About Ray Gralak

I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where I went to Catholic grade school and a Christian College prep high school. I always had an aptitude for mathematics and science so with lots of hard work studying I earned a partial scholarship to Caltech where I graduated with a BSEE degree in 1984. 

Despite my electrical engineering degree I never worked as that type of engineer. I found I was fascinated with the work I was doing to help put myself through college - computer programming - so I continued in that field. To this day I'm working in that field as a Senior Software Engineer at a local Silicon Valley hi-tech company. 

I'm currently doing embedded systems development at a hi tech company in Silicon Valley (California). It is a challenge and a blast. I have developed a Windows NT/XP control/status application called LexiPanel for my home theater pre-amplifier, a Lexicon MC-1 (http://www.gralak.com/LexiPanel). I have also developed a couple other software applications (PulseGuide and Sigma) with several more more on the way! PulseGuide is distributed with all new AstroPhysics goto mounts. The core code of Sigma is included in MaximDL V4 from Diffraction Limited.

Here are some of my interests:

Christianity: My wife Jerri and I are relatively new Christians. We joined Green Valley Christian in the fall of 1999 and have been actively pursuing our faith. Two and a half years ago I took over the Church's web site. Since becoming the webmaster I completely revamped the site and actively update it every week (more than I can say for this site! ha ha! :-) It includes all of the pastor's sermons from the last 2.5 years as downloadable MP3's.

Astronomy: When I was a kid I had a fascination for astronomy. I read all the books on the subject that I could find at the local libraries. I still can remember the blurry views of Jupiter provided by the department store refractor my parents bought for me. I never saw even one band on Jupiter but I plotted the daily motion of Jupiter's 4 largest satellites, trying to find the pattern of their motion. 

As I grew older I found I had less and less time for Astronomy so my interest went dormant for many years... until early 1993. My wife and I were vacationing in the Mendico area at a Bed and Breakfast to celebrate our first anniversary. On the table in the room was a Celestron catalogue. After looking through that, seeing the wonderful pictures I decided I had to get back into astronomy. 

A couple months later I bought an 8" Orion dobsonian telescope. My love for the hobby kept growing at an exponential rate. By the summer of 1995 I had built my own 17.5" truss-tube dobsonian with the help of my wife's grandfather, Joe McCord, a master craftsmen in the pattern-making trade.

My real interest was in doing astrophotography. After buying several other telescopes I finally bought a mount that was (barely) capable of tracking the motion of the stars. With that, a 4" high-quality refractor and an inexpensive CCD camera my dream started. The dream continued when I had the opportunity to purchase another very high quality refractor, this one 5" in aperture, and a superb telescope mount. That and a more expensive CCD camera improved the quality of my pictures even more.

The last step was obtaining a more expensive CCD camera and telescope mount. With these I have been able to take some very high quality images. Many of these images have been published in books, magazines (U.S. and foreign) and prestigious web sites (e.g. NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day). I now use 3 different telescopes for Astrophotography: a 4" refractor (AstroPhysics Traveler), and a 6" refractor (AstroPhysics 155EDFS). and an 18" Newtonian.

Home Theater:  My current Home Theater setup reached its evolution over a period of several years. Visually, it consists of a " television. My 7.1 multi-speaker setup is based around my Lexicon MC-1 preamplifier. The center (Aerial Acoustics CC3), fronts (Aerial Acoustics 10T's), and sides (Aerial Acoustics SR3's) are powered by a six-channel 250Wx6 power amp from CinePro. An Acurus 200Wx3 Amp sends power to the two NHT Super-One speakers (one channel is not used). My subwoofer is a M&K MX-200. DVD and CD is handled with a Toshiba 2200 DVD player.

Computers: I have at least a half-dozen computers. I am constantly upgrading my primary computer. In December 2002 I purchased a new Dell Precision 650 Workstation with dual 2.4GHz Xeon Processors (533FSB). I upgraded the CPUs to 3.06GHz (with 1M L3 cache) in late November 2003. In March 2004 I upgraded from 2 to 3 Gigabytes of dual channel DDR RAM . Video is handled with an ATI 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card. The primary drive is a 73GB 15,000 RPM Seagate 15K.3 Ultra320 SCSI drive. It also has two IDE drives (pair of 250 GB Western Digitals - both 7200RPM, each with 8MB cache) for over half a Terabyte of hard disk space. It also has a Pioneer DVR-104 DVD Burner, CDRW burner, scanner, etc. I use a DSL line (6Mbits Down/512Kbits Up) to connect to the internet. I use the large quanitity of RAM and hard disk space for software development, data analysis, and image processing.

Digital Photography:  I take a lot of pictures with my pro-digital camera (Nikon D1X), mainly of my family but also for my Church (baptisms, special events, Easter pictures, etc.) and for friends.

Running:  Because of a good friend I took up running in the summer of 2001. Some day I plan to do a marathon. My longest run so far is 13.2 miles... approximately 1/2 a marathon! Every week I try to do 3 short runs (3-6 miles each) and a longer run on weekends.

Weight Training:  I've been working with a fitness trainer since November 2002. I've been working on improving my stamina, strength, and muscle mass. This provides a great break from work!

Tennis: Here's a sport that has slipped away from me in the past few years. I played varsity tennis in high school and at Caltech so I was really serious about it. Perhaps I will get back to playing it again soon!