On December 1st 2011 Greg was made Emeritus Professor of Photonics at the University of Southampton

Having sat here for an hour or so not believing I could possibly have bleached all the colour out of Capella in the imaging I decided to reprocess the image from scratch and got this result.  O.K. so that’s a lot better now

I imaged Capella at f10 a few nights back with the C11 (still not collimated the camera to the scope properly, but will work on it) and got a nice bright yellow star with a pretty boring background.  O.K. so use the Sky 90 to get a much bigger field of view with a nice bright yellow star in the middle.  Went out last night and took 28 subs at 3-minutes per sub.  Not good.  I bleached Capella out with 3-minute subs (I wasn’t actually expecting to do that) and now I have to retake the data with shorter subs, probably just a minute will be more than enough which seeing as that is close to my delay time between images as I use dither is getting a bit silly (I am effectively throwing away half my imaging time just to get rid of hot pixels).  Such is the life of a deep-sky imager – pure frustration!

Steve Collingwood (Telescope House, Lingfield, Sussex) kindly spent a not inconsiderable amount of time collimating my 2 Sky 90 refractors.   Steve showed me the process as he worked away on his custom-built rig.  All very impressive and now I just need to fit the scopes back in the mini-WASP frame and see if they held onto their collimation on the trip home.

Although it is the beginning of the long darks nights this month, and if only the weather played ball you could be imaging from about 5:30 p.m. on – November is a completely frustrating month as you never seem to get a clear night’s sky.  This does seem to be a yearly occurence, so I checked my imaging log book which goes back to winter 2007 – and sure enough November has been a write-off imaging wise every year since 2007!!  So November is just as bad as June (when it doesn’t get properly dark) as far as I’m concerned.  It’s also not too good for most of May (light evenings) and for most of July too (light evenings again).  So that’s 4 months written off not counting intrusive Moon and bad weather at other times of the year.  Hmm – beginning to think this is not the best hobby to have in the U.K.

I so thoroughly enjoyed the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson that I bought his biography of Einstein.  I have already read “Einstein Lived Here” by Pais, and “Albert Einstein Philosopher-Scientist” by Schilpp.  Isaacson’s biography (so far, only 100 pages in) is certainly very good, but nowhere near as gripping as the Job’s biography.  I guess that’s just the difference between the two men concerned.

I have started the long and arduous process of putting together another astronomy book today.  For the first time since setting the system up I actually needed to use all four screens to get this particular job done.  Up until this moment I thought the only time all four screens would be used in anger was when I was running the mini-WASP array from indoors, but I actually needed to fire all four up to make my life easier in putting a new data entry into the book.  One screen had the page I was working on, another screen had a previously completed page for use as a template, on screen 3 I had “The Sky 6″ open for object data and on screen 4 I had the Internet open on a Wikipedia page for data on the same object.  I don’t think I really need 6 screens to do my book-writing work unlike Terry Pratchett whose famous reply to the question “Why do you have 6 screens on your desk?” was the unforgettable “Because 8 screens won’t fit”

Well – I am very pleased to say that I have finally finished the Steve Jobs biography so now I can resume my work.  I am also very sad to have finished the book as it is one of the best pieces of writing I have come across.  I don’t know if Steve Jobs was a genius, but he was enough of a genius to know who the best person on the planet was to write his biography.  RIP Steve Jobs – your unique way of viewing and interacting with the World will be sorely missed

Now exactly half way through this book which I started two days ago.  Can’t put it down – it is completely disrupting my work.  Will give a fuller report when I finish it, but I can say that it is very educational and if you are thinking about starting your own company you really should read it along with Alan Sugar’s Autobiography “What you see is what you get”.

Having spent an academic career in advanced optics I am more than a little sceptical about the recent faster than light neutrino claims as you will know from posts below.  As astronomers we should also be aware of the 1987A supernova explosion where the arrival times of the photons and the neutrinos (yes I know they weren’t the same type of neutrinos or of the same energy as the earth-bound experiment) were as expected for non-superluminal propagation.  Tom How forwarded me this very interesting paper on the subject.  What I find poetic justice here is relativity bailing out relativity – nice