New Forest Observatory ®

Just ten minutes ago I had one of those “hair raising on the back of the neck” moments.  I am reading Arthur C Clarke’s book “Astounding Days” and on page 186 I come across this bombshell sentence.

“I am tempted to link these mysteries with the theory that some kind of universal field of information may exist, and that a part of what we think is memory is not in the brain at all, but somehow outside it”.

So good old Arthur C Clarke pre-empted my idea of the “Mind Field” by at least a good 10 years. Wowser Arthur – you were good!!

In this month’s National Geographic magazine there was a pretty unpleasant reminder of the destructive nature of man.  I won’t go into the unsavory details but it basically spelt out how morons in several European countries are decimating the migratory bird population.  Now this is nothing new of course, but it is still a jarring wake-up call to be reminded, yet again, that this wanton destruction of our bird life is still going on unabated.  We also still have the idiots who climb mountains with their shotguns in order to blast migrating birds of prey out of the sky too – this has also been going on for decades with no concerted effort by the Governments concerned to put pay to this brainless carnage.  This led me to some further thoughts along the same lines.  How long will it be before we see the last wild Leopard killed?  The last Lion?  The last Tiger?  The last Snow Leopard?  The last Rhino?  The last Elephant?  The last Orang-Utan?  Not too long at all the way things are going, and very little is being done to prevent this catastrophic loss of the planet’s invaluable gene pool.  How long will it be before ALL wildlife has been killed off and all that we are left with are domesticated animals and domesticated livestock?  And then how long eventually before those too are gone?  I think in terms of human-generation timescales, we are not talking about many generations at all.  There has been an effective moratorium regarding the destruction of the great Whales which must be applauded, but what use is such a moratorium if we continue to pollute the seas to the extent that they become nothing more than great stagnant ponds with iridescent waves of filth breaking on our shores?  You have no idea how pleased I am that I won’t be around long enough to witness these final stamps of success of the Idiocracy.

I don’t believe it is actually a Cree Indian saying, but whoever said it first, they certainly understood where we were heading.

“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will you realize that one cannot eat money”.

Of equal import, one that is an Indian saying.

“Who speaks for Wolf ?”

God help this planet’s wildlife – but right now we have next to nobody speaking for Wolf.  What an indictment!

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

I carried on adding some new frames to the mega Tulip nebula DSS mosaic until the computer gave up.  So this is it for now, the computer can’t handle any more 🙂  Note the ultra bright red S-type star AA Cygni near the top of the star and nebula panorama.

I am building up a big panorama around the Tulip nebula in Cygnus by downloading and processing DSS red and blue datafiles.  Simply fantastic data to work with.