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This seemed appropriately timed: https://www.xkcd.com/2202/
Was it cellulose acetate or cellulose nitrate (nitrocellulose) that was the problem? Nitrocellulose was quite widely used in the early years of the 1900s.
I imagine cellulose acetate can burn but, nitrocellulose is also known as gun cotton and burns with vigour!
Without the addition of carbamite or another stabiliser, the decomposition products of nitrocellulose accumulate quite quickly making film go brownish – so colour film would really suffer.
Didnt some types of billiard ball made from nitrocellulose during the 20’s have a similar issue? I have a vague memory nitrocellulose was used as a coating for playing cards as well at some point.
Brilliant. Really hadnt realised you just had to look 60 degrees in front or following the sun. That makes it pretty easy, get the sun’s position on ecliptic in RA/Dec, convert to ecliptic cooords, add 60 degrees and convert back to RA/Dec again. Sure I can find something in AstroPy to do most of that. I imagine that drops it nicely into the edge of the Zodiacal light.
Thanks again.
It was a nice, friendly and well organised conference. Some very interesting talks.
Shame its a bit expensive for amateurs to attend – but its not really aimed at us.
Watched for the 00:08 pass from here in Salisbury. A single 3rd mag satellite went through at about 0:08 but certainly nothing else brighter than 5th mag was seen for 3-4 mins either side.
Perhaps their shape means there will be passes when they are bright and other faint – a bit like iridium flares.
Had a look at the last two papers. It all looks pretty straightforward – though the devil will be in the detail as they themselves admit, care is needed to ensure the implementation is robust against residual defects, cosmic rays and artefacts. Would be fairly easy (though fiddly) to implement in something like Python – shame some of the commercial packages go for the simple solutions only – its not as if CPU and memory is expensive anymore.
It was surprisingly familiar as I saw similar methods presented at an SPIE conference in 2003 or 2005 (cannot check as work went “smart working” a year or two back and lots of conference proceedings got thrown out when we lost book shelves) where there was a session on dim source tracking techniques.
Will have a look at the other paper on Tuesday and report back.
