Hi Y'all from N CA Mountains

[chabekostc]

Hi to everyone-

My name is Charlie Habekost, and I live in Twain Harte, CA. I do Gums and Dental Implants for a living. I graduated from a residency in Periodontics from Emory University in 1985. Spent 7 years in GA, so twang hops out from time to time. I have a practice in Sonora, CA and San Jose, CA. I commute every week, to pay for hobbies.

I am a trained EE, with 6 active in Navy as an ET also. Hobbies are Astronomy and plasma physics type stuff, flying, and ham radio (KF6CID).

Hello to all, look forward to a good back/forth.

Charlie

[Doug Coulter]

Welcome Charlie!

I did astronomy for awhile too, got the big Meade, computer, vid cams, all that stuff, and had a good time with it. Sadly, since the big boy astronomers are pretty good about putting their data online, it almost seems a waste of time to have your own big (in my case 10") scope and stuff. Actually, that's not sad at all - the kind of academics that actually share data are the only kind I actually like. I did do some work on "stochastic" image smoothing, by taking video and simply removing the ones with atmospheric smearing before summing (and some other tricks involving medians), to prove to myself and others that outside-the-air scopes aren't really needed for most things. At the time, the ground boys just couldn't believe in things like short samples, only very long exposures, but eventually got the word, but still do it wrong, in my opinion. Had I gotten a fast multichannel plate so I could sample "above nyquist" for the air, I'd have gotten a lot farther with that, though. And, obviously you can simply throw out frames with no photons in the "area of interest" and also use things like stars in the field to know about how much smear and motion you have. Now, sigh, I think the scope and stuff are for sale, or should be, one less thing to trip over.

Too bad you're on the other side of the country. Any dentist seeing my teeth thinks "new yacht" A few close encounters with steering wheels and dashboards from my racing days.

Although we've not been posting much about plasmas up here yet, I expect it will pick up considerably -- this is early days still. A couple of guys are doing sputtering now, I believe, and I'm doing a fusor. Chris is doing something "completely different" but it sometimes involves plasma if he lets in too much gas. The hope here is to tie it all in, build up a network of guys who do it all (between us) so we become more than the sum of the parts -- benefits everyone. Science and tech kind of hang together. You can't do much with plasma without needing some electronics to make the drives, and probably some vacuum to make it happen easier for example, and knowing one helps with the others.

[chabekostc]

Doug-

Yeh, I don't play with the scope as much these days. I will pick it up in ernest again soon as I finish my servo mirror cover. Then one fresh coat of Al, and "I will be excited" again. The good thing it is not in the way, up the hill some 400 feet in a dome (20" rcos).

I seem to do more Astro here, and when I go to San Jose for 3 nights a week, I got the physics lab there. Don't want to give the neurons a rest.

All the best,

Charlie

[Doug Coulter]

Wow, 20" is starting to become actually worth it! And a dome too, that's real helpful. Mine has to stay indoors and be setup again every time, a major pain to get all the aiming right for the computer etc. Seeing is great here -- it's over 20 miles to the nearest town so the sky is quite nicely dark most all the time, and we're at 2500 ft altitude.

If you get it going again and want to fool with some signal processing stuff -- I'll be here. Though to take it to the next level, we need to find a high rez microchannel plate so as to get frames quick, but get each photon that hits. I tried hard to talk Ti into making a MCP on top of and aligned with their nice CCD cameras, but either they were doing that already (and it's a secret) or I didn't get to the correct guy or something (pretty sure I did get the right guy, though). Mebbe those aren't for consumer use just yet -- you can see why one would be nice in some space applications (satellites that look down).