I have just brought the massive all-Aluminium mini-WASP pier in from the shed.  I will set it up in the upstairs study with the Paramount on top to give a dry run for the computer and all the electronics.  The pier was made by NTE Poole Ltd. craftsmen in everything to do with Aluminium (and stainless-steel for that matter) – thank you Eric Kennedy for a really great job on this.  The foot ruler is positioned on the base to give you an idea of the scale – the cylindrical central Aluminium tube has a wall thickness of one-inch!!!  The whole thing is pretty heavy (considering it’s Aluminium!) and extremely robust.  The pier will sit on a concrete foundation that is approximately 2-foot x 2-foot in cross-section, goes 5-6 feet into the ground, and protrudes 1-foot above ground level.  There will be an octagonal wooden decking surround (not physically touching the pier) and this will accommodate the new observatory – the new decking will look exactly like the decking underneath the original New Forest Observatory.  Here is an image of the all-Aluminium pier:

The next step is to bring the Paramount up into the study as well, sit it on top of the pier, connect up the computer and all the electronics and see if it all works (no I haven’t powered it up since it arrived nearly a year ago – oops).  If it does all work and I can control the Paramount using the hand-controller, then the next entry will be the second mini-WASP video log showing the Paramount in action.  Fingers crossed everybody

Thought I would begin a video diary on the mini-WASP array project at this time even before the hole has been dug in the ground for the obligatory concrete block.  As we are all aware – any new observatory project begins with a hole in the ground that we subsequently fill with a cubic yard of concrete.  The short video (shot on the mega Sony NEX-VG10E handycam) shows the position the new observatory will occupy, to the left of the original 7-foot fibreglass dome, creating a Keck II landscape in the garden.  Next steps in the project will be digging the hole (5 foot deep, 1 foot above ground level and 2-foot by 2-foot cross-section) – filling the hole with concrete and setting in the all-Aluminium pier, and finally building the octagonal wooden decking around the central concrete block which will then support the new dome.  I expect this first phase of the project to start around March-April 2011.  And yes – the Paramount has now been sitting unused in my dining-room for almosr a year – unforgiveable

This image shows a prototype illumination rig I have just built using 18 ultra-bright white-light LEDs and powered by a computer PSU.  The idea is to create a compact, high-power, flicker-free light source for photographic applications.  This prototype array (I estimate) kicks out the equivalent of a 200W light bulb, yet it consumes only 20W.  A useful photographic studio array would therefore need around 100 LEDs in a 10 x 10 array and would supply the equivalent of a 1000W thermal light source.  There is a CPU fan behind the LED array providing some forced-air cooling.  In a short while I will be testing the array out with Tony Allen to see how it performs in high-speed video applications.  I will almost certainly put a “snoot” reflector over this array, and Tony will being down a Fresnel lens to go over the front of the snoot.  Should be an interesting experiment

Now here’s a really annoying one you may have been putting up with for quite some time with no apparent solution.

As you know on my super-duper-computer system I run 3 screens (one via an adapter which seems to create its own problems – but that’s another story), thing is I had a one-inch unused black border around the edge of two of the screens that I couldn’t shift with any of the screen controls or resolution settings or refresh settings.

The graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 5700 series, the Catalyst Control Centre software is the latest 10.9 version, and the screens are IIYAMA Prolite E2407HDS.

You will see tons of useless garbage on the Internet on how to “cure” this problem – and none of them work (of those that I’ve seen anyway).  Here’s how to fix your annoying unused black border problem!

1)  Go into the Catalyst Control Centre

2)  Go into Desktops and Displays

3)  At the bottom of the D&D screen you will see your monitor setup.  Click on the black downarrow associated with the monitor you want to fix.

4)  Click on Configure.

5)  Go into Scaling Options.

6)  Drag the scaling options marker to 0%.  Miraculously you will get your (almost) full screen back.

Why on Earth this stupid bit of nonsense has been put into the software and made so difficult to find I have absolutely no idea.

Hope you enjoy your “new” screen

Update!  I take it back – in the 6 months or so that I’ve had this problem I now see there’s a number of correct solutions posted up.  Great!  Just needs a little more widespread publicity now so that it becomes common knowledge.  I still have no idea why this totally useless option is made available though.

Sir Patrick had a Whisky tasting event he hosted at Farthings on 17th September 2010 and we were educated in all things distilled by Dr. Andrew M. Forrester who is the Balvenie Ambassador U.K.  Some rather fine Whiskies were sampled over the course of 3 hours and we were given the background on how they were made - fascinating stuff.  Must admit the highlight of the evening for me was when the very special bottle was opened at the end – now those of you that know me know that I’m not into drink at all – but that stuff was pretty amazing   I’m not saying how much per bottle, but you could get a couple of 2″ narrowband filters for about the same price.

After a completely overcast day the cloud began to break up around 5:00 p.m. and now (9:00 p.m.) it looks like we might actually have a reasonably clear night.  Whooppeeeeeeeeee – I’m off over the forest with the AstroTrac Canon 5D and 15mm fish eye lens to grab some Perseids   There was just too much light pollution from the street lights in my back garden to do a proper job with this setup, so I’m going in a nice large flat field right next to our allotments to hopefully get some dark sky imaging.  I’ll report on the outcome of this evening’s efforts tomorrow – provided it stays clear long enough to get started.

Why is there so much cloud at night recently when it’s been relatively clear through most of the day?  Well I have the AstroTrac ready and set up with the new Canon 5D MkII and the Canon 15mm fish-eye lens so that I can take some whole-sky pictures (the 5D and 15mm fish-eye gives me a full 180 degree field of view so I can get horizon-to-horizon shots).  So that’s why it’s cloudy   Don’t forget we are also in Perseid season (that’s the main reason I’m ready with the AstroTrac), and although we won’t be getting any Moon problems at the height of the shower, we can’t guarantee clear skies on the main nights, so it’s fingers-crossed time again, as usual.

I am just starting to read Cliff Pickover’s “The Loom of God” and it jogged my rapidly fading memory of my Professorial Inaugural lecture.  Below I reproduce the last few minutes of the 2005 Inaugural lecture I presented at the University of Southampton.

“It really is very strange that mathematics should describe our physical world so well.  There is after all no good reason why certain mathematical functions should so precisely describe what goes on in our physical world, unless there is of course some hidden link between these two sciences.  In fact some people find this link is so peculiar that they have written papers on the subject, as Eugene Wigner first did with  “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences”.

Einstein is said to have remarked, “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.” And I think this guy knew what he was talking about.

To quote Eugene Wigner:

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”

Is this one of those cases where one introduces complexity when it isn’t really there, or is there something deep and meaningful here?  Why should mathematics be able to describe physical events so well?  As any Mathematician will tell you, the maths is already “out there” it has an existence of its own independent of us, all we do is occasionally turn over a new stone and find a new piece of maths that had always “been in existence” independent of us.  Likewise with our physical measurements and experiments, the results of these experiments has always “been out there” we just came along at this particular point in time to uncover some of them.

If you were to apply Occam’s Razor to this problem, where Occam’s Razor states that the simplest most logical answer is usually the right one – you might be led to conclude – as some people firmly believe, that the reason mathematics so “unreasonably” describes the “real” world we live in is because we really are “living” inside a computer simulation – the Matrix had it right all along!

Thank you for listening, have a good evening, and let’s hope the program doesn’t decide to crash tonight!”

Einstein was pretty unhappy with the way Quantum Mechanics was developing – which was a bit odd seeing as he came up with the concept of the photon and an explanation of the photoelectric effect – but I digress.

In trying to show those poor wayward Quantum Scientists where they were going wrong, Einstein came up with a number of “thought experiments” which tested and probed Quantum Mechanics to its limits.  One such thought experiment involved the simultaneous emission of two oppositely polarised photons from a source (something which can be achieved, and which has actually been practically carried out in ground-breaking experimental work by Aspect et al) and then measuring the polarisation state of each photon when separated by a distance greater than that which would allow “communication” between the two photons during the polarisation measurement.  In other words the polarisation state of each photon was measured in a time shorter than that which would allow a photon to travel between the two polarised photons being measured.

For many years I didn’t think this was much of an experiment.  For conservation reasons the two photons will be emitted in opposite polarisation states from the source, so that if at some large separation distance I measure the polarisation state of photon A and then I measure the polarisation state of photon B it is hardly surprising that I find the polarisation states are separated by 90 degrees.  This is in fact true and correct and shows that both common-sense and Quantum Mechanics agree for this special case.  Now what I cannot simply explain is that if the polarisation measurements are made for angles other than 90 degrees (and in fact 45 degrees where again common-sense and Quantum Mechanics agree) we find a discrepancy between the common-sense expected result of the polarisation measurement and the Quantum Mechanical result.  How very odd!!  As mentioned above, this experiment has been carried out practically by Alain Aspect and his team, and the experimental results agreed with …………………………Quantum Mechanics.  How extremely odd!!!!!

Now this is not the first time that a Quantum Mechanical result has gone against “common-sense”  but the repercussions of this are a little more far-reaching than in some of the other cases.  Einstein, together with Podolsky and Rosen (hence EPR) came up with this thought experiment to show an inconsistency in the Quantum Mechanical theory that required the theory to be “non-local” that is it allowed photon A to know what polarisation state photon B was in at any separation distance, even if that distance was greater than a photon could travel during the measurement time.  Einstein having created the Special Theory of Relativity would have been extremely unhappy with this possibility existing within another theory (Quantum Mechanics) – and this was the whole idea behind the EPR thought experiment – to show that the current ideas of Quantum Theory were “incomplete” as they required QM to be a non-local theory.

If you go into great detail regarding this experiment and where it “goes wrong” as far as common-sense is concerned, there are just three basic principles, one (or more) of which must be violated.  These principles are:

1)  The Reality principle.

2)  The Induction principle.

3)  The Locality principle.

Reality – regularity of phenomena is due to an underlying physical reality.

Induction – it is possible to reach conclusions valid for all systems of a given type from a consistent set of observations on a large sample of systems of that type.

Locality – if two systems have for a time been in dynamical isolation from each other, then a measurement on the first system can produce no real change in the second.

Now it is the Locality principle that was being “probed” by Einstein’s thought experiment – so it seems extremely perverse to me that out of the three possible principles that could be at fault – this is the one chosen by the Quantum Mechanical theorists to be the “joker”.

Surely in this post-Matrix age where the possibility exists that we are all part of a computer simulation, it is the Reality principle that needs to be called into question – and that the EPR Paradox is actually an extremely testing experiment into the very reality of our Universe – not simply a statement about the light-like separation of particles that had once interacted.

The photo below is an animation of two images of open cluster NGC7789 (in the constellation Cassiopeia), taken around 18 months apart, from the New Forest Observatory, Hampshire, U.K. The star sitting just below the open cluster has changed in magnitude during this period from about magnitude 7 (brightest) to approximately magnitude 14 (dimmest). This impressive variable star (WY Cas) sure appears like it’s trying to get our attention.  According to Roger Pickard of the British Astronomical Society, W Y Cass does indeed vary by something like 7 magnitudes over a period of about 18 months! So, no aliens this time, but instead rather an incredibly interesting object all the same. Processing as usual by Noel Carboni, Florida U.S.A.

Please click on the image to see the animation in a new window: