Wesley's Tool-Box

Hoping to get a bigger look at the planets, I bought a 5mm LE series eyepiece from e.Frantis. It would supposedly get twice the magnification of the 25mm eyepiece & 2.5x barlow lens combination. After waiting for more than a week for the weather to clear up, I observed the planet Saturn through the brand new eyepiece. It certainly showed the planet nicely, in spite of being a bit dark due to the high magnification.

Not to miss the opportunity to capture this on camera, I got my SX50 HS camera out and placed it over the eyepiece by hand. After several hundred shots, I was able to recover a handful of good photos. Putting them together, I was able to finally have the Cassini Division on the rings of Saturn properly show up. This fulfilled one of the main expectations I had of the Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope.

As for the actual magnification of the eyepiece, my calculations showed that the photos had a 0.22 arc second / pixel resolution, which is about 6.65 times better than the 50x zoom provided by SX50 HS's integrated lens. This is equivalent to having a 8000mm zoom lens. Also, this is 2.4 times the magnification given by the aforementioned eyepiece-barlow lens combo. This is somewhat higher than expected.

Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + 5mm eyepiece
Device: Canon SX50 HS (afocal)
Settings: 24mm - ISO 200 - 1/5s - f/3.4
Filters: None
Time: 2015-04-27 03:16-03:29 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
23 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

For the past two weeks, I've been having a strange problem when attempting to place calls with my iPhone 6 Plus. Many of the phone numbers that I know for sure exist would be met with "the number you dialed is not in service". If I switch the "Enable LTE" option in Settings app to "Data Only" instead of "Voice & Data", the phone calls would go through just fine. So it had to be an issue with VoLTE.

I first contacted my carrier, SK Telecom, to see if this was a problem at its end. But nothing turned up and I was eventually advised to contact Apple instead. Sure enough, colleagues using iPhone 6 on the same carrier did not have the problem. Digging deeper, I discovered that the problem did not occur only if I had country code prefix (e.g. +82 for Korea) on the phone number. So while +82-10-xxxx-yyyy would work, 010-xxxx-yyyy wouldn't.

Seeing that it might be some sort of a weird software issue, I contacted Apple support about this. Unfortunately, no clear solution came up, either. As a last resort, I was told to do a complete factory reset and see if that helped. As the troubleshooting was reaching a dead-end, I got a carrier settings update as I opened up the "About" page in Settings app. It updated the carrier settings from SK Telecom 18.x to 19.1. I told the support that I'd see if this update did anything, and if not, I might try the factory reset.

I attempted several calls to various places with the VoLTE setting on, and I saw that all of the calls now made through regardless of the country code prefix. The update apparently fixed the problem. It was indeed a software problem, but it was somewhat caused and fixed by the carrier. I reported this success to Apple support.