New Forest Observatory ®

Terry Pratchett only had 6 monitors fitted to his computer as he couldn’t get 8 on his desk 🙂  O.K. well I didn’t want 8 or even 6 monitors – I only wanted 3.  Looking at the graphics cards offered by ATI there are a few which state that they will support 3 monitors – however, look at the small print right down at the bottom of the page.  The card as supplied will only actually support 2 monitors – if you wish to run a third monitor you need to purchase a separate active displayport adapter which goes in-line between the monitor and the graphics card.  Now here comes the good bit – it doesn’t look like you can actually get one of these in the U.K. right now, so as you can guess I am well and truly pleased.  If the main spec on a graphics card says that it will support 3 monitors I expect it to do just that – I don’t expect there to be fine print at the bottom  of the page saying only if you have a displayport adapter – being generous this is at the very least misleading.  So there you have it, you have been warned.  By the way, you can by an Accell active displayport adapter on Amazon.com (States) but they won’t ship to the U.K.  So if you find yourself going down this route too, E-mail a mate that lives in the States and see if they will buy and ship you one over.  I am highly unimpressed with this state of affairs, and congratulations to ATI, this is the first time I’ve felt “stung” in buying any computer component in 20 years – usually I am highly impressed at the value for money offered by most companies.

Poor weather conditions (high cloud/fog/mist) sub-zero temperatures and a very unimpressive display of Geminids this year – even though we were blessed with NO MOON!!!  Set up the Canon 40D with a 17-55mm zoom lens set to 30mm, 2-minute subs, f#3.5, ISO 400.  Just set the remote timer off and left it running until the batteries ran out.  Managed to capture 2 Geminids on a total of 54 frames.  In the image the two bright stars are of course Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini.  This image should also make an appearance as the weather picture on tonight’s Meridian Weather report around 6:00 p.m.

By the way – the zoom lens gives terrible star shapes in the far corners and I will be looking at short focal length prime lenses to do this sort of work in the future.