Transit of Venus vs M6600

Did live video of the transit of Venus today. We expected to do 300-500 viewers.

What happened was that as other schools and observatories listed on site like skyandtelescope.com got traffic from people watching - and then crashed - we saw more and more viewers. I looked at the server and we were doing 900-1100 Mbits of outbound data with 1,700 trackable viewers. Google Analytics is still counting, but we are over 12,000 page views from 9,000 people. All 50 states. 93 countries.

We had higher quality video than NASA. No kidding.

Since this was not expected to be a big event, I only took one M6600. When I saw how many people were watching, I kinda freaked out. The M6600 was encoding high def video and sitting in direct sunlight. I checked temps and loads and they were very low.

Since we are sort of on the East coast, were were below the horizon with the telescopes by 8:15. We had a great night of streaming and reached many more people than we expected. Very happy that a machine that was hot to the touch from sitting out in sunlight was able to run cool enough to be stable.

Just a random Tuesday.

 

Well done Bokeh. I did not think of watching the Venus Transit online, and it was too cloudy to see where I am.

Is your video still online?

I have used the M6600 in offices that are 38 degrees and up, and the laptop has always performed admirably and never even moaned.