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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
The extremely fast – but ultimately finite velocity of light in vacuo, strikes me as very odd. Why does it have this particular value? Wouldn’t it be very interesting if the finite velocity of light in vacuo is actually telling us … Continue reading
O.K. so this is getting quite a ways off deep-sky imaging, but I just clicked on a site that I thought was going to tell me about ultra-black materials and I was instead treated to a monologue of how the … Continue reading
I have asked some friends to put up the Golden Solid angle on their sites to try and find where this might occur in Nature. Some people in trying to help with a reply have gone astray with both the … Continue reading
There’s plenty of clouds at the moment 🙁 but I’m hoping for just a few gaps in the cloud tonight. No Moon – and it should be the peak in the Geminid meteor shower (13th – 14th December 2009). Went … Continue reading
Well as the weather is not allowing me to take outer-space images, it’s back to some inner space work again. This time an opalescent beetle leg gets photomicrographed using a 23-frame focus stack put together using the Helicon Focus software. … Continue reading
