Category: phenomena

Fungal Infection

A2’s travels took her past many rotting tree trunks sporting a fine selection of fungi. Here are some of them.
In other news, geomagnetic activity was very lively this evening and, in a small gap in the black clouds, we photographed a purple thing in the sky which was possibly a STEVE. No aurora though.A2 is reading The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa. Time was, writers like Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe dug into the raw depths of the human soul. Now it’s all trains or cats or both.

New Toy!

This is the new Raspberry Pi 500+. With keyboard lighting!

Thankfully, it’s completely configurable: you can have any colour and brightness, light up just the key pressed, have a “heat map” effect … you can even turn it off 🙂 And for fun, you can play a (very difficult) “Flappy Birds”-type game just using the keyboard and its lights.
The keyboard itself is really good, with mechanical keys. Just like the old BBC Micro.
When he can tear himself away from his new toy, A1 is reading Stone & Sky by Ben Aaronovitch. A2 is reading The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown, a readable fantasy about magic books that, for the purpose of the plot, can be used for good or evil.

Partial Eclipse Day

The day started auspiciously with a fine 22° halo, seen on the webcam.

Clouds rolled in, but there were enough gaps to see the eclipse between 10am and noon.

And here’s the traditional colander picture, with hundreds of crescent suns:A2 is reading The Sacred Art of Stealing by Christopher Brookmyre.

An Aurora at Last!

In the wee hours of this morning, as A1 was suffering from cold, flu or covid and A2 was wakeful with worry, the aurora alert shot up to a high level (thanks to those charged particles from the CME; see below)To the naked eye there was only a hint of red high up but a photo revealed the green wavy curtainsIt was a wonderful thing to see, at least on the screen, after so many nights of staring at black skies and taking black photographs. See the stars!

Halo, Halo!

Another very warm and sunny so-called autumn day. A2 was out watching a very feeble sundog and willing it to brighten up when she looked up and saw not one, but two, very bright arcs nested together. Possibly a segment of a circumscribed halo.
Meanwhile A1 is reading Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan, which has a pleasingly complex plot and is much darker than previous volumes (and is all the better for it). But VK does enjoy his similes…
A2 is reading The Misper by Kate London (thank you A1), a boy goes missing under the influence of a County Lines panjandrum who is himself under the influence of Game of Thrones (an unnecessary distraction).

Circumzenithal Arc

Not a very impressive one, but the first we’ve seen in ages!
In other news, our weather station is now integrated with Wunderground, with live updates. Sample below (click on the image to open in a new tab):

We had stroggers and homegrown apple and blackberry pie for our family dinner and scored 10.5 on the GSQ.
Admin2 was reading 1989 by Val McDermid but abandoned it because it was boring and is now rereading Golden Hill by Francis Spufford.

Glow!

A peculiar glow in the night sky turns out to be common in all cities that have sports grounds and is the reflection of grass-growing illumination on the Headingley rugby pitch a couple of miles away.
Admin1 is reading The Water Clock by Jim Kelly, a book neither of us remember buying which has lain on the windowsill getting slightly foxed for a couple of years. A very chilly crime book with a reporter protagonist, set in the frozen fens of East Anglia; a pretty good read though.
Admin2 is reading Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths.

When the Nights Are Blue

Happy birthday twins!
To celebrate, some low-down noctilucent clouds, the first of the year, and 13.397kWh on the solar panels, our third sunniest day ever, by 2 watts, what what!
Admin1 is reading Tragedy on the Branch Line by Edward Marston, which was a considerably cosier train ride than Bullet Train, soon to be a big film. Admin2 is reading Crow Court* by Andy Charman, another crowdfunded debut, not so interesting.

Batting for Africa

One of the questions in yesterday’s Guardian quiz prompted a family discussion about the Kasanka National Park in Zambia and its enormous colony of bats. Admins 1 and 2 paid a visit there in 2010, which involved getting up in the middle of the night, trekking through a swampy jungle with some armed guards and climbing rickety wooden towers to view the bats flying around. It was spectacular. Here’s another shot we took:
Anyway, in a weird coincidence the Park turned up in today’s Guardian. Apparently some company wants to open a huge commercial farm which would have a catastrophic effect on the wildlife. The paper also has a nice photo essay on the Park’s bats.
Admin1 is reading The Special Dead by Lin Anderson. Admin2 is rereading The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.

Festivals of Light

Happy Hanukkah and Lucia Day. Christmas Lights Man displaying as usual, with a giant snowman standing in the hall before he hastily shut the door. And Admin2 saw three Geminid meteors in the night [update: later we each saw dazzlingly brilliant ones].
Admin2 is reading Accidental Agent by Alan Judd; most boring spy novel ever.
We scored 8 on the GWQ; no, let’s make it nine because our answer to “What links Johann Strauss II; John Philip Sousa; Benny Goodman; Elvis Presley?” Blue (Danube, Ridge, Moon, Hawaii) was just as good as theirs (King of).

Happy New Year


Sadly it was too windy to let the drone out at midnight, but Admin2’s new camera has a firework setting so here are some fireworks.
Happy New Year everybody xxx