Observatorio de la Ballona

For a blog (and a site, for that matter) that is supposed to be dedicated to astronomy, there has been precious little astronomy for the last several months.

Back in January, I removed the NP-101 and put the C-11 back on the mount intending to take some longer focal length images. Several factors interfered.

• Changing Equipment. The effort to re-balance the mount and set-up the whole thing to work with the C-11 instead of the NP-101. Note that the NP-101 set-up was done when I was on an extended vacation between jobs.
• Weather. Our rain came late and in small batches. Not good for investing the time required for a new set-up and getting good images.
• Work. New job, new responsibilities, less time for astronomy. And that winning lottery ticket is still very elusive .
• Property Quest. We have been looking at property to be a site for a darker sky site (not really dark as the location has to work as a local “camp” as well as an observatory site) and that has taken significant time.

Enough whining. I have posted some nice shots of Saturn. I have some Jupiter data in the pipeline. The bottom line is that all of these things are about having fun, right?

It finally happened. After basking in the idea that my local disk space was unlimited, I finally hit the wall.

It started with the computer in the observatory. I was taking AVIs of Jupiter, and it was taking a long time to allocate disk space and then started giving warnings about lack of space. This is a relatively small (80 GB, small by today’s standards, anyway) drive. I started to move older data to the second drive on that machine, a 40 GB drive. Problem solved, I thought.

Not so fast. After a few minutes, I got a warning that the second drive was short on space. The move aborted, I was OK with about 10% free on the working drive. Over full by my standards.

Then things went from bad to worse. Or the problem got broader, anyway. I noticed that my main drive on my main desktop machine, a 160 GB drive, was down to 7 GB. Given that I was moving around 800 MB AVIs, that is full for all practical purposes.

Today I cleaned things up. The Observatory computer is still fairly full, but not critical. I compressed 60 GB of AVIs and freed up about 35 GB. Some AVIs compressed by 96% (small object in a dark sky, no doubt). I did a directory command and sent it to a text file via “>”, created a macro to change the file name into the commands I needed, and it ran for several hours. I am now at 56 GB free, a little over 30%. I have breathing room, but I think the next computer will need a terabyte, and I should get another external drive!