Today, I announced my bid for Fort Collins City Council, in District 5 (the current councilmember, Kelly Ohlson, is term-limited). You can read all about it at http://www.rosscunniff.com - it should be a great adventure!
On December 18, 2014, I received a letter from Rocky Scott, the Director of Corporate Relations with Woodward, Inc. The letter was remarkable for its bullying and intimidating tone. It also repeated several false statements, in an apparent attempt to extract more taxpayer money from the citizens. In response, here are the facts: Homestead Natural Area was not a gift from Woodward. It was part of a $23.5 million taxpayer-financed package, which was adopted by Council on March 26, 2013. The agreement says the property was “conveyed”, not donated, which just means Woodward transferred ownership to the City as part of the deal. The City of Fort Collins is not required to ask the voters for millions of additional dollars to fund the Lincoln Avenue project next to Woodward. It has always been up to Council whether or not to refer this question to the voters. And, if Council should ask, you are free to vote “no” on the question. It is impor...
I got two GoPro Hero3 Black cameras and am planning a panoramic project with them. However, to do the project correctly and accurately, I need a good read on their field-of-view. So, I set up a tripod and a grid and a tape measure, and took a few photos. Here they are, desaturated and contrast-enhanced, with central red dots and some annotations. First, measuring the diagonal FOV: Next, the horizontal FOV: Finally, the vertical FOV: The front of the camera lens was almost exactly 17 inches from the grid. The camera body started about 17.25 inches from the grid. Assuming the sensor is embedded some distance into the body, I used an estimated field-to-sensor distance of 17.5 inches. This yields the following field-of-view, in degrees: Diagonal: 146 Horizontal: 121 Vertical: 93 Doing a little interval math on the field-to-sensor distance shows these angles are accurate to about plus or minus 1.5 degrees. Int...
I got up this morning very early to make an animation of Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the Moon, Venus, and Mercury as they rose in the early morning sky. Here is the finished product: It was very cold - 7 degrees Fahrenheight - and very early. This is a 30-minute sequence starting at 5:39 AM and finishing at 6:09 AM. All of the images have the same parameters: Canon 7DmkII camera Canon 8-15mm f/4L lens, locked at 10mm (widest useful zoom with this lens on a 1.6x crop camera) 8 second exposures at ISO 3200 Image sequencing performed by Canon's EOS Utility. A capture was started every 15 seconds. That camera/lens combo yields a 180-degree diagonal field-of-view. Jupiter and Mercury are about 120 degrees apart in these images, so this gives some extra room for animation and cropping. Capturing all five planets in the pre-dawn skyglow is surprisingly tricky, especially when city light pollution is contributing to a murky lower atmosphere. ...
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