The Algonquin Radio Observatory (ARO) isn't all that well known, dispite having Canada's largest steerable dish: The 46m Telescope. It was also one of the two telescopes used to do the first successful Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observation in 1967, along with the John A. Galt 26m Telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophyical Observation (DRAO) in BC.

Algonquin Park is my favorite Ontario Provincial Park, with over 7500 \(km^{2}\) of beautiful lakes and forest. Amazingly I camped and canoed here for years without ever knowing the Telescope was here. Below is a view of Lake Travers; when I'm onsite and I get some time away from my work on the telescope acquisition systems I go canoeing on it.

Are we phase-locked to the hydrogen maser?
-- Actual question when working on the telescope.

One of the great perks of working in radio astronomy is the opportunity to go to remote locations around the world, and to say things that sound like they come out of Star Trek (but that are actual science). And also take pictures like the one below of the Milky Way behind the 46m.

This was the first, and so far only, time I've been able to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights). It was fairly dim, and looks more impressive in the long exposure photograph, but it was still a great experience.

The time-lapse video at the top was shot on the Sony a7RII, with a 16-35mm f/4 lens. In theory I could render that in 8K, but I haven't yet acquired the software to do the rendering yet. At some point I'll hopefully return to this and at least re-master the video into 4K. Right now it's only 1080p.

Years ago I ran a small personal blog called area256.com (redirected here now). It started in high school with a fully HTML based site written entirely from scratch. Later I moved over to using wordpress, which I stayed on for a long time. However, overtime I found the wordpress platform, as rich and powerful as it was, to be slow and difficult to maintain. While I'm perfectly happy to dive into the source code to make something work the way I'd like, instead of creating content for the blog, half the time I was just updating the backend to do what I wanted.

So when I got a new domain (renard.io), I figured it was time to try something new. Having done a lot of work with node.js in one of my jobs, I became interested in the node.js based Ghost platform. It was very beta or even alpha feeling when I first installed it, so for a while I just held off, but now that it has reached 1.5+, and fixed a lot of the maintenance issues, I figured it was worth giving a serious try. We will see over the next few months of using it how well this switch turns out. I will post updates on the experience doing more complex tasks as I play around with this new platform.

So now that I have a new blog what kind of topics will it cover? All kinds of subjects I find interesting or happen to be working on. I'm not creating a themed blog, or restricting myself to one or two areas. So there will be photography posts (with hopefully nice photos), topics related to my work (high performance computing and radio telescopes), little hacker projects with things like the Raspberry Pi, lots of Linux sysadmin related content, some math and research, a product review or two, and anything else I find interesting.

(The post photo was taken near the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in BC, Canada.)