Priya Nagarajan

Limiting magnitude from first principles

Where the fifth root of 100 comes from, why 5 log D is just Pogson again, and why every aperture table you have seen is a point source table.

The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying

One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.

Every projection is wrong, here is how much

Gauss closed this in 1827 and Tissot gave us a way to measure the damage. Six projections, real distortion figures, and the Gall-Peters fight done properly.

218 hours on one galaxy

Three winters on NGC 891 from a Bortle 4 backyard. Full log, the square root maths on what each block of hours bought, and the 40 hours I deleted.

It is always DNS, but here is the actual reason

Why DNS breaks things out of proportion to its size, with real dig output read line by line, plus the four commands I run to prove it is not DNS.

Magnesium: what the trials actually show

Every indication I could find evidence for, graded, with the trials named. Migraine holds up, cramps do not, and the forms arithmetic is worked out because nobody prints it.