2020-02-02 Palindrome Day

Today is a palindrome day, i.e. the date written in the format YYYYmmdd can be read in reverse order to give the same result.

An article in a swiss newspaper reported, that this is the first palindrome day for 900 years, a little thinking about the problem easily will give you dates like 2001-10-02, 2010-01-02 or 2011-11-02 that are also palindrome days, but only for the format yyyyMMdd, different dates are palindrome dates for ddMMyyyy. I was curious to see how many palindrome days in either format exist from a given date (I used the year 1 AD (there is no year 0!!!), so I created this little script that prints out all the palindrome days since 01.01.01, days that are palindromes in both formats are highlighted:

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Total Solar Eclipse 2017 – first look

These are preliminary results of the Solar Eclipse 2017. Me and my family traveled to Madras Oregon, to observe the eclipse.

I will only be able to process the images when we get home after our vacation.

I got quite a few requests for the t-shirt I wore, here it is the link: https://teespring.com/solar-eclipse-t-shirt-madras-o. It is my own design.

Giant Sunspot AR2456

These days the large sunspot AR2456 is very prominent on the sun’s disc:

Meade LXD-650 Declination Runaway repair

The last time I wanted to do some deep-sky astrophotography, I ran into an issue with our astronomy club’s LXD-650 mount – immediately after switching it on the declination motor started to run at high speed.

After some research on the internet I was able to resolve the issue, by tweaking the setting on the potentiometer responsible for the declination encoder LED light.

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Partial Solar Eclipse – 20.3.2015

While travelling to the Faroe islands or to Svalbard was out of the question, I was able to take a day off for the solar eclipse of March 20th 2015.

The Vorarlberger Amateur Astronomen (VAA) organized an eclipse observation in cooperation with the Pfänder-Bahn at the summit of the Pfänder mountain above Bregenz. Thanks to Kurt Gattnar, who managed the organization from the VAA side, we had a very enjoyable experience. Even carts for our equipment were available! Read More