Went out half an hour before a 6-minute ISS pass last night to set up and caught a pair of satellites flaring – could be USA229 and associated debris.

I then imaged the main event of the evening, a lovely ISS pass starting at 11:04 p.m.  Moving from right to left in the imaged, I stopped as I thought it was moving too far off to the left, and then swung the camera East and caught the last bit of the trail.  Should be another massive 6-minute pass tonight which I will get if the weather plays ball.

I just finished painting the South Dome’s decking which finishes the Spring cleaning of the two dome’s for this year.

The South Dome has just had a re-injection of life for the Hyperstar III with the addition of a 9-Megapixel SX814C OSC CCD and a Lodestar X2 guide camera.  Just waiting now for a clear night to get the guide refractor focused up and the guide camera rotated into NSEW position, and the main 814C imaging camera needs to be collimated to the Hyperstar III.  Once this is done it is Hyperstar time once again at the New Forest Observatory.

OK – so things are now getting very interesting indeed here in the UK. Just a few weeks before a rather important General Election, Theresa May announces that she wants to bring back Fox hunting. No, this is not fake news, this is the real deal!! And here’s a prediction for you – she will drop a few more of these bombshells in the next few weeks. Why?
Well, I’ve had my suspicions about this election from day one. This business about a mandate just doesn’t hold water. She will still get untold flack from her opposition even if voted in, and if she does get voted in, it won’t give her any more leverage in the Brexit negotiations, she still has a very hard and very difficult job to do – a job that I think is well beyond her capabilities, as it was well beyond Cameron’s capabilities, which is why he quit (after clearly stating that he wouldn’t).
Theresa May was a staunch remainer and now, finding herself in the impossible position of heading the Brexit negotiations – she is doing a Cameron – she desperately wants to lose this next election. The trouble is, the so-called opposition is so flaky she might win even though she doesn’t want to. You just couldn’t make it up.

This country is currently in the shittiest state I have seen in 63 years on this planet – and it looks like it is going to get a helluva lot worse before it gets any better.

If you had clear skies, you may have noticed last night that Jupiter was very close to the 12-day old Moon.

This image has a fisheye view of the scene over the New Forest Observatories and inset there is a telescope view of the encounter.

So the Prime Number the MegaNode computing facility just found has now been confirmed – it is:

3438759891285*2^1290000-1

Which is 388,342 digits long and is in the top 5,000 largest primes.

I just ran the numbers through Mathematica to see what the whole thing looks like – it takes up many pages – and the last digit is a 9.

 

Yesterday – 2nd May 2017 – the DELL Quad Node number cruncher came up with a new Prime(s).  Don’t know how many digits or how many Primes yet until my “checker” reports in.  However a kind Admin ran the number through his machine and confirmed I had found my first new Prime Number.  MEGA!!

Is today’s EPOD – http://epod.usra.edu/blog/

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work, and Dr. Brian May for creating the stereograph.