After taking a look at the Orion Nebula Katie and I decided to look around for some more easy-to-find Messier objects. Since the Beehive Cluster was very near to Mars – a quite recognizable landmark in tonight’s sky – I gave it a try.

At first I couldn’t find it. I was confused by the star chart and looked down and to the left of Mars when in fact the cluster was down and to the right. I gave up on finding it and decided to take one more look at Mars before calling it a night. As I swung the binoculars up to take in Mars, there it was.

At first I wasn’t completely sure what I was seeing. Surely it was a Messier object -- there was marked at that location on the Astronomy magazine star chart. I just wasn’t sure which object it was. In these situations, Google is your friend, and the very first image Google returned looked almost exactly like what I saw through my binoculars. See it for yourself here.

In my binoculars it is a bright mass of stars with a few very bright blue stars that shine out. When I had it in my binoculars the bright light of Mars was just out of the field of view of the binoculars, helpful since Mars was brighter than Sirius tonight.

Katie got a chance to see it too, so her bag of Messier objects is still the same size as mine.

OK, this is an easy one to find, but for completeness I feel like I need to put it in here. Tonight the air was clear and cold, and after taking a look at Mars hanging bright in the sky I decided to train the binoculars on Orion’s sword to see the Orion Nebula. Here’s the Wikipedia entry.

The naked eye shows the nebula as a bright smudge that makes up the tip of Orion’s sword. Through my 7x50 binoculars the gas clouds are evident, but the most visible thing is the blue glow of the young stars lighting up the nebula. If we get a chance to get the big scope out on a clear night while Orion is still in the sky it should make a fairly easy target.

In fact, I can’t imagine why I haven’t tried for it before…

This is one of the earliest Messier objects that I learned how to find, since it’s right there in one of the most recognizable constellations.

I’m not sure why, but on Saturday I decided that I needed to brew some beer. That’s not totally surprising – I have all the equipment that I need for extract brewing, it’s just that it’s been 4 years since I brewed any beer, and 12 years since I brewed regularly.

The biggest problem I’ve had since we moved to Brambly Hill is finding a place to ferment the beer. I made two batches at the Hill, one in 2002 that I fermented on the built-in sideboard in the mobile home, and one in 2006 that I fermented in the chest freezer in the barn.

Neither of those places are available any more. Both the sideboard in the mobile home and the mobile home are long gone, and we keep the freezer full of food instead of fermenting beer. There are lots of places to put a carboy, but not many that meet all the requirements – steady temperature, dark, out of the way.

That changed when we built the wall between the laundry room and the powder room. Now I have a little room that doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic that I can stash a carboy in while it works. It’s not ideal – we do use the powder room – but it’s the best place I’ve had since I moved to the Hill.

Anyway, Dana and I made a trip to Homebrew Heaven for supplies on Saturday afternoon. I decided to start with of a batch of “Ye Olde #2,” my favorite recipe so far. It was only a little tricky. I couldn’t find my brewing log, so I had to rely on a note that I wrote in my PDA in 2002 with an ingredient list, but the list didn’t include the yeast type or type of bittering hops to use. I decided on Yakima Northern Brewer for the bittering hops and Wyeast 1098 for the yeast.

Here’s the grain bill for the recipe:

• 7 lbs light malt syrup
• 1 lb 20L crystal malt
• 1/4 lb cara-pils malt
• 1/4 lb wheat malt

I pretty much use this grain bill as the base for all my recipes, altering it to get different character for the beer. It gives me a O.G. of about 1.050 which ferments down to a 4-5% beer.

The hop schedule goes like this:

• 1 oz. bittering hops for 60 minutes (in this case, Northern Brewer, though I’ve used others).
• 1/2 oz. Yakima Kent Goldings for 15 minutes (the original batch used imported East Kent Goldings, but I haven’t seen them for years).
• 1 oz. Fuggles for 5 minutes.

I should probably list the IBU or HBU of the hops, but I don’t have the numbers with me right now.

The beer went into the carboy about 3:00 p.m. and I pitched the yeast. This morning at 7:00 a.m. I heard a “bloop” from the powder room; there is about an inch of foam on top of the wort and a regular bubble of CO2 coming out.

Now it’s just a waiting game – primary fermentation should be done in a couple of days and then it’s into a secondary carboy to finish off. We’ll see how I did in a few weeks.

Update

• 1-27: Racked the beer from the 6-gallon primary fermenter to my 5-gallon secondary. Left all of the trub behind, beer is starting to clear nicely.
• 2-6: Bottled. I tasted a little of the leftovers in the bottling bucket, for flat beer it’s tasting pretty good.

We did a couple of projects over the holidays that made a big difference around the house. The first was something we planned to do from the first day that we decided to get the house. The second was not something that we planned but it is something that will make another project easier to get into.

Our first project was putting up a wall between the powder room and the laundry room. We wanted the builder to do it, but they don’t do pocket doors. So I did. Turned out pretty well and the downstairs bathroom was handy to have when we hosted the family Christmas party.

The second project was one of those that starts out with “How hard can it be?” and then turns into something that was fairly hard. And more expensive than we thought it would be. But we now have a “custom tiled entry” in our house. Taking out the 40-odd square feet of wood laminate in the entry will make choosing what to put on the floor in the family room easier, we don’t have to worry about matching or clashing with the entry.

Now that the entry is done, it’s time to move on to the family room and figure out what we’re going to do there. It’s probably going to laminate, we just need to figure out what kind of laminate it will be.

This afternoon we pulled all the petunias from the front garden. Back in the spring Dana planted three flats of petunias (plus a few more) to fill in the gaping holes between the few perennials we had planted out there.

Dana took two heaping wheel barrow loads of petunias to the compost bin, then I came out and started helping. We switched to the tractor and filled the bucket on the tractor twice.

There is almost two feet of petunias on top of the compost heap right now. I know that they will break down over the winter and be ready to turn back into the gardens in the spring, but sheesh, that’s a lot of petunias.

Tonight was a beautiful clear night, so I set the telescope up to try to get a look at M13 through out little 4-inch reflector. Two weeks ago at the Everett Astronomical Society's open scope night we'd seen M13 through a 16-inch Dobsonian telescope, a view that made the cluster look like the picture from the Hubble Space Telescope (here on Wikipedia).That night I'd went outside with binoculars and took a look, through the 7x50's M13 was little more than a smudge on the lens, but I could see it.

I was certain it wouldn't look anything like the 16-inch Dob in our scope, but I the telescope would make it appear better than the binoculars, I was sure.

M13 is in Hercules, about 2/3rds of the way between the bottom two stars of the trapezoid (40ZetaHer and  44EtaHer according to Pocket Stars). I star-hopped from the tree line near Arcturus up to Hercules -- finding M13 was pretty easy since there was a straight line of bright stars from the tree line to the trapezoid. Once I'd found the trapezoid, finding M13 was easy.

Through the 16-inch reflector M13 appeared as a bright cluster of stars, the central cluster showing individual stars and thinning out toward the edges. Through the 7x50 binoculars the cluster appears as a bright smudge against the black sky, but with little detail. Through the 4.5-inch reflector I still can’t make out any individual stars in the cluster, but I can begin to see that it is round, bright in the middle and thinning toward the outside.

According to Wikipedia M13 is just visible to the naked eye on a clear night. I haven’t been able to pick it out yet, but since this is an easy to find Messier object, I’ll keep trying.

The new memory arrived in the mail right on time, and I could hardly wait to get one of the two new memory chips out and into the ELF2K to see if it would work with a new chip.

Of course, I had to wait, there are always things around the house that I need to do. But eventually I got a chance to head into the den and put the new RAM chip into the socket. Put it in, powered the ELF up, flipped the RUN switch up, and son of a gun the little computer worked on the first try.

Only I didn’t have a terminal hooked up yet. So I needed to download a terminal program (TerraTerm) and set it up (baud rate, port), hook up the serial cable (take the shield off the DB9 socket on the ELF, my serial-to-USB converter sucks), power everything up again – and it still worked.

I then spent a happy half an hour toggling programs into the ELF – starting with the one from page 66 of the March 1977 issue of Popular Electronics. That’s the one where when you flip the input switch once it turns the Q LED on, and when you flip the input switch again it turns the Q LED off. That’s the first program that I ran on my original ELF, and the one that I showed my Dad. I showed it to Katie – the nostalgia was thick in the air.

I’ll be playing with the ELF now from time to time, it’s a bit of nostalgia after all. I’m probably going to have to get the I/O expansion board so that I can hook it up to my Picaxe network, but that’s a project for next winter I think.

For my birthday this year my wife got me a Spare Time Gizmos ELF 2000 kit, a re-interpretation of the original 1802-based computer that I (and many others) built from plans in Popular Electronics.

Just like the first one that I built, this one had a few problems when I first turned it on. Finding and fixing a bad connection in an IDC socket was fairly easy, and I found the cold solder joint on the switch panel after just a little more work. What was harder was the fact that some memory locations just didn't seem to be changing, and I couldn't figure out why.

So I built a test rig for the 32K static RAM on the ELF2K. I used a Picaxe 40X1 as the brains, two 74HC595 chips to latch the 16-bit address required, and a handful of LEDs to show me what's going on.

I used PortC to read and write data to the RAM chip. I had some difficulty getting the bi-directional data bus to work until I put dirs= statements in the code to explicitly change from output to input when writing then reading the test data.

Since PortC was in use, I couldn't use the hardware SPI port, so I used the simple bit-banged serial protocol from the manual.

Once I had the test rig up and running it started indicating memory errors throughout the RAM chip, but especially on the last page of memory, the page that the ELF2K uses for it's system data page, and where the OS on the ELF2K was indicating there was a problem.

I've ordered a couple more RAM chips that should be here tomorrow. Once I've got a known good RAM chip to install in the ELF2K I'll be one step closer to getting it to work.

We built a new garden this weekend. We didn’t mean for it to turn into a cat garden, but the cats had other ideas…

The back side of new deck (the one toward the pasture) looked unfinished – we needed something to anchor the deck and provide a place for the eye to go. We decided that what we needed was another(!) garden, one with a water feature that we can hear on the deck and with a Japanese maple tree to stop the eye from wandering out to the pasture.

I went to Lowe’s in Silver Lake on Tuesday. I found a 91-gallon pre-formed pond on sale. We went back on Wednesday to buy it. Dana went to Mulbak’s on Friday where she discovered they were having a sale. She picked up perennial plants for the new garden.

On Saturday we started by cutting the sod out of the space where we wanted the new garden to be. Joey and Dana knocked the topsoil off the sod so we could use it later. Once the sod and topsoil was off the garden I used the roto-tiller to loosen the clay underneath. We dug out 4 inches of clay, then roto-tilled again to break up the next 4 inches. I added two tractor buckets of compost, roto-tilled, put another bucket of compost on and the topsoil we took off earlier and roto-tilled again. It took half the day, but we had almost 8 inches of good soil for the plants.

After taking a break I started digging out the hole for the pond. The clay around the house is pretty nasty – hard to break through and full of rocks. Eventually I had a hole I could use, but by then it was time to stop and go shopping for trees.

Dana and I went to Home Depot in Woodinville for the trees. They’re having a sale – we ended up getting two rhododendrons for the front yard, a maple tree for the end of the driveway, a willow for the other back corner of the house, and a Japanese maple for the new garden that we’re working on. Beautiful plants, lots of digging to get them in.

Sunday we finished digging in the pond, made two trips to Lowe’s for sand to put around the pond, and finally planted our new plants. We put a drip irrigation system in to water. After filling the pond we sat back to enjoy it – and to watch all the cats run around the garden, play in the pond, and play with each other. It’s pretty successful for all of us.

Dana and I took Odyssey out this weekend even though the kids decided that they wanted to stay home and work on their posters and cages for the fair. It felt a little weird to take off to sail with the kids at home, but it turned out to be a nice trip for Dana and I.

Saturday morning was gray, so I wasn’t sure if we were going to have a comfortably warm day for being out on the water. We loaded up the boat with towels to use as blankets, sweatshirts, and wind breakers. Turned out once we were on the water that we didn’t need warm clothes, it was a beautiful sunny day out there.

The wind was blowing just about right – not too much to fly the genoa, but enough to make Odyssey lively. We consistently were hitting speeds of 4.5 to 5 knots over the ground most of the day. Dana and I, mostly Dana, pushed the boat harder than we have in the past. We found that we were pretty comfortable at 10 degrees of heel, and that as we got to 20 degrees things started flying across the cockpit. We mostly tried to stay under 20 degrees of heel.

The coolest part of the trip was seeing a gray whale only one or two hundred yards away. It would come to the surface, blow, then wave one pectoral fin in the air as it slipped back under water. We watched it for about half an hour as we sailed toward Port Susan. At one point we noticed we were on a slightly converging course so we tacked away. The whale looked like it was bigger than Odyssey, we didn’t want to be in its way – and that’s not including the whole marine mammals laws.

The trip from Hat Island back to the river was long and boring. It was downwind, so it was relatively calm even though we still made 3.5 to 4.5 knots over the ground most of the way. Downwind sailing isn’t the most exciting thing, and Dana took advantage of the calm to take a nap. I didn’t even have the VHF to keep me company – most of the charge was gone on the radio so I was saving it for emergencies.

Setting up and tearing down were almost trouble-free. We had a little trouble putting the mast up, one of the stays got stuck under the edge of a portlight and wouldn’t come free. Then once the mast was up it turned out the bolt we normally use to keep the forestay on was missing. We had to set the mast down and dig a replacement out of the cabin.

One the way in we were having trouble getting Odyssey onto the trailer. We needed it to move away from the pier, but every time I kicked the bow out the stern would swing in to the pier, and when Dana kicked the stern out it would pivot the other way. We couldn’t get the boat to move sideways through the water at all – until I realized that I hadn’t retracted the keel into the boat before we tried to put it on the trailer. Once I cranked the keel up we were fine.

The whole day was great, and Dana and I had a good time. I’m looking forward to more “adults only” trips out on the Sound.