.  Also the sticker needs specs for the cooling fan and maybe the all available external connectors like USB, Firewire, etc. 

RAM I might add, but the rest doesn't matter in my case...video and sound are on the mobo and makes no difference to the speed of the number crunching. 

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-science/20080619/Phoenix.Mars/

Yah I've been following reports on the Phoenix lander almost daily.  Here are some links directly from the people in the know:

The Planetary Society Blog (daily blogging with info direct from the scientists - highly recommended)
http://planetary.org/blog/

NASA's Phoenix Lander News (also updated daily)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/index.html

Space.com Phoenix Lander Thread (up-to-the-minute discussion on the lander and events)
http://www.space.com/common/community/forums/?plckForumPage=ForumDiscussion&plckDiscussionId=Cat%3ac7921f8b-94ec-454a-9715-3770aac6e2caForum%3abf7b9387-46b4-47ed-ad5b-34a5350b82ecDiscussion%3a9a92d6c4-86a5-4b35-8183-6c97a30c6f8c&plckCategoryCurrentPage=0

[guyjin]

they found water ice 

http://laist.com/2008/06/19/ice_water_found_on_mars.php

[ceti alpha]

lolmax!!! He said "w00t". 

That's awesome though. And boy, do I ever want a Mars globe.

[Pcenginefx]

As promised, here are some vids I took with the cheap telescope and 360 vision camera.

"Traffic Test"


Moon


Jupiter

[ceti alpha]

Neat.

It's amazing to see Jupiter even like that, but you must be super happy to now be able to see Jupiter and all its colourful gas clouds.