The Mycroft Server Project is pleased to announce our entrance into the RetroChallenge Winter Warm-Up 2008. Our project for the winter will be "Mars Observer."
Procedure: I will make observations of the planet Mars each night during the month of January. Following each observation, my PowerBook 170, "Dexter," will go online to report on the observation. The daily update will include an image depicting the position of Mars in relation to Earth using Orrery 1.2 and converted to a jpg image using JPEGView 3.3.1. I will sketch my observations of the planet using MacPaint 1.0 and make my notes in TeachText 1.2. This update will be created daily on the PowerBook 170.
The PowerBook 170 will go online each day for four hours, running MacHTTP 2.2, to make these observations available. The dial-up dynamic URL will be posted on this blog. At the conclusion of each day, the update will be posted to the blog from the 170 using Eudora 1.3.1.
Apparatus: My telescope is a small Cstar Stratus refractor, with which I should just be able to discern the disk of the planet. I may attempt some photographs using a 35 mm Fuji Discovery 500 zoom camera, which is approximately of the same era as the 170. The 170 is configured with 8 MB of RAM and a 25 Mhz 68030 processor. It has a 120 MB hard drive and will be running Macintosh System 7.1, update 3.0, with Thread Manager. It will connect to the Internet via a SupraExpress 288 modem.
