Category: Chile

First Images from the Vera Rubin Observatory (in Chile) Were Posted Today

Click above for a MUCH better image
From the IEEE Spectrum article:

Every night, the telescope will take a thousand images, one every 34 seconds. After three or four nights, it’ll have the entire southern sky covered, and then it’ll start all over again. After a decade, Rubin will have taken more than 2 million images, generated 500 petabytes of data, and visited every object it can see at least 825 times. In addition to identifying an estimated 6 million bodies in our solar system, 17 billion stars in our galaxy, and 20 billion galaxies in our universe, Rubin’s rapid cadence means that it will be able to delve into the time domain, tracking how the entire southern sky changes on an almost daily basis.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/vera-rubin-observatory-first-images

So cool. Thanks to all those who reminded me that today was the day!

Building Nixie Tubes for a Hiroshima Project

Thanks to Bob Scott KD4EBM for alerting me to this wonderful video. It seems especially timely, given the recent release of the Oppenheimer movie.

I posted back in 2000 about Dalibor Farny and the Nixie tubes he makes in a castle in the Czech Republic:

In this more recent video (above) Dalibor describes a very cool and very challenging Nixie tube project: A museum in Hiroshima Japan was presenting an art project designed by a Chilean artist. The display needed a lot of large, custom-made Nixie tubes, some of which would display Japanese language characters. So: Museum in Japan, Chilean artist, Nixe maker in the Czech Republic. There are big geographic challenges before you even get to the technical challenges.

Dalibor does a great job in describing all of the challenges that they faced. The technical stuff will be especially interesting to SolderSmoke listeners. His description of the evolution of his Czech workshop fits very well with our “other kinds of workshops” theme.

The video is really worth watching. Check it out (above). The ending is quite moving.

Thanks again to Bob Scott. Congratulations to Dalibor, his crew, and to all those involved in this Hiroshima museum project.

Working Indonesia and Chile with new 15-10 Homebrew Transceiver

Conditions were good this morning, and the Radio Gods continue to favor homebrew rigs. I got on 15 meters SSB with the new 15-10 dual bander and quickly worked YH0AD in Jakarta (about 10,000 miles). A few minutes later I talked to YB2MVD; he was a bit further east on Java. I shot a video of the QSO with YB2MVD. He said I was 59.

I then switched to 10 meter SSB (same rig) and worked CE4PS in Chile (5,000 miles).

TRGHS.

The antenna for all these contacts was my K4KIO Hex Beam. I was running about 75 watts from the .1kW CCI amplifier.

Volcano Light in Chile

This popped up on Twitter today. It is from 2018 — the Villarrica volcano in Chile. Interesting shot. The label said it was taken during a snowstorm, but I don’t think that is right — the “snow” is actually stars and that big white thing in the cone of red light is the Large Magellanic cloud.

https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/photos-of-the-week-idUSRTS209HO

XQ6FOD — A GREAT Knack Story from Chile


 Greg VK1VXG sent me this link. I had a blog entry on this a few years ago, but I didn’t do it justice. This is a truly amazing and inspirational knack story, the story of Manfred, XQ6FOD. So many lines from this page resonated with me. For example:

I always regretted having disassembled this radio. It was so nice, so compact… Everything was hand made, there was not a single right angle in it… I felt like a murderer after destroying it. But, I needed the parts…

I designed this thing during a family summer trip into Chile’s beautiful deep south. The VFO part was designed on Chiloe Island, the IF and receiver circuit took shape at Futaleufu, Rio Cisnes, Puerto Aysen and Coyhaique, while the difficult RF power amplifier work was done on the return trip via Bariloche in Argentina. So this is an international design! Once back at home, for the first time in my life I did a thorough computer simulation of the whole thing. I hacked around the program for two weeks, and then my poor Atari had to spend another two weeks crunching numbers. It found some potential problems. I improved gain distribution, corrected mistakes, and then went straight to designing the printed circuit board, without doing any real-world test.

Check it out:



The Giant Magellan Telescope

Wow, seven 28 foot mirrors! They just started blasting away the top of a mountain in Chile to make room for this magnificent ‘scope. More details here: http://www.gmto.org/index.html
For those of you who are looking, they have some job openings (link at the bottom of their site).

Our book: “SolderSmoke — Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics”http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20