Archives December 2023

Eclipses are one of those things that are easy to assume they’ve been around and will always be around. But no. While the Anthropic Principle guarantees the universe must be sufficiently fined tuned for us to exist, there’s nothing which requires us to be alive during the “Golden Age of Eclipses.”

So we’re just lucky. I like to think about what other wonders are there to be appreciated: nearby, on our planet, elsewhere in our universe. They must be uncountable.

Happy holidays to all and please enjoy as many wonders as you can!

Since we’re building 10 new instruments, we’ve made a number of small investments to make building them easier and faster. This was a fun one to share:

On the left, you’ll see an off-the-shelf appliance dolly. Cheap and easy to obtain, but it only allows access to the wiring area in the instrument base with the panels removed and with the dolly somewhat awkwardly interfering with said access. On the right, we’ve machined custom aluminum “legs” with casters, so the bottom panels can stay on and even be opened or closed as necessary. The machining took a couple of hours, however, so we’ll be testing both side-by-side, to see which fits the need better–or maybe both are good for slightly different purposes or phases of construction!

For reference on our development process, we’re including XKCD’s study of tool making below (“automation” in programming-speak). 😉

We just became aware of an ET advisory in the FEMA app, and thought it was important to share! 😉