Today is a palindrome day, i.e. the date written in the format YYYYmmdd can be read in reverse order to give the same result.

An article in a swiss newspaper reported, that this is the first palindrome day for 900 years, a little thinking about the problem easily will give you dates like 2001-10-02, 2010-01-02 or 2011-11-02 that are also palindrome days, but only for the format yyyyMMdd, different dates are palindrome dates for ddMMyyyy. I was curious to see how many palindrome days in either format exist from a given date (I used the year 1 AD (there is no year 0!!!), so I created this little script that prints out all the palindrome days since 01.01.01, days that are palindromes in both formats are highlighted:

The last time I wanted to do some deep-sky astrophotography, I ran into an issue with our astronomy club’s LXD-650 mount – immediately after switching it on the declination motor started to run at high speed.

After some research on the internet I was able to resolve the issue, by tweaking the setting on the potentiometer responsible for the declination encoder LED light.

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