New Forest Observatory ®

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 🙂

no images were found

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 🙂 🙂