Strangely enough, there are probably some people out there who would say something similar about 100 year old cognac. My vote, why ruin the taste of a fine cognac with a piece of burning weed?

Alt-az mounts are fine, but you need to keep exposures short. Even if the alt-az is tracking, the field of view slowly rotates. Stacking a bunch of short images is the way to go. Your brother does some nice work! Never get tired of looking at M42 - either through the eyepiece or a good image.

I saw the Stockholm when it came into NY harbor after colliding with and sinking the Italian liner, Andria Doria. The bow of the Stockholm was shortened by something like 60 feet from the force of the collision.

Why would he have to do a lens change. Looks like every lens already has a body attached.

Definitely sounds like a Draconid meteor. The radiant point in Draco was in the northwest during most to the evening hours. Burners are definitely cool!

The Draconid meteor shower peaked on 10/7 and you probably saw one the later ones.

The wife's 2004 Honda Accord just turned over 260,000 miles on the clock. She puts about 125 miles on it each day as she travels between 3 hospitals - Piedmont, Gwinnett Medical Center and Northside - seeing new born babies.

Her company pays her whatever the standard mileage rate is these days. I think it's 55 cents per mile.

I'd spend every evening at home, but the wife likes to say, "How can I miss you if you don't go away." So this week, sitting in the camper at the Georgia Star Party with a bunch of other astronomically minded nerds.

Shoulda been dead 10 years ago. Got really lucky and some great doctors.

Sounds like a plan. I do a differential of the system drive every night and a complete backup of the sys drive weekly. Use Allway Sync to track any data changes to a primary and secondary backup drives in real time.

What the heck was the AT&T Passport Center? I spent 16 years with AT&T Long Lines and 22 years with BellSouth. Most of it in long haul switching and broadband carrier.

Before doing anything... Get a big external drive and a copy of Acronis and back up the entire system as it arrives. Then, after partitioning and tweaking the system to work as you want it, do another complete backup.

My preference is all software on the boot drive and no data on the boot disk. Although you will have 2 partitions, you still only have a single drive in the machine and that's a recipe for disaster. A good backup and restoral plan should be near the top of your list.

The old 6809-based CoCo could have been a great machine if Rat Shack had implemented some of the features of the processor - mainly memory bank switching. I always thought it was a far superior CPU compared to the 6502 in the Apple boxes.

All computers have some of the OS in ROM. If, for not other reason, that to boot the system. It beats having to key in a bootstrap loader like we did with the old DEC PDP-11 machines. You keyed in a small piece of code through the front panel switches that allowed the paper tape reader to work. The paper tape loaded the code necessary to boot the system from a hard drive.

Ahhh.. the bad old days!

The whole Jesus myth has been a part of many societies myth structure. The Jews just adopted them and incorporated them into their own mythic structure.

The difference between a myth and a religion is a myth is a religion with no adherents any longer. It won't be long before christianity moves into the category of myth as people are leaving the churches in droves.

Even more telling, surveys show the young - the future of the religion - are rejecting christianty in ever increasing numbers.

Atlanta, GA
Average window.........Earliest
Jan. 21 - Feb. 6.....Nov. 11 (1968)
Average annual snowfall 2.7"

And there are many years the first snow doesn't come at all.

Still running XP Sp 3 and not looking forward to the hassles of moving to 7 when I build my next machine...