Recent content by mishima

Could it be that indeed mostly everyone has moved on from IRAF in 2025? Is anyone teaching an Observational Astronomy course with data reduction techniques? Curious what is used these days in place of IRAF.

Hi, I was wondering how prevalent/popular IRAF is in 2025. When I studied in 2001 it was dominant. Last I really played with image reduction in the 2010s it was still fairly important. I am guessing most service observers still use it for real-world telescope installations. Or is Astropy or...

Hi there, I'm a high school teacher and had a student stump me with a rather practical question. It concerns the analogue black holes I had read about in one of our universities, similar to this. The student was simply curious how these materials are discarded after the data is recorded. I had...

I've never had a good understanding of this. Say I am dissolving 20g sodium chloride into 1L of water. Is the only way to theoretically predict the final volume of solution to consult density tables? edit: I realize this isn't a practical situation, and that typically you are making a solution...

Thanks, that's a great idea, I'll have them investigating printer settings and print orientation to give the best streamlines. They can design different methods to attach the 'seeding rake' to the wind tunnel's inlet, and try different rake spacings.

Could it be as simple as drilling some holes in a piece of PVC then feeding the fog through to get good lines? As long as the PVC is capped, the pressure should be the same at each hole.

That's one thing I'd definitely like to explore more. I haven't used dry ice or a (glycerin) fog machine to get those kinds of laminar visuals before. I was worried about the glycerin fog crudding up the wind tunnel prop, and never really researched how those effects are otherwise created. It...

The entire enclosed test space size is about 5x5x15. The wing sections we test are 3x5, spanning almost the full width. Jetstream 500 Product Page

Hi, I teach a high school Aerospace Engineering course. We have a small wind tunnel that can reach about 85 mph, and test objects roughly the size of a 3x5 notecard. It has a pitot tube and force scale. In the past we have constructed airfoils using their 4 or 5 digit NACA codes, then tested...

So, these are possibly switch mode power supplies? Is anything identifiable from the pictures? I can try to remove more epoxy, but its a little fragile.

Oh, I am not trying to build my own power supply. I was just trying to get a circuit diagram of this one to study, mostly in an effort to explain it better to curious students and differentiate it from the neon sign transformer. As I said, my current explanation amounts to 'its a transformer, a...

Yes, it works similar to a Jacob's ladder but the climbing effect is not as smooth, as you say. It does clearly rise in height. Also as mentioned, there is a magnetic attraction effect I never noticed with other transformers. It's interesting because the magnetic effect actually pulls the...

It is a Jacob's ladder that uses 2 hanging chains as the conductors, and also this. For the latter I have not had much luck getting my 3d prints to become conductive enough. But it makes a great Jacob's ladder with a 6V lantern battery and some hanging chains. I have used neon sign transformers...

Hi, I recently acquired some of these cheap modules for plasma experiments. I tried dissolving the epoxy off of one of them in an attempt to reverse engineer the circuit. I can see a resistor, diode, and transformer but am unsure about some of the other components. I was wondering if anyone here...

I see. So you are questioning set theory, but not calculus. You concede that the concept of infinity, at least as it is employed in calculus, is a useful tool for solving human problems. I admit I am far from an expert in set theory, that is why I made my original post requesting clarification...