Necessary Facts: April 2022

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Daysmith Coffee

It is nice to see vendors in the store again in the wake of the continuing Covid concerns. Derek and Daniel, founders of Daysmith Coffee, were set up at the Wheatsville Co-op.

https://drinkdaysmith.com

From their website:
COFFEE + BENEFITS

Our mission at Daysmith is simple: to transform wellness with everyday goodness. That’s why we make delicious coffees that combine the benefits of vitamins and plant-based nutrients to support your health and power your day

GOODNESS

It all starts with our ultra smooth coffees and creamy oat milks. We know taste is number one, so we've taken our time to perfect our recipes with ultra smooth coffee and creamy oat milk to maximize deliciousness.

WELLNESS

All our coffees are infused with vitamins and plant-based nutrients to provide targeted benefits and support your health.

LESS IS MORE

We pride ourselves on what’s IN our cans, just as much what we’ve left OUT of them. While other coffees are loaded with calories and sugars, we’ve cut them down. All our coffees have only 15-70 calories and 0-5g of sugar per can.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Awesome Austin Foods at the Wheatsville Co-op

Two Hot Mamas Salsa

Crisp Greens at the Wheatsville Co-op

Sunday at the Co-op

Salsa Showdown: Jaime's versus Royitos

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Astronomy: Two Minor Books for the Backyard

There’s a lot of books out there for backyard stargazers. Amateur astronomers with some experience tend to recommend a few favorites with longevity.

Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis (Cambridge University Press; five editions 1989 to 2019);
Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe by Terence Dickson (Firefly Books; four editions 1989 to 2019);
and The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer (Firefly Books; four editions 1991 to 2021).

These two books are not at that level but there’s nothing wrong with them. You would have to search well to find them for more than $10 online and your local used bookstore probably has them for that much or less (and no shipping). And as always, check the city library.

Starwatch by Ben Mayer (New York: Perigee Books, 1984).

In a layout favored by book designers in the 1970s Starwatch by Ben Mayer offers two unique teaching aids for learning the night sky. The author shows how to construct “starframes” from clear kitchen wrap stretched on coat hangers bent into rectangles. Scaled with the illustrations in the book you can hold the frame up to the sky to find constellations and the deep sky objects within them.

Mayer also shows how to build a projection system that he calls a “problicom” for revealing new objects that have appeared on successive nights. His system requires two slide projectors. Mayer also insists that you can take pictures of the night sky with a standard 35mm camera and a 50mm lens. That being as it may, it is true that with a different machine on the same principle, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Modern technology offers other solutions but the method is sound.

Those two projects open and close the book. Most of the book is a tour of 25 constellations in the northern night sky. The rest of the book is about celestial coordinates, comets, meteors, adapting to the dark, and other standard topics. For the constellations, every layout includes a classical artistic drawing, a guide to estimate the location, the geometric arrangement of the stars, and a list of interesting targets for your telescope.

The Stars : The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos by Robert Dinwiddie, et al., delivers a solution to an esoteric problem with all books: we project a spherical sky onto a flat page. This criticism came up on the Cloudy Nights discussion board as a reason not to give a planisphere to a child. I reject the criticism but I understand the point. The illustrations in this book are spherical projections. Those prints are also pieces of a puzzle that could be reproduced, cut and pasted onto a sphere. Also included are call-outs to favored targets: the Messier objects (of course), binary stars, and so on.

The Stars: The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos
by Robert Dinwiddie; David W Hughes;
Geraint H Jones; Ian Ridpath; Carole Stott;
Giles Sparrow (New York, New York : DK Publishing
and London : Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2016)