M45 – The Pleiades open cluster.

The purpose of this blog topic is to provide a list of deep sky objects that are observable from within the light polluted confines of a city. This will allow people who are new to astronomy with a list of objects to hunt down and observe visually from their backyards. It will also be useful to more experienced observers who, like me, are sometimes just to lazy to drive out to a darker site.

So you want to work out how faint an object you can see from your backyard eh? This article will help you do that.

Just a photo of Saturn I snapped on Friday night. I'm amazed at how well it turned out given that I hadn't done the polar alignment drift yet.

It would seem that the Harper Conservatives are continuing along the long, slow slide to their apparent dream of a neo-con totalitarian dictatorship. The most recent action would appear to be an attempt by the Harper government to muzzle the independent officers of Parliament such as the Auditor General. Actions such as this begin to make me wonder about the Harper and the Tories' commitment to democracy in general, and our democratic system in particular. Millimetre by millimetre, the Tories seem hell bent to destroy Canada as we know it, our democracy with it.

So last Saturday I swapped my old Motorola Cybersurf modem for the new DOCIS modem from my ISP. So there was a brief period on Saturday where the sites here at Castle Evil were down. No big deal. Except that for some bizzare reason the new modem kept dropping carrier. My ISP sent out a tech last night to check signal levels and such. The levels were fine and he swapped out the modem. So far so good, except for some reason the modem picked up a dynamic IP from my ISP as opposed to using my static IP. So after about an hour on the phone with tech support it was recommended to power down the modem for four hours. Since it was late at this point I powered down the modem and went to bed.

My ISP is making me upgrade my modem (fortunately at no cost). However I need to take the old one down to their office to make the switch. I will be doing this Saturday, 26 April 2008. During the day this site, and all the others hosted here, will be down until I have the new modem installed and the new IP propagates through the DNS system.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

If you want to control the message and spin bad news in a better light, it's probably not a good idea to invite "select" reporters to a private meeting and then scurry around like cockroaches when the rest of the media find out about it. Doing that makes it look like you really do have something to hide. Of course Harper, chess master and control freak, won't probably take this advice, simply because it's unlikely that he or any of his minions read my humble little blog, but really, you'd think it was obvious. The optics of having your party office searched by Mounties is bad enough, adding insult to your own injuries by acting underhanded isn't going to help.

Apparently the beavers up in Wood Buffalo National park have been busy. The dam is big enough that it was spotted from Google Earth images. All I can say is... well... damn!

... the best politicians money can buy.