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Episode 98 Astrophotography with Nik Szymanek

By Gurbir Dated: October 18, 2021 Leave a Comment

Nik Syzamnek is one of the UK’s leading astrophotographers and one who has been doing it for almost four decades.

Nik Szymanek

In this episode, Nik shares his unique perspective on how the hobby of astronomy and especially astrophotography has evolved since the 1980s when he first started.

We cover a lot of ground including modern software used for image processing and telescope control, increasing use of robotic telescopes e.g. Telescope Live by amateurs and the obstacles introduced by Climate Change and the mega-constellations of satellites. We conclude this episode on his lesser-known skills as a drummer in a band.

Books
2005 – Infinity Rising: A Personal View of the Universe
2018 – Co-author of – Spacerocks: A collectors’ guide to meteorites, tektites and impactites
2020 – Shooting Stars – 2nd Edition (AstronomyNow website)

Nik’s images on Flickr.

https://media.blubrry.com/astrotalkuk_podcast_feed/p/astrotalkuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Episode98NikSzymanek.mp3

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A video of this interview is also available here on Youtube and includes many of his images.

As the lock-down begins to end – Nik is getting out and doing some talks live. If you are in the area – catch him live in 2021 here


2nd November: Stour Astronomical Society
17th November; Havering Astronomical Society twitter.com/HaveringSociety

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Episode 97 Bob Heil’s Moon Bounce Experiment with NASA

By Gurbir Dated: October 8, 2021 Leave a Comment

Bob Heil

Bob Heil is a sound engineer and has been an amateur radio operator since the 1950s. In addition to working on live stage shows for some of the legends of rock and roll (including Grateful Dead, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton ..). His first job was playing the organ in a 4-star restaurant called Schneithorst where in around 1962 he bumped into America’s first astronaut Alan Shepard. By chance, Alan Shepard’s was had grown up in a family with an interest in organs.

What emerged out of this encounter was an unexpected Moon-bounce experiment that involved Bob at his home in Illinois receiving a phone call from NASA in Houston, he patched the phone call through his radio and pointed his 128 element array antenna operating at 2m to the Moon. The reflection was picked up by a receiver directly by NASA in Houston. This was in the early 1960s and Bob never quite understood why NASA asked for his involvement. It would have been very easy for NASA to conduct this experiment without it.

128 Element Array used for the Moon-Bounce experiment
That is Bob in the centre of the image!

Bob is a great storyteller and has many unique stories to tell from a career spanning 6 decades. A few of the other topics we cover include the advent of DTH satellite TV in the USA and some of the work done by Bell Labs. He can be contacted here k9eid@arrl.net

A longer version of this interview is available on Youtube. Bob shares many of the pictures that you can hear him discussing. Link below.

https://media.blubrry.com/astrotalkuk_podcast_feed/p/astrotalkuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Episode97BobHeil.mp3

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A video of this interview where Bob shares many images relevant to the themes discussed is available here.

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Facebook Outage – The bigger they are the harder they fall

By Gurbir Dated: October 6, 2021 Leave a Comment

Suddenly, at 16:51 on 4th October 2021, Facebook disappeared from the Internet for all the 3 billion users no matter where in the world they were. There was no warning, and the experience was identical for the head of a large commercial organisation as it was for a first-year university student using a low-cost android phone. Users of Instagram and WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, suffered the same experience. The outrage started at 16:50 BST and returned at 22:20 BST. The impact was high because Facebook, a single company, is so large.

Facebook Availability. Source Cloudflare

The “what and why” is gradually emerging. The most surprising thing for me is that t was NOT a cyber attack. There was no malicious software, no ransomware, no Ddos and no hackers or disgruntled former employees. However, by chance, just before the outage, a former Facebook employee in the US now a whistleblower, Frances Haugen was providing testimony to Congress that Facebook prioritised profit over harm to children.

Facebook explained on their 259-word blog post the cause, “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication”. Many independent sources provided an explanation including Reuters and Cloudflare.

The failure that prevented users from accessing Facebook also obstructed Facebook engineers attempting to fix it. Apparently, the systems used by Facebook for physical and logical access to its own buildings were also affected by the same outage.

In simple terms, the error involved two of the internet’s many interconnected sub-systems. The Domain Name System (DNS) and the Border Gateway Protocol. The DNS converts a URL like facebook.com to an IP address of a server (one of many around the world) hosting the Facebook application. The BGP provides routing information services on the Internet. In this case, it allows data from one Facebook Datacenter in say South Africa to find another in Norway.

Like signs on the motorway, the BGP provides drivers’ directions for their destination. The “configuration change” that went wrong on 4th October, meant that suddenly all the motor signs (the BGP) went blank (and DNS could no longer see Facebook). The drivers could not see how to get to their destination and the traffic came to a halt.

Although the outage lasted for just 6 hours, it had a huge global impact on individuals, businesses and governments that rely on Facebook for communication, data transfer, payments and education.

Facebook did not explain why this update, something they would have done many times in the past, went awry. It is unclear if this was a planned or unscheduled update nor why there was no simple regression mechanism in place for exactly these eventualities.

However, independent security specialists cannot rule the possibility of sabotage or other sinister activity.

This outage was limited to one company, albeit with a huge user base. A similar outage for Google, Amazon or Apple would potentially have a larger impact, affecting many more applications and businesses. The internet was designed and built around TCP/IP (Transaction Control / Internet Protocol). It has resilience at its core. That resilience still stands. This incidence illustrates the age-old problem of too many eggs (users) in a single basket (Facebook).

Quick update.

Down detector recorded a further Facebook outage for a few hours starting late on October 8th in to the early hours of the 9th. This was a far less significant outage that lasted just a coupe of hours and probably had a differrent cause thsn Monday’s. Here is how CNN reported it.

Facebook has provided a further update explaining the 4th October outage.

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Episode 96 Seti – The search so far with Jill Tarter

By Gurbir Dated: October 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Allen Telescope Array. Source Seti.org

The Earth is one ordinary planet of many orbiting one typical sun of many in an unremarkable galaxy, the milky way one of the countless numbers in an ever-expanding universe.

Since the beginning of human civilisation, people have looked up at the night sky and wondered – are we alone? Science and technology of the 20th century has made it possible to try to address that question. So how is are we doing?

What have been the near-misses? How has the search evolved since then what are the current prospects of detecting a signal?

Jill Tarter from @SETIInstitute has worked on a number of major scientific projects, most relating to the search for extraterrestrial life and attempt to answer the question ”Are we alone in the universe.  The 1997 Hollywood film ‘Contact’ starring Jodi Foster was largely based on her work. 

As the former director of the Seti Institute, she explains when Seti research began, the technology used, how it is funded and the global collaborative international endeavour it has now become. 

https://media.blubrry.com/astrotalkuk_podcast_feed/p/astrotalkuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Episode-95-Current-Status.mp3

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A video of the interview on which this episode is based is available on youtube.

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