Comment Motorized Equatorial Telescope mount free. (Score 1) 85
I have a motorized equatorial mount that is of very hefty precision design. You would have to pick it up from Santa Fe NM, but its perfect for astrophotography.
-Simon.
Equatorial Mounts For Budget Astrophotography? 85
Timoris writes "With the Perseids approaching rapidly, I am looking for a good beginner's motorized equatorial mount for astrophotography. I have seen a few for $150 to $200, but apparently the motor vibrations make for poor photographs. Orion makes good mounts, but are out of my price range ($350) and the motor is sold separately, adding to the price half over again. Does anyone have any good experience with any low- or mid-priced mounts?"
Autodesk Suing to Keep Format Closed 365
An anonymous reader writes "AutoCAD is by far the industry standard CAD tool for engineering drawings. When I was an engineering student it was on every computer in the college of engineering. Autodesk, the makers of the AutoCAD software, are attempting to quash an effort to reverse-engineer the proprietary binary format used by AutoCAD. Looking at the court order, their whole argument revolves around something called TrustedDWG that basically looks like a digital signature that verifies the file was created by an Autodesk product."
Comment method of digitizing a laser disk (Score 2, Interesting) 92
A laser disk has pits on the disk that vary in length and position in the sequence. So essentially you have a time and amplitude domain that generates a analog waveform. Why would it not be possible to construct a special apparatus that reads the length of the pits as accurately as possible and store that information in a data file with a 64 bit number for each pit with a time? Once you have this the data you have captured is digital and can use the necessary analysis to generate the image information from that data?
It seems a lot better than dealing with disk players that are taking this information doing various filtering on the information and working with the generated analog frequency waveform.
