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At 6:31 pm on January 27th, three astronauts, training for their first Apollo flight, were
lost in an accident.
The Apollo One capsule blew up on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.
During a full-scale simulation of their mission,
astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, died in a flash fire.
As a ten-year-old, I saw these guys as being
real heroes, and it absolutely captivated my attention, and I’ve been interested in
that ever since that time.
I’ve had small telescopes, and I was always in the city when I was trying to do my observing.
The biggest challenge with observing in the city is the light pollution. So I was always
interested in getting out into the country where the dark skies are, where I could get
much better views of the night sky. I designed this observatory structure, and my nephews
helped me build it. I decided that I could go after exoplanets. That is finding planets
around other stars. Hopefully, if I’m successful, I’ll find something that I can
report to the astronomy community and share that way.
Observatories are not heated. They’re
not heated because heat causes the air to waver, okay, and it would create a heat bloom
going up in front of the telescope. It’s black. It’s dark. Typically I’m all
by myself, and it’s cold. Not a lot of fun. So if you can do remote observing from
a warm room, that’s ideal.
So I just looked at, over a number of years, different pieces of software that I could
bring together that would allow me to do this kind of remote access. I actually went to
my local TELUS store and talked to the guys there and says, “So what kind of solutions
does TELUS offer?” And they told me about the Smart Hub.
The Smart Hub is a wireless device with a
SIM card, and you can take it anywhere you want. And it provides data.
It worked really well for the observatory
to connect out to the Internet, but it still presented a number of challenges for me to
connect back in. I never resolved to calling tech support because I figure I can resolve
just about anything. But I called them and the first level guys decided that they were
unable to help me. And they passed me off to the tier two support.
At that point, I tried every scenario, trouble
shooting we can try.
He said, “Well, call me back tomorrow night. I’ll do some research and see what I can
do to help you.” So when I called back the next night, he had all the answers.
Bob had a unique case, this is actually a
remote site, right. Like, in the woods or something. So I figured the solution was,
you need a VPN access bundle in order for him to connect to.
He said, “Here’s what you need to do.” So he walked me through, we set it up, we
tried it out and it worked. I can load an automatic imaging run into my observatory
equipment and I turn the automated control over to the computers. The imagining running
the computers will open up the dome, turn on all of the equipment. It’ll auto focus
the camera. It’ll then position the telescope at that particular object and take an image,
and then it’ll go off and take all of these pictures. And after it’s all done, then
it will shut down the equipment.
Maybe my resolution is supporting to him to continue to go on.
Oh for sure I dream that I find something
that contributes significantly to the scientific community. I think the odds are low of that,
but it doesn’t stop me from trying.
Hopefully he finds what he’s looking for.