Another non-astro post, so if you’re not interested please stop reading here.

A certain Bank has been accused of wrecking small businesses, as if this is some kind of new behaviour – sorry, it is not.

In a past life I was deeply involved with UHV precision metal-bashers (engineers) and one guy in particular became a good personal friend of mine.  He had run a precision engineering firm for something like 40 years and during that time had always been in the black.  Clearly this popped up on the local Bank’s radar.  He was paid a visit by his local Bank manager who proposed he should take out a loan (he didn’t need any loans he was doing alright thank you very much) to build a huge warehouse-like extension on the back of his factory.  Why?  So he could expand his business – and here’s the best bit – the manager said, even if you don’t expand and you hit hard times, you can still rent out all that extra space – it’s a win-win situation.

You can probably see it coming from a mile off can’t you.  He was paid a visit because the Bank was well aware that a tough period was right on their doorstep.  Yes times DID suddenly become hard, and what happens in hard times?  People tighten their belts and there’s nobody out there looking for huge warehouse type spaces to rent.  What happens next?  Of course – the Bank asks for its loan back.  And so a business that had run profitably for over 40 years had to fold.  Nice isn’t it.  Within a year of the Bank’s visit a profitable 40 year old business had closed with all the added fallout of job losses and distraught families.

I didn’t know my friend had actually done this, otherwise I would have warned him off knowing the way Banks operate.  After having to sell his business and then suffering pretty tough times for a few years he did manage to start up again and got another precision engineering company underway, but he had lost those 40 years of profitability and had nothing to show for all that time he was running a successful manufacturing business.

Banks wrecking small businesses – it’s nothing new!!

You would have thought that with a whole Cassiopeia mosaic I would have caught the Lambda-Lambda asterism – and of course I did.  It is in this image top left of the main star Epsilon.  Reason it wasn’t immediately obvious to me in the mosaic was due to the way I had to crop the 4-frames to get the whole constellation to fit

Not managed to image this one myself yet (non-stop rain) but I found a new asterism in Cassiopeia that bears a strong resemblance to the Greek letter Lambda.

Will grab this with the mini-WASP array at the first opportunity

Arrived today  This is clearly a labour of love.  Beautifully presented, oozing quality, and very fine attention paid to the detail throughout.  I had the honour of going through Brian’s Ph.D. thesis on “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud” some years ago.  This thesis differed very significantly from every other thesis that I had gone through during my 23 years at Southampton University.  How did it differ?  There was not a single spelling mistake, not a single typo error, no grammatical errors, no errors with the presentation of any of the diagrams, and of course no errors of fact.  With 23 years in higher education – I had not seen such a perfect piece of work produced in a Ph.D. thesis before.  What has this got to do with “Diableries”?  You get the same presentation in Diableries as you got in the thesis.  Word perfect, perfect layout, extreme attention to image quality and detail – Brian is clearly a perfectionist – and Diableries is an example of stereoscopic perfection available for you to appreciate in front of a roaring log fire this winter.  Superb job Brian

Just over one year ago I wrote the piece below:

I guess I have reached that age where I feel I can do much better than the dimwits who are running this country.  I feel highly underwhelmed at their complete lack of vision and foresight.

I have just seen a “Grand Designs” programme where a couple of guys with a couple of million quid turned a water tower in the center of London into a mega-palace worth (I would imagine) somewhere between 10 and 100 times their investment.  This got me to thinking – what could we do if we had Government budgets to play with, and we thought even bigger than those two developers?

Keep with me for just this last piece of the jigsaw.  My first job was at Harwell, yes the atomic energy place.  The U.K. was, for a significant period of time, the font of all knowledge when it came to nuclear reactor design.  We really knew what we were doing.  As a second piece of interlinking knowledge – there are only two places on the planet that can build the new huge steel pressure vessels needed for the next generation of nuclear reactors – and yes, one of those two places is of course the U.K.

A quick Google (always a bad thing to do on an empty stomach) says that the U.K. electrical energy consumption is around 36GW, so let’s call that 40GW.  There are current nuclear reactors rated at 800MW, so let’s say that with our greater know-how regarding reactor technology, we could put together a reactor with 1GW output.  So we could build 40 of these reactors, say over the next 10 years, and we could be energy independent.  It would be possible to get off the gas supply circuit, which is only going to lead to tears, and use electricity for all our domestic and commercial needs (the car and petrol would last a bit longer unfortunately).  It would be possible to even make electricity free for all domestic users – should the Government care to be so brave.  I don’t know what they would do about the current energy providers and the stink they would kick up – but if it was left to me I would give them 10 years notice to find another job.

Such things are possible if you have the will, and the money to back the ideas.  America is thinking about a trillion dollar investment into defence alone – a nuclear-based U.K. would certainly come in at less than that figure.  It could be done.  We won’t do it – and we’ll continue to fret and worry at the current economic situation without taking the really bold measures that could propel us out of this situation.  We won’t do it while we have lily-livered brain-dead Politicians running the show.  Rant over.

I now see some action in Somerset – though unfortunately not at the level of commitment I was hoping for – still, at least it’s a start.

Things got rather hair-raising at the New Forest Observatory last night with a display like I haven’t seen in over 10 years.

Needless to say the picture was taken from indoors as it was just too scary to work outside with all the fireworks going on

For the very first time, the New Forest Observatory is offering a portfolio of deep-sky fine art images.  There are 3 portfolios on offer, a 5-pack, a 10-pack, and a 12-pack.  All images are printed on A4 HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, high-gloss, 280 g/m² using a 6-colour HP inkjet printer (Designjet 130).  Each artwork is protected in its own A4 wallet, and the complete portfolio is bound in an A4 holder.  The base 10 images are as follows:

1)  The Pleiades  2)  The Rosette nebula  3)  M31 – the Andromeda galaxy  4)  M13 – the definitive NFO version of the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules  5)  The Cone nebula, Trumpler 5 and IC 2169  6)  M42 – the Great nebula in Orion  7)  The Horsehead nebula and Orion’s Belt  8)  North America and Pelican nebulae – round version  9)  The Witch’s Broom and Pickering’s Triangle  10)  The Jellyfish nebula

The 5-pack portfolio contains images numbered 1-5 above.

The 10-pack portfolio contains all of the above images.

The 12-pack portfolio contains two further high-quality deep-sky artworks chosen from the NFO archives.

Price for the 5-pack portfolio inclusive of U.K. p&p is just £125

The 10-pack portfolio inclusive of p&p is £250

The 12-pack portfolio inclusive of p&p is £300

E-mail greg@newforestobservatory.com to place your order and to receive PayPal details.

Thumbnails of the portfolio are shown below – please note these are very low resolution for easy display on this site.  The deep-sky artworks you will receive will not have captions, unlike a couple of the thumbnails shown below.  Some higher resolution versions of these images can be seen on my Flickr site here.

Single A4 artworks are still available at the very low price of just £25 including p&p and you can choose any image in the Gallery that you like

If, somehow, you are not feeling the effects of the current recession and you would like the portfolios in A3-size, the prices are as follows:

The A3-size 5-pack portfolio inclusive of p&p is £250

The A3-size 10-pack portfolio inclusive of p&p is £500

The A3-size 12-pack portfolio inclusive of p&p is £600

The A3 Fine Art prints are supplied on HP Advanced Photopaper, glossy, 250 g/m² and they are printed using an HP 6-colour inkjet printer (HP Designjet 130).

You should be able to guess from the last few entries that there haven’t been any clear nights  No different tonight – but at least I’ll stay on topic  This is some DSS2 data of the Pleiades region that I have just processed, the data in this region as you can see is pretty good.  Unfortunately, just a bit further off to the left they caught a plane, that’s why it’s cut a bit short on the left hand side

As I rapidly leave middle-age and note the ever increasing loss of elasticity of the skin on the back of my hands I become acutely aware of my DNA’s inability to perfectly replicate.  Enter Deinococcus radiodurans – a polyextremophile bacterium, one of the most radioresistant bacteria known and which can also survive cold, dehydration, vacuum and acid.  Deinococcus radiodurans’ ability to survive high doses of radiation is due to it having multiple copies of its genome as well as a rapid DNA repair mechanism – I could do with some of that!!  D. radiodurans usually repairs breaks in its chromosomes within 12-24 hours.  Although this bacterium will not help much with my telomere-shortening problem, it seems that the contribution of telomere length to lifespan in humans is currently a controversial issue.  However, if this issue does get resolved and we find that we could do with increasing telomere length with increasing age, then we need to go take a look at Leach’s Storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) to help us with that particular problem

The Government would like to spend £50 billion of your money on a new high speed rail link.  How would you prefer 50 nuclear reactors spread around the country and free electricity for the rest of your life?  Free electricity for domestic users and commercial users can pay a nominal tariff.  Now don’t you think that would be a better, more forward-looking way of spending your £50 billion??