Allen's spec on the spot on the web

Last Updated 7/4/2008

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A little about me...

If you care to know how old I am, my birth date begins at the 71541070st digit after the decimal point in PI (in the MMDDYYYY format).  If you put enough numbers together anything is possible.   In my younger days I live about a year on God's Island, near Ft. DeSoto,  without electricity or running water.  Having only a kerosene lantern at night really got me into reading.  The no-name storm of 1983 rearranged my living situation and I ended up on a houseboat in Hurricane Hole.  This was the same time that movie Summer Rental was filming the sailing scene about 100 yards away.  It was a great lifestyle until Billy Morning's restaurant went in and brought along caravans of people.  These days I live in a average house on an average street with a couple of not so average cats that keep me in line and assist with whatever I'm doing - unless it's their nap time.

I tinker with woodworking, computer programming, astronomy, scuba, photography and kayaking (at the moment)...

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 with my own hands.  This isn't necessarily less expensive than purchasing commercial equipment, but it had a strange appeal for me, but I'll get more into that later.

The reason that I have so much astronomy 'stuff' on my web site is that is one the few areas that I felt that I could contribute something that isn't already on hundreds of other web pages.  If I come up with anything unique that others may find interesting I'll add those pages also.   I guess that this is my Great American Novel.

I don't consider myself a hard-core observer. I spend more time reading about astronomy and cosmology than looking up. This may have more to do with the light-polluted area I live in than desire. The observing chair and mount I made for the for the Megrez got me interested enough in woodworking I have built a few Dobsonian mounted Newtonian telescopes. 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.

During my college days in the early 80's I signed up for a couple of astronomy classes with Daryl Schrader, who had a great lecture about the correct way to fall into a Black Hole. I kept a read-about-it interest in astronomy until 1998.  It took me a year to wade through the advertising hype before I settled on a C11 and a Losmandy G11 mount. Interestingly, I never actually saw a C11 or Losmandy mount in person before I ordered them. I spent the first year learning how to use the equipment and the basics of observing. Now that I'm no longer clueless I have more fun every time I go out.  I do 'cheat' and use Sky Commander digital setting circles.

In 2002 I signed up for the Observational Astronomy class at St. Petersburg College (SPC) under the guiding eye of Dr. Craig Joseph.  Well, in short, it was not all that it could have been.  The weather allowed us only one night of decent seeing so almost all of the classes were lab exercises.   Fortunately it was also off campus at the local gray sky park, which is far better than in the middle of the city.  Unfortunately, that one night was slated to take piggyback photos so no eyepieces were brought for the school's C8's.   The instructor knew I was bringing the CG11 and he packed away a image intensifying eyepiece and I brought my set.  This was the only deep sky sights the students saw, other than photos, during the class.  Sigh.

I've also been known to spend some time Geocaching.  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 maps.  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 tale about some New Jersey technical divers (modern term) discovering a German U-Boat that shouldn't have been there.  I believe that it will be a movie in the next year or two.   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 - The Yellowstone section will knock your socks off.  I'll also throw into the lighter category First Light, by Richard Preston, who also wrote The Hot Zone and, last, but not least, Seeing In The Dark by Timothy Ferris.  Seeing In The Dark covers many of the advanced amateur astronomers and some are locals that I have gone stargazing with.  These books are are all worth reading and a few are now on audio CDs (great for long drives).  Now I put them on the iPod and could likely drive across her country and back before needing to reload it.  Make sure that you get the unabridged versions, if it is offered, so that you don't miss the good stuff.

Here's some of the Homosassa gang getting getting ready for a  trip to the house on the island. In Homosassa Springs pontoon boats are used like cars are in the city.

Over the past years I have had the pleasure to visit some remarkable locations.  My favorites were:  The reefs of Cozumel, Museums of Washington DC, Arches National Park in Utah, Acadia National Park in Maine, Grand Canyon National Park, a too short visit to Yosemite National Park and a couple of weeks on a houseboat in the Florida Keys SCUBA diving until I looked like a mutant prune, among others.  It's been a while since I've been to the Keys.  Maybe it's toe to go back.

The to-do list in no special order...

I need to visit and leave Yellowstone before it blows up.  Learn TIG welding, specifically for aluminum.  Learn what all of the buttons on the D70s digital camera do - I love going out just to take photos.  Learn Java programming. (see a pattern here?  I like to learn new things)   Take a leisurely drive through the Smoky Mountains, go swimming in Manatee Springs,  revisit the Edison house...

I can now scratch three items off of my to-do list.  In 2007 I attended the Stellafane convention in Vermont, visited the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary and took up kayaking.  The latter will keep me busy for a while.