Author: admin1

Storm due…

At 2:10am the lightning was approaching:

It reached us at 3:40am, when we woke and spent an hour enjoying the sights and sounds, and trying (and failing) to photograph the flashes.
Admin1 is reading A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin. We watched the film of Borkmann’s Point which was excellent but a bit different from the book we have both recently read.

Night Sights

After sunset the moon, Venus and Jupiter are nicely grouped at the moment, and this is a first attempt at Jupiter. At least the bands are visible…

It was taken with a Canon 7D attached to a Meade ETX125 telescope, and controlled by an Android tablet running the extremely useful DSLR Controller app. Ten shots, stacked and processed with RegiStax (a somewhat hair-raising program, but very powerful). Jupiter is low in the sky at the moment, hence the colour fringes, and it’s also on the opposite side of the Sun, and therefore small. We should be able to get a better result by taking a film and stacking many more images.

[Later] Second attempt, now I’ve skimmed the RegiStax manual and learned about RGB correction and a bit about wavelet processing:

Below is the moon, a much easier target.

Admin1 is taking a break from The Kills and reading The Silence of the Sea by Yrsa Sigurdarsdottir.

Solar eclipse

The day of the eclipse. We decided not to go to the Faroe Islands, fortunately so as it was clouded over apart from the last few seconds of totality. Good views from Svalbard though, and here in Leeds we had enough gaps in the clouds to get some decent pictures. Here’s an early stage, with a sunspot visible in the upper half:

A bit later:

The maximum from here (about 89%):

Here’s a timecollapsed image of 10 of the photos:

And here’s a shot of the diamond ring as seen from Svalbard on a webcast, with one of our freshly printed pictures in front:

Finally, it did get noticeably dark at maximum, and here’s the proof:

Admin1 is reading The Truth by Terry Pratchett.

Saharan Sands

Early April gave us a week of very murky weather, with increased air pollution over the UK caused in part by sand carried from the Sahara desert. Going up on the roof to seasonally adjust the positioning of the solar panels and give them a clean, Admin1 noticed a fine reddish deposit at the base of each one. After cleaning, we had the best day of the year for electricity generation, just under 10kWh.

Admin1 is watching Orphan Black, series 1.

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Yesterday Admin1 rewatched the otherwise terrific film of Cloud Atlas. This scene occurs very near the end — an alien planet, with two moons in the sky.

So how come the moons are in different phases (full and crescent)? This isn’t really possible, although some people have expended considerable effort on trying to come up with convoluted explanations (see here).

This kind of mistake doesn’t necessarily ruin a film or book, but it does have the unfortunate effect of taking you out of the story. And it really isn’t that hard to get things right…

We’re watching The Tunnel, the UK/French remake of the Swedish/Danish The Bridge (series 1). Admin2 is reading Walking to Hollywood by Will Self.