Made with Processing.org

Repaired some broken solder joints, sanded out the biggest scuffs and polished most of the scratches out of the screen. Oh yeah, and the paint job.

The two hemispheres are electrically connected to each other and to an AC power supply, the ring is connected to the same AC supply but 180 degrees out of phase. Particles are charged and then injected into the trap, they are then alternately attracted to the ring and hemispheres causing them to oscillate and become trapped! As the voltage is increased lighter particles pick up more speed until they are finally thrown free from the trap. In ideal conditions ions are all charged the same amount allowing the trap to sort the ions from lightest to heaviest, allowing you to determine the atoms that make up a particular substance.

In this model I can not control the charge on the particles but it is possible to roughly sort them from smallest to largest.

Notes: This trap is scaled WAY up, the ring had a diameter of about 24mm. I'm trapping non-dairy creamer not individual ions. The frequency this trap runs at is WAY lower frequency than that of a real ion trap. This trap runs at a much higher voltage than a real trap. Otherwise them mechanism of operation is identical to the real thing.

So I bought 2 sets because it looked like one set was briefly lost in the mail and this past week I got an email from Amazon that said one set I bought were “fakes.”

• Both sets have printing that matches legitimate manufactures.
• The “legitimate” set have all black filters (not the metalized filters I am used to like Thousand Oaks Optical) the “fakes” have the metalized filters.
• Both sets of glasses have the same transmittance as the Thousand Oaks filter material I use on my telescope and cameras.
• The build quality of the “legitimate” glasses is quite a bit worse than the “fakes” with the two layers of paper being misaligned

So, what I suspect is that I actually received a crappy set of “real” glasses and a well made set of counterfeits, this seems in line with the press release made by the American Astronomical Scociety.^[0]^

Some of these newly identified counterfeits are indistinguishable from genuine Qiwei products and appear to be safe. Others look like Qiwei’s eclipse glasses, but when you put them on, you realize they are no darker than ordinary sunglasses. So, these products are not just counterfeit, but also fake –– they’re sold as eclipse glasses, but they are not safe for solar viewing.

So, did anyone get unlucky enough to get some ‘real-fake’ glasses? An did anyone get a set of legitimate glasses with the non-metalized filter?

^[0]^ https://aas.org/press/american-astronomical-society-warns-counterfeit-fake-eclipse-glasses

Forbidden Fibers

In the ten years since I took this photo the trail has been abandoned and the tree has rotted away.

To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door, because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else.

Totally unrelated to the Boeing that lost a wheel last week or the Boeing that had "a strong movement" today, injuring 50.

[OC]

So many CRTs.

$40M that came of a Conservative motion which was backed by the NDP.