Tag: admin2 reading

Jabs for the Girls

A2 went for the Covid jab and Salvation Army shopping experience today. Changes: very few punters, you no longer get a certificate and the nurse calls it a sharp prick instead of a sharp scratch or a little prick. And the wall of the long departed Jabberwock has been painted over again. [Aside: A1’s id number at boarding school was 37. But he had nothing to do with this. Honest.]
A2 is reading Tom Lake* by Ann Patchett, featuring three sisters in a cherry orchard.

Welcome Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS)

Another marvel from the Dwarf Mini; captured by A1 in the wee small hours in a gap between trees.
More info on Roast with a bonus North America Nebula. Update: Here’s a better photo, taken the next morning:
Our bathroom book is The Single Helix 100 short science essays by Steve Jones, which has well-timed chapters: one for a no.1, two for a no.2.

Critter of the Day: House Sparrow

Passer domesticus, a very common but also extremely endangered bird. We’ve never photographed one before.
March was more or less average on the sun, rain and temperature fronts, but it was frequently unpleasantly windy. In like a lion and out like a lion.
A2 is reading The State of the Art by Iain M Banks.

Pie Day II and Mother’s Day Too

Dave was unable to join us due to an overdose of beer but the other mothers and children enjoyed this hearty vegetarian pie followed by a chocolate orange cake. Sadly without the Davester we only managed to scrape 10 on the GSQ.
Meanwhile, A1 has been on a Galaxy Quest…
…and found Bode’s galaxy in the Great Bear constellation. More images here, on our other blog.
A2 is reading The Four by Ellie Keel which was unmitigated tripe.

Critter of the Day: Tit

A little bird sitting on the weather station.
A1 is reading The Bells of Westminster* by Leonora Nattrass. A2 is reading Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. I don’t generally like reframings of well-known works of literature but Atwood’s reprise of The Tempest as an avant-garde production in a prison with the producer hell-bent on revenge was a joy and an education.

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.

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.

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.