Astronomy

Recently my Manager started blogging. Despite my initial cynicism it’s actually turning out to be a pretty good blog, and the comments are great. Communication about patches is an area that Sun could improve in. What they are, how they are created, how they can be installed, when they can be installed, and when and what you should patch are all areas that I’ve received customer queries about. Patch Automation Tools is Gerry’s most commented Read more

Live Upgrade is a feature of Solaris that lets you create alternate boot environments. This makes it easy to switch between OS builds at boot time, but also make upgrading much easier, less risky, and quicker. This extends to patching too.   I recently received a query from a customer asking how we ensure that patches installed via live upgrade do not interfere with the running system. As well as ensuring that the patch applies Read more

James A. Van Allen died yesterday age 91. Van Allen made the first great discovery of the space age, with his instruments on the very first american spacecraft, Explorer 1. The largest Earthly “object”, the Van Allen radiation belt, is named after him. http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/vanallen.html It sad to see one of the last great space age pioneers passing on. Read more

According to eclipse chasers you can count seeing a solar eclipse, just by being in the path of totality. So technically my trip to Cornwall, UK in 1999 for the Solar Eclipse there counts. Despite it being raining for the morning of the eclipse. The next total Solar Eclipse that I managed to get to was on March 28th. The trip was organised under the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies, and unberella group of all Read more

Dave McDonald sent a post to the Irish Astronomy forum the other day announcing that he had confirmed a supernova. As with many sciences once you make a discovery, it needs to be verified before you are taken seriously, and Dave was asked to verify the discovery and did so with rather modest equipment. The image below was recorded with an 8″ telescope, and a $300 ccd camera; granted the mount he uses is large Read more

I dont usually put up non computing topics, but since this talk is well worth attending… We are delighted to announce that we have got the well known and eminent Guy Consolmagno to give us our talk next Thursday in Gonzaga. Guy is speaking at Whirlpool in Birr which begins on the Friday after our meeting and with the help and influence of Gonzaga he has kindly consented to come a day early and give Read more

Dublin played host to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. Up until a few days before the event only the professionals and amateur astronomers were aware of the event. What was organised well in advance were the public lectures, on the opening day of the conference, Kip Thorne, best known publicly for his book on black holes and the conference ended with a talk from Roger Penrose, probably best known for his Read more