Beamlines

To observers in much of North America and East Asia, on January 31st, the second full moon of the month, passed through Earth’s shadow in a Super Blue Blood Moon.

A day or two ago I came across this article

A few days ago I read an article in the Telegraph Humanity’s earliest known ancestor discovered - and it looks like a ‘wrinkled old sack’, featuring this creature:    

Do you find that your camera is not registering violet correctly?  Flowers that are more violet in appearance are coming out blue, while some purple flowers come out all right.  In the picture below, the daisy and the pansy to the right appear more or less correct while the pansies at centre and left may appear more or less “true blue” depending on which camera.  This is discussed in the YouTube

In recent years in Britain, we have heard much about bovine tuberculosis, which affects a wide variety of mammalian species, including mustelids, including the European badger Meles meles. There has been much argument over whether badgers should be culled to control the spread of the disease among cattle: indeed, badger culling in the United Kingdom has been a fraught and controversial subject.

In the last few days, there has been a spate of reports that the incandescent bulb is on its way back.  This relates to work by a group of authors at MIT plus one at Purdue University in Indiana, featured in a news report from MIT:A nanophotonic comeback for incandescent bulbs? Many of us might look forward to this, having found compact fluorescent lamps troublesome, and LED lights a bit weird. It relates to this very recent publication,:

We are often told how bad it is to keep sitting at the computer, but one good outcome at least is how some much interesting science news comes one’s way.  One item dated 19 October 2015 from Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) states:

Back around 1960, at school I enjoyed a laboratory lecture on liquid nitrogen, watching a deep frozen squash ball being shattered at a temperature well below that at which it turns from a rubber into a glass, and then seeing a nail being driven into a block of wood with a hammer whose head was made of frozen mercury.  The repeated impacts left an impression of the nail head in the soft metal.

Recently we were treated to a repeat of a three part series,

We have already had a view from the Mediterranean of Jupiter, Venus and the Moon in Seeing Jupiter In Daylight.  Jupiter and Venus are getting closer together in the sky, and on the 1st of July, at around 8:00 UTC, actual conjunction will occur, when the two planets are at the same Ecliptic longitude (referring the annual path taken by the Sun against our stellar background.)  At that time, the planets will be below the Horizon for New World observers.

Recently on Countryfile (BBC) we saw a presenter and a photographer together in the Pennines, the mountains that form the ‘backbone’ of England.  The photographer makes a living by taking spectacular scenes with a high-end camera and all different lenses, whereas the presenter was comparing what she took with her mobile.  He was worried that in the public domain the best images would be lost in a massive cloud which includes a lot of inferior (though he didn’t specifically use the word) data. This clicked with me, because of my experience of attempting astrophotography with what is known as a ‘bridge’ camera, somewhat between a compact and an SLR.

Once again, your resident tellytraveller has turned his gaze to the Southern Hemisphere, this time with second series of Coast Australia.  Episode 8 took us to New South Wales, and most spectacularly to Jervis Bay, a little under 200 km south of Sydney.