Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Mac user Rush Limbaugh reached an agreement with the Palm Beach County Prosecutor’s Office, ending their three year investigation of his alleged doctor shopping. Every story I read seems to contain this quote from Rush, spoken during his 1995 TV show, with the intent of pointing out some supposed hypocrisy:

Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. … And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.

Let’s see… He didn’t sell any drugs. He didn’t push any drugs. He used drugs, but not drugs that are illegal. He didn’t import any drugs. Nor is he accused of any of those things. So far so good.

He was suspected of violating the law, so he was accused, but since the Palm Beach County prosecutor obviously doesn’t have enough evidence to charge him and proceed to trial, likely because no crime was committed, he can’t be convicted, hence, he can’t be “sent up”.

Where’s the supposed hypocrisy here?

Had the prosecutor enough evidence to convict Rush of doctor shopping, you can bet everyone involved would be preparing for trial. What better example to parade through the media than alleged conservative hypocrite Rush Limbaugh? Because of the agreement, the prosecution gets to save some face, and Rush gets to have the prosecutor off his back.

Last evening, my friend Tim Miller and I went to our telescoping spot and set up our Meade LX200 12-incher for the first time in a few years. After initial alignment, I plugged my PowerBook into the scope and used Starry Night Pro to point it to a series of objects nether of us had seen in some time. One of those was the planet Saturn, and as we looked, I got an idea. I reached into my bag and pulled out my iSight camera, hoping that just by chance it would fit into one of our eyepiece adapters so that we could get some pictures.

Well, it didn’t. The adapters are 1-1/4″ in diameter, and the iSight is 1-3/8″ in diameter. But we still had a chance of getting some pictures by using the afocal method, where we hold the camera up to an eyepiece. The tricky thing about taking afocal pictures by hand is, the camera has to be at the right orientation so that the light coming from the eyepiece strikes the iSight’s lens at a perpendicular angle. We were able to catch several clips of Saturn using iMovie, the best of which I have posted here, at “Revenge of the Giant Head”. Saturn is off-center because, again, aligning the eyepiece and the camera by hand is very difficult. It jitters a bit also because it’s hard for a person to hold the camera perfectly still, and the movements in your hand are amplified by the narrow field of view and the small object being recorded. Had Tim and I been able to hold the camera perfectly still, the iSight would have been able to properly focus the image. You can still tell it’s Saturn, it’s just not a sharp Saturn.

Our next step is to build an adapter. Tim has the tools and some aluminum, and sometime this week he’s going to create a piece that we can slide the iSight into so it will be held still and correctly aligned with the eyepiece of our choice. When that adapter gets built, I’ll post some pictures of it here, along with the cool iSight movies we’ll make. The crescent moon is coming up soon!