Happy International Women’s Day, Ladies!

Here’s a delicious cherry bakewell cake to celebrate, after the main dish of pork in cider and before we scored 12 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading Quantum of Menace* by Vaseem Khan, who should stick with Indian detectives rather than pseudo-American thrillers and (as here) feeble James Bond tie-ins.
A2 is reading The Bells of Westminster* by Leonora Nattrass.

A Nice Rosette

A couple of clear hours tonight, and here’s the Rosette Nebula, another pretty object near Orion:
I took 100 15-second shots with gain 90; 92 were usable. I used the dual narrow-band filter which is tailored for various emission spectra, namely hydrogen alpha and beta, and oxygen III. It also reduces sky pollution and any glow from the Moon, which was very bright tonight (and quite close to the Rosette nebula). Speaking of which:I was going to try out the “Star Trails” setting, included in the latest software update. But guess what? Along came the clouds…

Booktally Day

It’s Booktally Day! Since we started counting we have read 3390 books; a mere 240 up on last year, but many of them were enormous, eg IT, ICE and assorted Neal Stephensons.
Out today is Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (see above) which A2 is about to read. A1 has just started rereading House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds so he’ll have to wait his turn.

Clear Skies, at Last!

And here are some pictures from our Dwarf Mini. All taken from our light-polluted suburban back garden, with a bright half-moon. The scope was plonked down on our patio table, and left to get on with it. No special mounting or alignment needed.
First (and best!), M42 aka the Orion Nebula:

The scope took 32 shots each of 15-second exposure, 28 of which were usable and stacked together. Quite remarkable, especially compared to our photo of M42 taken with a large professional telescope at COAA during our visit in 2001.
Next up, the Flame Nebula. A lot fainter, so needed a contrast boost:
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.

Fly Me to the Moon

Our last post was about dinner at the ivy and tonight a boy called Ivy joined us for our family dinner but nobody thought to take a picture. Instead here are a couple of shots from A1’s Dwarf Mini telescope: some iridescent starlings and the crescent moon.

The menu for tonight was spag bol followed by nectarine cake and the GSQ at which we scored 10.5.

Happy Pancake Day, Ramadan, Chinese New Year and Birthday Bob!

So much to celebrate! We had more food than you can shake a chopstick at, followed by A1’s sublime chocolate cake with 10 candles and 10 Lego minifigures sunk knee-deep in ganache.
A1 is reading HHhH by Laurent Binet. A2 is rereading Valis by Philip K Dick. We scored a most excellent 11 on the GSQ.

Dwarf Mini first light

A new toy! The Dwarf Mini is an ultra-portable smart telescope designed for deep-sky astronomical imaging. Controlled from a smartphone (in our case a Pixel 6a), it can track objects, take multiple exposures and automatically stack them to increase the image quality.

This hasn’t been a good time for astronomy here — we’ve had unrelenting gloom, rain and cloud cover for the last couple of months. But today, Valentine’s Day, the sky finally cleared enough to try the device out. The picture above is the sun, showing three groups of small sunspots. It’s a stack of 20 shots each exposed for 1/200s. The tracking was spot-on, with no need for special mounts or alignment — the device was indoors looking through an open window. Here’s a screenshot from the phone before it was taken (note the very useful inset wide-field picture):

At about 1:30am this morning the sky started to clear with some gaps in the clouds. I took a test sequence of a random part of the sky, centred on the star HIP80364. The Dwarf Mini took 21 15-second shots , of which 16 were usable — the device detected occasional cloud cover and discarded them. Again the tracking was perfect, with no discernable trails or elongation of the stars (click for full size):

 That’s a rather boring image, but given clearer weather we can hopefully do better. Oh, and it’s also good for wildlife:
A2 is reading Signals of Distress by Jim Crace.

Critter of the Day: Goldcrest

Regulus regulus, so good they named it twice. We have never spotted this King of the Birds before but it’s easily overlooked, being barely bigger than a bumblebee.
A1 is rereading Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds. According to our records, I originally read this on 5 Sep 2021. But I have absolutely no memory of it at all — and I would have remembered it, as it’s a much-anticipated continuation of AR’s Revelation Space sequence, with many recurring characters. Excellent, though the ending is a bit of a cop-out.
A2 is reading HHhH by Laurent Binet, an absolutely brilliant non-fiction novel about the attempt to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, documenting the writer’s struggles with his subject and including many encomia to Prague, which A1 and A2 also love.

Chicken Tonight

Another family dinner. A1 roasted a delicious chicken with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, carrots and broccoli and A2 made a wobbly trifle. We did this week’s and last week’s GSQs and scored 10 on the first and 10.5 on the second.
A1 is reading It’s Not a Cult by Joey Batey, a debut horror/fantasy novel about an alt-folk band in northern England who manage to conjure up a legion of Solkats — small gods of trivial things like empty glasses and bruises. JB (day job: actor) claims to have been writing for years without getting published, and you can perhaps see why: it’s horribly over-written. Some interesting ideas and touches of humour, but he’s clearly been paying obeisance to the Solkat of purple prose.
A2 is reading Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds.

Pigeon Pie

Back in 2020 we had an unexpected visitor: a sparrowhawk feasting on its prey in our back garden. The picture in the linked post was a still from a rather poor video, which we’ve now improved somewhat:

We thought the prey was a magpie originally, due to the racket being made by a flock mischief of them which attracted our attention. But now it’s looking more like it was a pigeon.
Thanks to the very powerful software ffmpeg, the video has been stabilised, sharpened and colour balanced.
A1 is reading Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds — thanks A2! AR likes incorporating both noir and detective elements in his SF (cf the terrific Century Rain and the Prefect Dreyfus novels), and here we’ve got Yuri Gagarin — well, sort of — as a mean-streets PI on a generation starship. There are touches of humour, and some Dickian nods in this tale: the sorrowfully forgetful robot, and the excessively polite one as it chucks our hero overboard. It all hangs together though, and a return to form.
A2 is rereading Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.

Winter Blooms

18 months or so ago we took pictures of the weathered logs blocking the entrances to Scott Hall Playing Fields. Whether it is the age of the logs or the time of year, they are all now blooming with magnificent structures. Here are a few:A1 is reading Wild Animal* by Joel Dicker, a typically convoluted thriller, with two pretty loathsome intertwined families and a jewellery heist.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Props to A1 for this lovely photo: shadow of the chimney in the fog.
A1 is reading Labyrinth* by Kate Mosse. A1 usually enjoys loopy conspiracy thrillers, full of secret histories, shadowy organisations and ancient artefacts. This is a Grail quest set in the 12th (the Albigensian Crusade) and 21st centuries, and given the novel’s reputation I was expecting writing, if not of David Mitchell quality, at least a step up from Dan Brown. But … oh dear. It’s not a patch on Neville’s The Eight,  Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Gentle’s Ash — plotting is all over the place, characterisation non-existent (all are pretty indistinguishable, apart from good/bad), and the writing, while not quite down to Dan Brown level, is at best workmanlike. Very disappointing.
There’s a section about the siege of Carcassonne which was a bit weird. It reminded me very strongly of the Battle of Helm’s Deep as portrayed in The Two Towers film — there are a number of coincidences of events and speech. So much so that A1 is now rewatching The Lord of the Rings films. I’m not alleging plagiarism (both could be based on earlier, similar sources, and there’s only so many ways to lay a siege), but the similarities were striking.
A2’s bathroom read is I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That; Ben Goldacre’s self-described toilet book.

Night Fog

A1 has not been to work since he slipped on the ice, fell and damaged his intercostal muscles three weeks ago, but today he went back and took this photo of the Methodist Hall and a cone of streetlight (A2 took a strangely similar picture out of our back window but the hall with its Romanesque windows is an improvement on the nondescript semi in A2’s shot).
A2 is reading Glyph by Ali Smith in which a blind horse haunts a house (thank you A1).

Blackbird

It’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend and our entry, if we submit it (which we didn’t because the website took us round and round in circles till the crows came home), is 2 pigeons, 3 blackbirds, 2 blue tits, a red kite and a million starlings.
A1 is rereading Reconstruction by Mick Herron. A2 is rereading The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood.

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.