Allen's Place

My free time is split between kayaking, photography, astronomy and building things. Much of the past couple of months has been working on updating the Robo Foucault tester (telescope mirror tester) The updates are rather extensive. On the rare occasions that the night sky is clear and somewhat dry I started to see if I could get any astrophotos of the dim fuzzy things that are up there.

Many of these things have their own pages on this site. This is likely the most unfocused page here. The goal of my web site is to offer information and examples that are not available in other places. This will mean that you will get a taste of whatever I'm up to. I guess that the site as a whole is my Great American Novel.

When the weather permits I spend much of my free time kayaking. It's a wonderful activity that has allowed me to visit places that were previously only accessible on a map. Most of my kayaking treks are in the 5-15 mile range. Not exactly epic, but they make for a fun day. My kayaking page has much more information on the subject.

I've been into photography for more than 40 years. I don't know if I'll ever be good at it, but I enjoy attempting to capture the moment, especially with animals and nature. Visit my photography page for some examples.

My woodworking hobby is really a vehicle to get other hobbies where I want them to be. My primary goal with woodworking is to end each day with the same number of fingers that I started with. So far, so good. At some point I realized that it would be possible to construct almost everything needed to enjoy the night sky, including telescope optics, with my own hands. This isn't necessarily less expensive than purchasing commercial equipment, but it had a strange appeal for me. I got my first taste of astronomy while in the Boy Scouts during a summer at Camp Soule. One night Earnie, an Eagle Scout, was pointing out the constellations and that inspired me to work for my Astronomy merit badge. About a year later I was presented the merit badge and, in 1979, I joined Earnie as an Eagle scout.

Outside of astronomy I'm into SCUBA certifications with NASDS and PADI and Nitrox (Enriched Oxygen) with PADI.

I'm busy with other things these days so I expect that SCUBA will be an occasional venture and no longer the main weekend event. Besides, I've seen most of the local dive sites back when they had big fish on them. It's still fun to visit the keys and enjoy clear water. It's getting more difficult to find a live reef.

Six months before Y2K (yep, that was a thing) I was handed a VB6 compiler and asked to learn the language and rewrite the Times Ad Tracking System, which I pulled off with 3 weeks to spare. After that I was part of the Server Admin team for about five years. For about seven years beginning 2006 I was the Prepress Technical Team lead which was a combination of news, ad and archive systems administration ad workflow management. I also switched from VB to C# for any new coding. After being tech lead I was promoted to Solutions Engineer for a couple of years where I researched and implemented new systems and their integration and interfacing with existing systems. After some downsizing I was a Business Analysis for a couple of years and then an engineer and then I worked in web development for a year and a half before moving to infrastructure. In August 2023 I modernized all of these pages using responsive design. This allows the content to wrap appropriately based on the width of the display. This should allow wide screen PCs and phones to see everything up to their ability.

I ground, polished and figured a half dozen Newtonian telescope mirrors and taught the process for more than 15 years at the SPAC Mirror Lab of the St. Petersburg Astronomy Club on Saturdays. There is a great satisfaction in looking at the cosmos through a telescope that you made with your own hands. The mirror lab and science center shut down in mid 2019. I current have four of the telescopes that I built ranging from the 8" Fritz scope to the The 18" Maxx telescope was finally finished and had first light on 2/6/2010, just four days before the star party.

The last telescope that I built was the relatively light weight 1" thick mirror that became the lightish weight 16" f4.66 Mini Maxx scope. When I started this mirror in March 2017 it was used more than 40 years before that as a tool for a 3" thick 16" mirror. It took a while to make the convex curve concave. It still had red rouge caked to the plate glass.

While working on the 12.5" I was told about an interesting home-made B-Box project. A B-Box is a interface between telescope encoders and a laptop computer. The end result is similar to digital setting circles. The B-Box parts cost about $20, but the interesting thing was the microprocessor that controlled it - a PIC 16F84. I started this not knowing diddly about electronics but everything worked on the first try. Yeeeeha! In fairness, it was a really easy, well laid-out circuit board with great instructions (Thanks David!)

In the last few years I have become a PIC junkie with my favorite being the 16F88 at the moment. I even know what a PNP transistor does now (hurts when you step on it barefoot). I finished a Bluetooth remote NGC display, a three axis quadrature encoder reader using gray code and TBL230 based dark sky meter using the CCS compiler. I recently designed a dew heater controller using a PIC 16F88 and we have made a 18 of them at the Mirror lab.

I've also been known to spend some time Geocaching, especially when it first started. Geocaching is the 'sport' of hunting down hidden boxes of Dollar Store junk with an expensive GPS and a few billion dollars worth of military satellites. The best part of this is that I've visited many great parks that I never knew existed. Some of the more memorable trips were wandering alone into a cypress swamp at dusk and the combo of Infochallenge South and Going for Distance in Balm Boyette Preserve, which turned into a 18 mile no-trail bike ride over two days. My biggest beef with using a mapping GPS in some if these areas is that there's no decent GPS maps for them, so I became an amateur cartographer and started making my own GPS maps that download into a Garmin GPS. You really get to know an area well when you are collecting data to map it and then draw it with a resolution of a few feet.

Allow me to recommend some of the books that I have enjoyed lately: Shadow Divers was a fantastic, true(ish) tale about some New Jersey technical divers (modern term) discovering a German U-Boat that shouldn't have been there. The Elegant Universe, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, and Five ages of the Universe. I read The Fabric Of The Cosmos, by Brian Greene (he also wrote The Elegant Universe) twice and then bought it on CD to absorb any parts that I still missed. This book is the first one that I have read explains WHY the universe inflated, among other things - cool stuff! For a little lighter reading check out Bill Bryson's exceptional work, A Short History of Nearly Everything

I went through a caving phase with the Deep Zone, Beyond the Deep and Blind Descent. If you are not familiar with a Rappel Rack you'll want to look it up after reading these. Before the 2020 pandemic I read The Coming Plague which is a heartwarming story about how much microbes enjoy our company. Good timing!