Closeup of Crater Clavius

I've been able to identify the locations a couple of the closeup webcam photos of the moon that I made back on Oct. 17 last year.

Here is a photo where I've labeled the bigger craters with their names. Smaller craters are labeled with their diameters, in miles.

Here is a closeup of the crater Clavius. I didn't label Clavius but it is the biggest crater and contains lots of the smaller craters that I did label. I like this picture a lot.

The smaller craters don't have names but have letters. So Clavius A would be a small crater in Clavius and Porter A would be a small Crater in Porter etc. Here are the diameters, in miles, of some of the "lettered" craters.
B 7, c 7, d 16, J 7, n 8, o 2, R 4, t 5, x 4, y 4
This will help you guess at the sizes of the unlabeled craters. There looks to be a bunch of the 2 mile ones there.
I think I'll forget about the letter names next time and just label them with their sizes.

Full size pictures can be found here by clicking on the thumbnails etc.

Moon Craters Identified

I've been curious to identify the various craters on the moon pictures that I have taken, and I'm making some progress.

I was able to download a free photo atlas of the moon that is pretty nice. It is called the "Virtual Moon Atlas" and can be downloaded here. It was originally produced in French, but it is available in a number of languages.

The VMA lets me see what the moon looks like at a specific date and time. This makes it easy to figure out what any given picture is showing, as long as I can remember when I shot it.

Here are a couple of the pictures that I took back in March with the names and sizes of some craters. Picture 1 Picture 2

If you want to see the pictures at a larger scale, you can get them here by clicking on the thumbnails etc. You may have to download the actual full size image and view it offline to see it really big, because I notice that Internet Explorer scales them down quite a bit when it displays them.

This atlas could prove handy, even for someone who doesn't take pictures but merely looks at the moon with the naked eye or with binoculars, and wants to know what they are seeing up there.

Missionary Secret Revealed! (or how I sound so knowledgeable on furlough)

Trans World Radio produces an award winning magazine that I find quite useful, especially when furlough time rolls around and I have to be able to explain to people what TWR is up to all over the world. There is always good stuff to share with our friends and sponsors.

Now you don't have to wait for me to regurgitate this info to you. You can download an online version here. It is a slightly less than one meg pdf file.

The one available online right now is a special 50th anniversary issue. It gives a great condensed overview of what TWR has been up to for 50 years and outlines our ministry goals and plans for the future.
I highly recommend it.

One more Jupiter image

I had another go at one of my Jupiter images from March 28. I blew it up bigger and fiddled with it until I can detect Ganymede's shadow on the left edge as well as just barely see Callisto's shadow on the upper right edge.
The two spots in the middle are from left to right: Io's shadow and Ganymede.

Jupiter's Moons

Easter Monday is a holiday here on Bonaire, so I was able to spend some quality time on the computer processing some images of Jupiter that I took at 4 am. on Sunday, March 28.

Jupiter has four large moons that are easy to spot in a telescope. On the morning of the 28th, three of them were casting shadows on the planets surface at the same time. So if your were a Jupiterian living on Jupiter, you could have seen an eclipse of the sun from three different locations that day.

Jupiter was low in the west by 4 am that morning, so the view in the telescope wasn't that great. Observers further west would have had a better view, and could have seen the event at a more decent hour as well. For example, people in California could see it at midnight. But this was a rare event and I had a good time imaging it.

Here is a montage of images of Jupiter that I took from 3:47 to 4:11 that morning.

The top row of images shows from left to right: Io's shadow, Ganymede, and Callisto's shadow. They are all moving from left to right across the planet disk.

The middle row of images sort of shows what I set out to see: Ganymede's shadow creeping onto the left edge of Jupiter, and then Io's shadow, Ganymede, and Callisto's shadow creeping off the edge of Jupiter on the right side.

The left image in the bottom row shows Ganymede's shadow, Io's shadow, and Io from left to right. Callisto's shadow had definitely vanished off the right side by then.

The right hand image in the bottom row was taken by Gu Yu in West Virginia and clearly shows what you can almost see in my middle row of images. :) The three shadows and Io are labeled on this image.

AquaSpace boat ride

One day last week, we went for a sail on the AquaSpace trimiran. We had all the usual boat ride fun, with the added attraction that just about the whole center hull of the boat is clear Plexiglas.

Being down in the hull is like being in a submarine with picture windows on both sides! It was fun to look at the fish and sea floor, even when we were just sitting at the dock.

Here is a shot of us on the AquaSpace as seen on one of the Bonaire Webcams cams.

Here is a shot from the boat showing the shore of Bonaire where our old house was located, before TWR sold it and the buyer demolished it and built a big fancy house. The Bonaire Webcams seacams are located on the beach hut that you can see in the lower left of the picture. More on the bonaire webcams, set up by our old neighbors and buddies the Richters, can be found here.

Here is a shot of some scuba divers down on a reef and some of the coral formations that we saw.

We sailed along the coast of Bonaire as far as oilslick leap and then headed out to Klein Bonaire for a snorkel. We then motored straignt in to Bonaire and back along the coast to the dock downtown. We went right by the old Bonaire Pastor's house and the old guest house.

More pictures from our AquaSpace adventure, including shots of my mom and dad and aunt and uncle, can be found if you go to our Club Photo page, and scroll down to the bottom.

For more on the AquaSpace sailboat and the types of outing available, check out their website. You can click on the various photos on their site, even the ones that are moving.

Nukove

While my parents were here, we went on the bumpy dirt road around Bopec and out to Playa Frans. It was clear and not that windy, so we saw Curacao pretty easily and there were lots of "nose gnats" as one MK calls them.

We also saw flamingos in Goto Lake and Salina Frans. We stopped at Nukove to check it out. There was some damage resulting from the backwards waves of Lenny in 1998, but it looks like there is still a lot of coral to see out there.

Here is a picture of the world's smallest beach, located at Nukove.

Here is a picture showing the coral rubble piled up in what used to be a snorkeling area.

Here is another shot of the beach taken from an area that used to be under water.

Here is a friendly Trupial that looked at his reflection in both side view mirrors of our pickup.

Thumbnails and larger versions of these pictures can be found on my club photo page here.

End of Cruise Ship Season

The last scheduled cruise ship of the season is visiting Bonaire today. It's a big one with around 1500 passengers.

To commemorate this "changing of the seasons" here on Bonaire, I thought I'd let you see what we see as we drive/ride along the road on the way to work at TWR during Cruise Ship Season.

Can you find the "brainless quadruped" (that's what the drivers license manual calls 'em) in the picture?

If you want to see this picture in a bigger format with more detail, you can click on the thumbnail at the bottom of the page here, and then click on the larger image, to see an extra large image.

Expedition to Spelonk

We piled into the trusty pickup truck and headed out to Lagoen, and then North to Spelonk. The dirt roads were bumpy and dusty. We had to stop and clear the back and side windows at one point because the dust had made them completely opaque. The roads are also wider then they used to be because lots of trucks are hauling rocks and sand from the area these days. I wouldn't want to cycle out there except on Sundays and holidays, because of the truck traffic.

We got to the Spelonk caves and found that the parking area had been cleared somewhat recently, making it easier to spot from the "main road." It also seemed to let a little more breeze into the area, which was nice.

These caves are very user friendly, because one can just walk in the large opening and wander among the forests of stalactites and stalagmites. You just have to watch your step in the semi darkness and watch your head because of the stuff hanging down from the ceiling.

I've posted a bunch of pictures of the caves on my club photo site. Using a flash in the caves is discouraged, because it might disturb the bats, so I brought along a tripod and made time exposures.

We also went to the Spelonk light house. I included one picture looking south from on top of the light house. I have other pictures of the Spelonk light house from another trip there a couple years ago.

As usual, you can click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions of the pictures, and click on the bigger pictures to see even bigger versions.

Moon Shots - the Astronomy type

My parents and aunt and uncle have been here visiting us for almost a week now. We've had great times exploring Bonaire, drinking home made root beer, making puzzles, and hanging out. They are also enjoying weather.com to see how yucky the weather is back home, while they are basking in the Caribbean sunshine.

I went out at 3 am on Sunday morning to see the shadows of three of the moons of Jupiter cross the planet's face. I may or may not have seen all three, but did see two of them for sure.

Sunday night we went out and observed the five planets that are visible in the evenings these days. We also looked at Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon in the telescope.

Here is a picture of the moon from Sunday night showing an interesting trench-like feature that looks to have been scooped out with a giant garden trowel.

Here is a picture of the other side of the moon showing lots of craters. The moon was pretty much right at its first quarter phase that night.

Here is a link to some other pictures of the moon from last year.

Venus and the Moon report

Well Venus and the Moon were very pretty Wednesday evening. I took a picture during game time at Awana - around 6:30 pm. I then took another one during council time at around 7:40 pm. I took a last one at home at about 8:40 pm.

When you compare the pictures, you can see that the moon is moving up (to the East) with respect to Venus, even during the course of a couple hours. By tomorrow night, the moon will be pretty far from Venus and near Mars.

Planets put on a show

We've been staring at the sky regularly after sunset and finally spotted the planet Mercury low in the west on Monday evening. Then it was easy to trace a line upwards (eastwards) and see Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter.

You can use the moon to help identify some of the planets in the sky this week. Once you find them, it is fun to see how they move with respect to the star patterns, which don't change. I think the word "Planet" comes from a word that means "wanderer", which is exactly what they seem to do against the regular backdrop of the stars.

We can see lots of the sky, here on our desert island in the Caribbean, so we'll have fun keeping track of all these planets for the next week or so, until Mercury dips back below the horizon. Here is a writeup on what to look for.

Venus and the Moon will be close together tonight (wednesday). I posted a picture of a pairing like this a few months ago. Venus and the Moon should be easy to spot, even in a brightly lit suburban area. I'll be looking at it tonight, from the TWR activities building, where we hold our Awana club on Wednesday nights.

The moon will be near Mars on Thursday evening, to help you locate that planet, as well as the Pleiades star cluster, which looks like a teeny tiny dipper. You will need darker skies to see the Pleiades. By this time next week, Mars and Venus will have moved eastward and Venus will be near the Pleiades.

The moon will be near Saturn on Saturday.

The moon will be near Jupiter on Friday, April 2. But Jupiter is bright enough that you might be able to find it without the moon's help.

Instant traffic Jam

One of our couples was late to our staff meeting this morning. We were joking about how they must have gotten stuck in the fearsome rush hour traffic here on Bonaire. But then again, they could have been held up by a herd of goats crossing the road, or a construction crane in transit, or even a boat like this one.

I just wrote our April quarterly prayer letter before work this morning. We'll ftp it to the TWR offices in North Carolina and they will print it up for us and mail it out shortly. Most of what I covered in this quarter's letter has first appeared online here.

If you are not on our mailing list and would like to be, just drop me an email. A link is at the right side of this page. Be sure to reference this blog in your email subject heading or I might just delete it along with all the spam that I get at my hotmail account.

Bonaire Scenes for wallpaper

I posted three vistas of Bonaire, as seen in Washington Park, on my Club Photo site. One is kind of dark on my screen at work, but looked ok at home, so monitor settings do make a difference. If an image works for you, great.

If you click on the thumbnails and pictures, you will eventually get to a 1024x768 size image that you can download if you want to.

Root Beer

We are looking forward to my parents and Aunt and Uncle visiting us soon. A family tradition in the summer has always been to make home made root beer, so I mixed up a batch to get fizzy for their arrival.

The Hires Root Beer extract that we used to use when I was a kid has become impossible to find, even in New England, home of Root Beer lovers. Fortunately my parents have retired out in Pennsylvania Dutch country, and it turns out that the Amish make their own root beer too. Shanks extract tastes amazingly similar to the old Hires extract. Yippie.

Five gallons of root beer fills up about two and a half cases of the small bottles we found here on Bonaire. Maybe we'll look for a case of old Brookdale Beverages bottles the next time we are on furlough in New Jersey. Filling bigger bottles would speed up our root beer production process.

Action photos are here and here.

Innovative tech wizards

We have lots of UPS battery backup capacity in our studio building, so we are going to put most of our office computers on the UPSes. We want to distribute the load evenly so we needed a quick way to determine which AC power phase (there are three) each office computer system was connected to.

Udo and Rich used this high tech tool to do the job. Not the scopes.... but the red thing in the picture that looks like a heavy duty hair dryer. I'm not sure what it's called, but I use it to shrink heat shrink tubing when I'm making mic cables and the like. It blows REALLY hot air.
Maybe it's called a flameless heat gun or something like that.

Well, Rich went into each office, plugged in the heat gun, and switched it on and off a few times. Meanwhile, Udo was watching the volt and amp meters for all three phases. When Rich ran the heat gun, the meters for one of the phases reacted noticeably while the others all stayed calm. Udo then told Rich which phase he was plugged into via walkie talkie.

In a related note, after much head scratching and dedicated decective work, we discovered that the new standby generator doesn't like us having a Laserjet printer plugged into it the UPS system. When someone sends a print job, the printer has to heat up the part that fuses the "ink" to the page. That draws about 10 amps. When this hits the UPS, it in turn draws some 30 to 35 amps, on one phase. The generator didn't like that at all, so now the finance office Laserjet is just plugged into the house power, like the other laser printers.

Visitors from the Frozen North

Scott Hollinger and Joe Barker have been here on Bonaire this week. Both Scott and Joe, and their families, have lived here on Bonaire in days gone by. They are now operating out of Trans World Radio's offices in Cary, North Carolina.

The both are involved in a number of aspects of the ministry of TWR, but Scott is mostly wearing his English language Ministries Director hat this week while here on Bonaire.

Besides his Americas region Technical Director responsibilities, Joe has begun to function as a liaison between Bonaire Director Rich Fuller and TWR-Americas-Region head honcho, Tom Corcoran.

It's been great to see Joe and Scott again and to catch up on what has been going on in the greater TWR world.

Here are two more pictures of Scott and Joe.

More Airconditioning work

Over the last few weeks, I've posted pictures of the airconditioning plant rebuild. Here is what the chiller barrel area looks like now that Udo has finished fabricating panels to close it all up. This unit used to hold the condenser coils for the old system. The new condenser unit is located directly overhead.

Here is a shot from the other side of the wall, showing the compressor, and controls that run the refridgeration plant.

On the other side of the same room are some of the pumps that circulate the cold water created by the plant. Here Udo and Rich examine out what happens when different pumps are switched on and off.

Painting Continues

Here is a shot of Ivan cutting in a window on the office wing. The unoccupied office wing I might add. We've pretty much all moved over to the Studio building, since there are only a handful of us rattling around the facility on any given day. We have more computers than people around here, but hey, they run the station for us.

Speaking of computers... we have a jazzy new firewall connecting our LAN to the Internet. The firewall is the teeny tiny blue box. The old firewall was the size of a normal computer because.... it was a normal computer. We can administrate the new firewall with a web interface, which is a lot easier than the old one, which was running a command line interface under Linux.

The really cool thing about the new firewall is that it lets us connect our LAN up to both our Internet connections at the same time. It performs load balancing and other magic to make sure we are always online and can get those radio program downloads as speedily as possible. It also maintains a secure connection to the TWR offices in Cary, NC for business info.

Paint is Flying

Here is a picture of Benny using what is the longest paint roller extension that I've ever seen. You know how paint speckles sort of fly off of a roller? Well when Benny rolled way up high on that wall and with the Bonaire winds, the paint was sailing to amazing distances. I still have paint on my jeans, and I was halfway across the parking lot.

We are beginning to spruce up the buildings and grounds, partly because they need it from time to time, and partly because we want to look our best when we celebrate TWR's 40th year of broadcasting from Bonaire.

The celebration will probably be either the weekend of Aug. 7 and 8 or the weekend of Aug. 14 and 15. It will depend on the schedules of the various luminaries who might or might not be attending. In other words, nothing is firmed up at this point.