The Lyrids meteor shower — a remnant of Comet Thatcher, no relation — has started, and though it doesn’t peak until the 22nd April, the sky was clear last night so we thought it was worth seeing if the Dwarf Mini could image them. It has a “star trails” setting, which takes a load of pictures with the wide-angle camera, combines them and produces a video of the result. We left it running for 3 hours (producing over 1000 photos) and got this:
At about 5 seconds, a pair of short trails appears at the upper right, which we’re fairly sure are meteors as they’re pointing directly towards the shower’s radiant in Lyra/Hercules. We’ll try again later, weather permitting; the night of 21st is forecast clear.
(Ignore the ghostly artefacts — it was shot from indoors through an open window and caught some reflections from the glass.)
Today’s sun through the Dwarf Mini, on a rather hazy day. Some evidence of 
I was going to try out the “Star Trails” setting, included in the latest software update. But guess what? Along came the clouds…
Here’s Jupiter with the four Galilean moons, showing the Dwarf Mini isn’t really meant for planetary imaging. Left to right: Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and Io (checked with Stellarium):
And lastly, the good old Moon:
A2 is rereading A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick.
A new toy! The 
October 2025 was our coldest and least sunny October ever recorded. It was averagely wet though. A2 is rereading Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson.
On the 300th day of the year, we’ve managed to reach 1,500.000kWh precisely in our solar panel output for this year. So giving an average of exactly 5.000kWh per day.
Lots of rain today, and the entrance foyer of the local Co-Op has a serious leak problem.
Today is the 5,000th day of generating solar power from our panels; they’ve been working flawlessly since December 2011, nearly 14 years. And quite coincidentally, today our total power generation reached 20MWh — that’s twenty megawatt hours, or twenty million watt hours. That will keep a 10-watt lightbulb lit up for 228 years.
Happy solstice! Here’s a glass of cream soda to celebrate. If you look closely, each bubble contains images of many other bubbles. Meanwhile, today storms are threatening to, er, bubble up, but just a brief shower so far. Feels very sticky though.
Some of this year’s excellent crop of cherries. Although the tree is over 10 years old it’s never fruited very well until now, not helped by the depredations of squirrels and pigeons.