New Forest Observatory ®

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 🙂

O.K. so once you get past the first 150 pages (roughly the length of the first book) the great chunks of text transposed from the first book thin out.  So my recommendation is if you buy both books don’t bother starting the second one until about half way through.  “I am Spock” was alright, it added a few snippets not in “I am not Spock” but didn’t add much more insight into Nimoy himself.  If you want Nimoy’s Autobiography then buy either book, but don’t bother buying both.

The North America nebula (NGC7000) 3-framer taken using the mini-WASP array made this week’s “Image of the Week” on the My Astro Space site http://www.myastrospace.com/ 🙂

So far (page 58) fairly disappointed with Leonard Nimoy’s second Autobiography as it contains great chunks of material from the first book.  Won’t be reading this one in one sitting 🙁

It will be of no surprise to those few people who know me well enough that Star Trek has been a great motivator (and joy) in my life and that I owe special debt of gratitude to Mr. Spock for showing me the way forward and guiding me into a life of Science.  This morning the first Leonard Nimoy autobiography arrived on my doorstep – “I am not Spock” – I have just finished it in one sitting.  Now that is a first, I have finished many books in one go but there were usually breaks during the day.  Not this time – a really great piece of work, gripping stuff!  I now eagerly await the arrival of “I am Spock” the second autobiographical piece by Leonard Nimoy – I hope it is even half as good as his first effort.

If you ever get a chance to see the 8-minute BBC1 “Inside Out” piece that Chris Packham did on the New Forest Observatory you will see Chris asking me if I had been motivated in my Deep-Sky imaging by the Apollo space programme.  My answer was that although I sat up all evening like many people did watching those first Moon landings my main motivation was not in fact the Apollo space programme, but Star Trek 🙂