Short video of Saturn through the telescope

Just came home from work, and wanted to glance at Saturn through my Meade ETX-125AT telescope. Wow, I had never seen it so sharply - I could even make up the orange color of the planet. The planet is very far, and at that distance human eye can’t make out the color and the planet tends to appear in gray-scale, or B&W. It also appeared to be at a slightly different angle then when I saw it before. I may be wrong though: maybe it was visible better and crisper then before, so it appeared to be different. It seemed the distance between rings and the planet was bigger, so I assumed that the North pole of the planet was tilted more toward me, or the angle of the rings changed over time. I don’t know if that’s actually happening. Let me know. [googlevideo:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2509405887317532341] Anyway, I ran for my camera, Canon EOS 20D and put it into rear port of the telescope. Set up the frame and… oh, no. The battery is dead! OK, no problem, let’s get a small camera, a 7.1MP Canon A620 point-and-shoot, and try to record the video. Attached the camera to the eyepiece. Dang, I need to work faster before the planet moves out of the view from my balcony! “Dinner is ready!”, I heard. “5 minutes!”, said I. By the time I installed the camera, the planet moved out of the telescope, so I took the remote and tried to point telescope to the planet again, using camera’s LCD screen to find it. Crap! I can’t find it. Gotta remove the camera from the eyepiece, find the planet, center it in the eyepiece and reattach the camera. OK, Saturn is centered, quickly attach the camera, try not to shake the scope too much or else the alignment will be ruined again. Great, I have the planet on the LCD. Rotate the focuser. The planet still looks small on LCD, try to zoom in. Ok, focus is set pretty well, start recording. Oh, no! At the total magnification ratio of 1900mm/26mm = 73, plus 4.5x zoom on the camera for a total magnification of 328 times! Problem is, now the camera feels 4.5 times more shaking, and the planet moves across the screen at 4 times the speed, so I have to use hand-box to pan the telescope to track the planet. Unfortunately, the speed to tracking far exceeded the speed of the planet movement (it doesn’t actually move, it’s just the Earth rotates) and I could not find it anymore. Time to pack up and have dinner. Watch the video! It’s compressed, so some information is lost. The sharpest view of the planet is the first 10 seconds and 0:30 through 0:36. I kept messing with the focuser to make it sharper, but it’s hard to do by viewing a tiny planet on a tiny LCD which has a very low resolution. I am not entirely disappointed with results. This video is a lot of fun to watch in slow motion or frame by frame. So enjoy! ()

The death of HD-DVD: Toshiba abandons HD-DVD.
It has become known on Saturday that Toshiba will abandon its HD-DVD format, resulting in the complete victory for Blu-Ray by companies like Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Hitachi and Sharp. The format war has been going on since 2003. HD-DVD format has many advantages over Blu-Ray, but Sony and its partners had managed to attract movie studios, one by one, on its side. With fewer titles that will be available on HD-DVD, more studios and later consumer electronics retailers like Best Buy had decided to support Blu-Ray exclusively. The tide in the war has turned completely after Warner Bros. studio decided to switch from HD-DVD to Blu-Ray. Soon after Netflix has announced that they will become Blu-Ray-only shop, while Blockbuster had been offering only Blu-Ray for more then a year now. The last nail in the coffin of HD-DVD has delivered by WalMart’s announcement on Friday that they too will sell off their HD-DVD inventory and offer only Blu-Ray starting from June. Toshiba has fought back with reduced hardware prices, but the move has been too little too late to turn the tide. Toshiba still makes laptops with HD-DVD drives, and will probably continue making them for while, but they will stop new developments. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats deliver same quality of video, they even use same codec, but are incompatible on hardware level. Because of this consumers were waiting on sidelines for the format war to end. Now Blu-Ray has become the only choice. However, Blu-ray hardware is at least $200 more expensive then any of the HD-DVD players. Hopefully for consumers the prices will go down as more manufacturers begin producing Blu-Ray players. The problem with existing Blu-Ray players, however, is that Blu-Ray format specification was not finalized when early players were rushed to market in response to Toshiba and LG releasing their HD-DVD players. HD-DVD specification was finalized at that time, and mandated certain features to be implemented in all players, such as network/Internet connectivity and minimum 256KB of flash memory. As the result, many of the early adopters of Blu-ray players had received inferior products that are hard or impossible to upgrade. Consumers were upset, which resulted in the recent class action lawsuit against Samsung for claiming to support Blu-Ray profile 1.1, but in fact weren’t even implementing all of the features defined in Profile 1.0 of the Blu-Ray specification. Blu-Ray profile 2.0 should be ratified by autumn of 2008, and only a hand-full of players are upgradable to the new Blu-Ray format. In fact at the latest Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas the only player that was recommended by the Blu-Ray Alliance was a game console - Sony’s PlayStation 3. It’s the only future-proof Blu-Ray player on the market right now. It too has it’s downsides, like absence of infra-red remote - PS3 used Bluetooth connectivity for all remotes. That and other reasons like high cost may keep Blu-Ray from being widely adopted even now, after the death of HD-DVD. It may well be that Blu-Ray itself is doomed to die or become a tiny niche soon, replaced by video downloads. ** Update (Feb 24, 2008) ** Microsoft today accounced that it will discontinue production of its HD-DVD add-on for their XBox gaming consoles. They, however, will still provide warranty services on estimated 300,000 existing XBox HD-DVD players. ()

Movies to see this weekend (Feb 08, 2008)
Opening in theatres in wide release:

• Fool’s Gold (2008) PG-13 113min - Action/Adventure/Romance. Matthew McConaughey plays Ben Finn Finnegan, a treasure hunter on the hunt for legendary 1715 century Queen’s Dowry lost at sea, while trying to keep his wife Tess Finnegan (Kate Hudson) from leaving him. Ben Finn discovers a clue and convinces owner of the yacht where his wife’s is working to go after the treasure. But they aren’t the only ones who know about it - his mentor also wants to claim it.
• Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (2008) PG-13 - Comedy. A.k.a. The Better Man. Martin Lawrence plays a successful talk show host who was picked on by his family when he was a kid, heads home to Georgia to the parent’s 50th anniversary with his 10-year old son and diva bride-to-be. He plans to prove to his parents that he has it made. But his family calls him on his attitude and he takes a hard look at what kind of man he had become

• The Band’s Visit (2007) PG-13 1h 26min - Art/Foreign(Israel/France/USA)/Comedy/Drama/Musical. A.k.a. Bikur Ha-Tizmoret. A small brass band comprised of members of Egyptian Police arrives in Israel for the ceremony at the Arab center. When they are left stranded at the airport, the band tries to make their way on their own, only to find themselves lost in a desolate, small Israeli town in the heart of the desert. This movie about Israeli-Egyptian relations has 28 wins and 8 nominations.
• The Hottie and The Nottie (2008) PG-13 1h 31min - Comedy/Romance. Paris Hilton stars as Christabelle Abbott, a hot woman that Nate (Joel Moore) has been in love with since childhood. Nate moves to Los Angeles to track her down, but as he was trying to get rid of Christabelle’s [not as hot] best friend June (Christine Lakin), he ended up falling for her.
• In Bruges (2008) R 1h 41min - Action/Adventure/Comedy/Drama. Collin Farrel and Ralph Fiennes star as two hitmen who are cooling off in Bruges, Belgium after a bloodbath in London. They have weird encounters with locals, tourists, medieval art in this surreal place, so when their boss calls them in, their vacation becomes a life-and-death struggle.
• Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (2008) R 1h 30min - Comedy/Documentary. The compilation of Vince Vaughn’s 2007 comedy tour across the country from Hollywood to the Heartland, performing 30 shows in 30 days.

• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) R 159min - Action/Adventure/Drama/Western. After Robert Ford (Casey Affleck, in an Oscar-nominated role) joins the most notorious gang in the West, he grows tired of the charismatic Jesse James (Brad Pitt) and begins to resent his fame. But by hatching a scheme to gun down James, Ford risks forever being branded a coward. Sam Shepard, Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker and Michael Parks also star in director Andrew Dominik’s riveting Wild West drama adapted from Ron Hansen’s acclaimed novel.Nominated for 2 Oscars with other 2 wins and 19 nominations. Available on DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
• Born To Battle (1935) NR 56min - Classic/Western/B&W. In this little-known 1935 Western directed by Harry Webb, one of Hollywood’s first tough guys, Tom Tyler, stars as “Cyclone” Tom Saunders — a ne’er-do-well hired by a rancher to stop a rash of cattle rustlings. Before long,”Cyclone” gets entangled in a full-scale war between the ranchers’ association and the villainous black hats running roughshod over the town. The supporting cast includes Jean Carmen and Earl Dwire.
• Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) PG-13 115min - Drama/Biographic/Romance/Historical/Epic.Reprising her Oscar-nominated role from 1998’s Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett is once again at the head of the cast as the Virgin Queen (earning her another Oscar nod) in this Shekhar Kapur-directed sequel to that film. Focusing on the queen’s tempestuous relationship with the adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh, the film also stars Clive Owen (as Raleigh), Geoffrey Rush (as Sir Francis Walsingham) and Samantha Morton (as Mary, Queen of Scots). Available on DVD and HD-DVD.
• Dresden (2006) NR 180min - Drama/Romance/TV/War/Foreign (Germany).At a Dresden hospital in 1945, nurse Anna Mauth (Felicitas Woll) cares for badly injured British pilot Robert Newman (John Light), whom Anna believes to be a German deserter. As Allied forces close in, Anna grows close to Robert despite her engagement to Dr. Alexander Wenninger (Benjamin Sadler). The gripping historical romance won the 2006 German Television Award for Best Movie Made for Television.