Cinnabar Mill
Favorite Tools
For someone who works with their hands tools are important. We all have our favorite tools, that one we always use as we have for so many years. There may be a dozen screwdrivers in the rack, but that one is used almost every time.
Thus is with great sadness that I announce the death of my longtime soldering station.
A good soldering iron is a basic tool for an electronics engineer. A multimeter, a soldering iron, and a set of basic hand tools are absolutely necessary for any electronics workbench. To this end I had bought a very good iron, one that has served me well for several decades.
I wonder just how many soldered connections I made with this old soldering iron… Thousands upon thousands certianly, so many circuit boards, connectors, and wires.
There are no available spare parts for this long obsolete soldering station. There are many conversations on bulletin boards and chat rooms lamenting this as others have had their beloved soldering irons fail. The WES50 was long ago replaced by the WES51, and the parts are not interchangable.
With sadness I remove the old soldering station from the bench. I replace it with a new Weller WE1010NA station. I wonder just what work awaits the new soldering iron, how many solder joints will it see in the coming decades. I hope that this new iron will outlast me.
I Am Not Impressed Jeep
After a couple years of use the Jeep Compass has been a fairly good vehicle. A decent daily driver, good gas mileage where gas is $5 a gallon, and able to do rough back roads with little worry.
I do have a few complaints, one of which had to be dealt with this week… The cargo area bed supports simply failed. I had noted signs of stressed plastic before, some cracks appearing after hauling heavy loads.
The final straw was Deep Violet, my 18″ telescope… Weighing in at well over 100lbs. When unloading the ‘scope after a night at Kaʻohe I found that the bed seems to have collapsed under the weight. The molded plastic bed supports simply ripped away from the cargo bed side panels.
An SUV where the cargo bed supports are two protrusions molded into the thin plastic side panels? Yeah, not impressed.
Continue reading “I Am Not Impressed Jeep”Ancient Path
A Misty Night at Kaʻohe
While I have gotten plenty of telescope time lately, it has usually been morning sessions with the old Astrola in my driveway. This is a low effort and thoroughly enjoyable practice that I engage in about half a dozen times each month. Such sessions do mean that my 18″ telescope languishes for far too long in the garage.
I really need to change that.
Thus when my fellow staff at Symbrosia start asking for another star party it made a good excuse to get the big ‘scope out of the garage and under a dark sky.
Continue reading “A Misty Night at Kaʻohe”A Century in Service
In this age of short product lifecycles and rapid obsolescence it is nice to see an example of longevity. We consider equipment or tools old when over ten years in service. How about a century?
Our CO₂ is delivered in standard industrial pressure cylinders. These steel cylinders hold 50lbs of liquid CO₂ at a pressure sufficient to keep it liquid at room temperature, about or about 800PSI.
These standard cylinders require inspection every five years, and the inspection date is stamped into the steel at the top of the cylinder in the format month-year with a two digit year. It has been this way for a long time, longer than I realized.
Continue reading “A Century in Service”The King’s Loop
The region south of Waikoloa along the shore seems to be a barren field of lava with little to offer beyond miles of dark rock and baking sun. That may seem to be the case, but there are surprising gems out in those lava fields.
The plan? As usual hike the King’s Trail south from Waikoloa, but this time explore some of the smaller trails I had passed by in the past. Perusing the satellite imagery reveals a surprising number of trails through the lava. Considering the substantial effort it takes to cut a trail through the worst aʻa lava those trails must be significant somehow.
Continue reading “The King’s Loop”Crater Glow
Lava Lake in the Night
A Leap Day
Today is February 29th, that odd date that only occurs every four years.
The reason for a leap day inserted into the calendar, the existence of February 29th, is ultimately astronomical. Perhaps a little explanation is in order…
We originally defined days as the time it takes the Earth to rotate. While we define years as the time it takes the Earth to orbit once around the Sun. The problem is that these values do not divide evenly into one another.
It is that bunch of decimals, the 0.24219 etc., that is the problem, every four years the count drifts out of sync by roughly one day. The insertion of an extra day every four years helps bring the calendar back into synchronization with the orbit of the Earth and with the seasons.
Even leap years do not quite fix the problem as 0.24219 is close, but not quite 0.25 or one quarter of a day. Thus additional corrections are needed… Enter leap centuries.
Our current calendar was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, setting up a standard set of corrections for the fractional difference between the length of a year and the length of a day. Scholars knew that errors had been accumulating in the calendar for centuries, resulting in a drift of several days. Religious authorities were concerned that this drift had displaced important celebration in the church calendar, in particular the celebration of Easter. After much argument it was decided to reform the calendar. The current solution was devised by a number of astronomers, including Aloysius Lilius, the primary author of the new system.
The Gregorian Calendar uses an extra day in February every four years, unless the year is divisible by 100, then there is no leap leap day that year. However, if the year is divisible by 400, then it is a leap year. While this may sound odd, it does create a correction much closer to the ideal value of 365.24219 days per year.
I am a geek, so let us put that into code…
Even this is not perfectly precise. The correction is close but will drift given enough time. The length of a tropical year also changes slowly over time. We will eventually have to add another correction to keep the calendar and the seasons in sync. But not for a few millennia, good enough, for now.
As 2024 is divisible by four and not divisible by 100, there will be a leap day added to the end of this February… Today.