Bendy Rocks

Folded rocks in Glen Gairn, Scotland

Solid as a rock or rock solid are expressions that are all too frequently used, abused and misused. For example describing a premiership football teams back four as a rock solid defence may be stretching the bounds of metaphor to breaking point, but such metaphor is in frequent use on the evening footy shows. And besides, solid as a rock is a bit of a misconception anyway.

Contorted Man 'O' War Gneiss from the lizard Peninsula, Cornwall.  Sample 15cm

The idea of rock being able to bend or flow seems a little counterintuitive, but is it? Solid state flow is something that we have been aware of (even if we could not explain it) for centuries. It has long been noted that stained glass windows (Original ones that is) in ancient country churches are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top. The glass has flowed – admittedly at an extremely slow rate – under the influence of gravity. That example takes place over a period of hundreds of years – over thousands or millions of years, under the influence of gravity, pressure, heat, and other forces such as pulling, stretching and offset lateral pressure, rocks can do the seemingly impossible. The gigantic nappes, folds, and antiform/synform structures observed in the Grampian Highlands of Scotland are classic examples of just this.

An agonizingly contorted pebble of Migmatite from Nigg Bay, near Aberdeen.  Sample 6cm 

So why does rock bend? In short, it's a matter of Competence. The pressure and heat generated by the Grampian Phase (the mountain building episode that produced the original Grampian mountains) did several things including changing the chemical and mineralogical nature of the Dalradian sediments (the bedrock at that time). It also contorted those bedrocks in seemingly impossible ways. Rocks bend as a reaction to pressure because of competency contrast. Competency is a measure of how rocks behave under pressure. Competent rocks are more viscous, maintain their thickness when deforming and may fracture, incompetent rocks are more ductile and will flow more easily. The contrast between the competency of different rock layers dictates how a rock sequence will adjust to applied pressure. In the Grampian Highlands, evidence can be seen of folding on a scale of a few millimetres to metres to a scale of many kilometres.

Microfolds in Dalradian Metasediment from Glen Gairn, Scotland.  Sample 2cm across

At a far smaller scale though, why are even individual mineral grains able to be distorted by these pressures? This question is at the heart of solid state flow, which is in turn a vital part of what keeps the Earth a dynamic living planet. We have all seen pictures, film footage (or maybe even in real life) of molten rock – lava – pouring out of volcanic vents, but this is just the depressurized surface manifestation of a far more significant flow. The rocks of the Earths mantle flow, but they are not molten. The pressure in the mantle is far too great for the rocks to melt. The flow, which results from the intense heat with in the mantle creating convection currents, happens because at those temperatures and pressures, any imperfections in crystalline structures (known as dislocations) allow the material to deform in a plastic manner rather than a brittle manner (as they would under applied pressure at the surface at room temperature). The slow, microscopic, high pressure creep is what keeps the dynamic Earth in operation. 

A Warm Spot

A view of the rugged South Coast of Madeira

Madeira is located 600Km west of Morocco and is the massive shield volcano at the end of hot spot island and sea-mount trail that stretches NE back to the Azores-Gibraltar fracture zone (a probable future plate boundary).  At 5 million years, Madeira is the largest and youngest of the islands and sea-mounts in the trail.  The trail gets progressively older and colder back to the 67 million year old Ormonde Sea-mount SW of Portugal.  There have been no historically documented eruptions, but there is a history of land slippage due to internal movements - an indicator perhaps that this giant may only be sleeping.  Does this fact make Madeira a warm spot rather than a hot spot?

For the uninitiated, a hot spot is were an anomalously hot plume of mantle material (surprisingly termed a mantle plume) rises up through the mantle and pools beneath the crustal plate passing across the top of it.  This results in a linear sequence of islands and sea-mounts at the surface were the plate has passed over it.  Imagine passing a sheet of paper over a candle flame leaving a trail of burns.  In this case, the African plate was corkscrewing in a clockwise direction, passing over the plume and creating the hot spot trail.

South Coast 

Madeira rises to a high of 1861m above sea level, but don't let that fool you.  It continues down to the abyssal plain over 3000m below the waves - It is big.  On land it has been eroded into a spectacularly rugged edifice - the coastal scenery is dominated by imposing sea cliffs (one of which is the 4th highest in Europe) cut by impressive gorges, some of which penetrate all the way into the central massif.

The central Massif from the road to Sao Vincente

Geologically, it is the result of four phases of volcanic out-pouring followed by erosion and remod-elling of the land.  This can be seen quite strikingly at Sao Vincente on the North Coast were eroded and redeposited volcanic materials can be seen covered by more recent lava flows - the new covering the old, so to speak.

The new and the old

Organ Pipes - a section of columner lava formed by thermal contraction as the lava cooled, near Sao Vincente

A result of weathering of volcanic material can be seen all over the island.  The warm, relatively humid climate of Madeira results in the chemical weathering on the underlying volcanic rocks to form an iron and aluminium rich heavy clay soil known as Laterite.  Fields, road cuttings and red running rivers bare witness to this weathering, and it has been going on throughout the islands history, as witnessed by successive layers of laterite topped by lava flows, topped by more laterite, topped by more lava flows, etc.  In the Quinta Grande area, the laterite deposits can be seen with vertical cross cutting volcanic intrusions (Dykes) cutting through them - The dykes are of a more resistant volcanic rock (Hawianite).  Similarly weathering-resistant volcanic bombs (known locally as onion stones due to their concentric layering) can also be found in the laterite - usually exactly were they had landed after having been forcibly ejected from whatever volcanic vent spewed them out.

Laterite

A dyke cross-cutting laterite in a road cutting at Quinta Grande

To the North of the island are a series of caves created as lava tubes.  These were created when a solid crust developed over still flowing lava.  The flow of lava eventually dropped off leaving a long tubular space which was subsequently covered by later lava flows.  These are open to the wondering public and are presented as part of a Disney-esque tourist sideshow.  This is not geology in the raw - it's a well intentioned educational tourist trap that removes any sense of wonder or adventure  from the experience of going into a lava tube.  By hanging back from the crowds on the official tour, I was able to gain a little of the exploratory spirit, but is was immediately removed when the official photographer pounced on me - The image was printed and framed before I had even left the cave!!

Lava Tube at Sao Vincente

In relatively recent times small vents have spewed out copious amounts of volcanic material along the Southern coast.  In the Funchal area, you can see lines of volcanic vents getting progressively older further in land - their output is all around and can be seen on the pebble beaches in and around Funchal.    If you look carefully you may notice little flecks of green in the grey basalt groundmass - sometimes there are larger fragments - xenoliths - little fragments of the mantle, unfractionated, plucked from the Earths mantle and brought to the surface - little bits of the centre of the Earth.

Basalt cobbles on the beach at Lido, Funchal

Funchal from Casa Girau - volcanic cones in the middle and far distance

A small peridotite (Dunite) Xenolith in a  basalt pebble.  Xenolith approx 5mm diameter.

All Over Bar the Dissertation

California Nebula

Well folks.  It's all over bar the dissertation...   I took my last two exams on Wednesday and Thursday, and I'm not too unhappy about the way they went, so I celebrated last night with a trip to California, that is to say The California Nebula...

Techno Techno Techno...

Cygnus area fron Dark Site X

The patience that must once have been required to be an astro photographer is is definitely of the same order of magnitude as the proverbial saint.  Back in the old days for a start, the astro phot had to know one end of a camera from another - now don't get me wrong - an astro phot still has to know one end of a camera from another, but one of the crucial differences between then and now is that back in the day, the astro phot had to get it right first go, by application of skills and knowledge honed with practice.  Today, the same applies, but if you don't like what you've just taken, you can just delete it and start again.   Even today, your choice of camera can have a big impact on your results.  I used to shoot with Olympus, which, while they were great daylight cameras, were far too noisy for astro.  I am now on my second Canon (they control the noise much more effectively) and I cant complain about the results, and the update (a 550d) is am improvement on my previous Canon - an entry level 1000d.  Back in the day your astro phot had to devise ingenious methods of keeping track of the rotation  of the Earth - that way stars were pinpricks of light not streak - no all you have to do is have the right sort of tripod head - aside from setting it up correctly, all the hard work has been done by the R&D departments at various equipment manufacturers.  Back in the day, the astro phot like as not had to spend hours in the darkroom developing his image, using skills that are rapidly disappearing as there are less darkroom spaces available and less companies making the equipment to stock them.  Besides, now there is Photoshop (for the adventurous) and a host of drag and drop, do it all for you image post production applications for the less adventurous.  Who needs a dark room? 

One thing we all need though is more dark sites.  I have already wittered on about dark sites in an earlier post, so I wont bore you now, but if you find a good one, it may be worth keeping it to yourself, taking time to get to know the locals (so they know who the wierdo standing out there in the dark and the freezing cold is).

A Dance on a Volcanoes Edge Part 1

El Tiede from Los Roques Garcia

One goes through life accumulating ambitions, and some of those ambitions will come to fruition, but quite a lot remain unfulfilled. So to tick off an ambition, even at great financial or personal cost is a good thing, and the first time is always the best, even if subsequent occasions have much to recommend them. Since rebooting my geology ambitions, I have harboured the idea that it would be good to see a live volcano. I'd seen British volcanoes (the most recent of which last erupted when the North Atlantic started to rift), but I wanted to seen the real deal. After a difficult summer of Level 2 geoscience (How naive was I? Thinking level 2 was difficult!), I decided a reward for all my hard work was in order and that ticking off a volcano was that reward.

El Tiede is the tallest peak in Spain and an active (if currently slumbering) volcano. It is situated on Tenerife and stands as an imposing presence at the Southern end of the island. Tenerife is one of the Canary Islands and being far from any plate boundaries is and example of a hot spot volcano resulting from a mantle plume – a flow of anomalously hot mantle material flowing up and out from under the western side of the African continental crust. My trip was planned to coincide with Maria getting back from Sudan, so we could have a holiday together, and tick a whole lot of boxes at the same time – volcano, whale watching, Astro stuff, etc.

Accommodation was a small friendly hostel run by an Austrian named Manfred tucked away on the North side of the island. All we had to do in a restaurant was to mention that we were staying at Casa Manfred and free food and drinks would start to appear on our table – It's not what you know, it's who you know.

El Tiede from Casa Manfred

I had toyed with the idea of going up El Tiede in the cable car like a tourist, but it was shut, so our hand was forced. We had applied for and gotten summit passes, which you have to do, but we were going to have to do it the hard way. Luckily, you can gain about three fifths of the required height above sea level in the car, up the gloriously twisty-turny road up to the caldera. Once inside the caldera things level off and you are surrounded by miles of lava fields, with the main cone of El Tiede always present. Off to the left as you drive up the road is the Observatory, high up on the rim of the caldera, in a place were the sweep of the sky is broken only by the looming presence of El Tiede to its south.

The Observatory on the rim of the caldera

From the parking space, the initial walk up the hill crosses a mass of scoria pebbles – this zigzags back and forth through this terrain for a couple of kilometers before starting to level off prior to the first big climb. This climb slogs its way through one of the more recent lava fields – hell on the knees, and starting to gasp for breath. It's a steep climb in a relatively short distance to reach the mountain refuge at Alta Vista. People will often stop there overnight and then get an early morning start to see the sun rise over the summit – not us though we were on a time line we wanted to get to the top for our allotted slot, as determined by our summit pass. A short break for food, water and photographs, and we were back on out way through the next set of lava fields. Although they were less steep, they did seem to go on for ever, and I was discovering by now that I really was no mountain goat.

View from Alta Vista Refuge

At a junction in the path, a left turn took me back towards the top cable car station. This again seemed to take an age to come into view, but once in sight, we were on the finishing straight. At this point I was really expecting to see a little Spanish fellow in a national park employees uniform sitting in a shack ready to stamp my summit pass. The reality could not have been further from the truth – the place was deserted. We probably could have gone up without having a pass at all. The final climb up the smouldering cinder cone is one of the most amazing things I have done. Throughout the steep climb, you are surrounded by gases and steam; Black flows of obsidian snake down the slope; exotic suites of minerals crystallise from the continuously venting gases forming light honeycomb structures; the small of the sulphur dioxide stings the throat and lungs forcing you to breath shallowly and shuffle just a few steps at a time before stopping for a rest.

Eventually, the summit ridge comes into view, and you scramble across a jumble of sulphur laden boulders that make up the rim of the crater. The crater steams and belches gas, but the wind whips it away to join with the clouds that are for the first time marring the view. The realisation that I am dancing on a volcanoes edge is quite intoxicating. Below my feet is a pipeline to the depths of the Earth.

An obsidian flow

Looking north from the summit

The Crater

El Tiede eggs

El Tiede and Roques Garcia

A busy bit of the sky

Milky Way in the region of Cassiopeia

It has been a busy old year, what with working on Open University B.Sc Geoscience level 3, and having to hold down an ever more stressful job, hey that's life, and I have found time amongst all that to do a few stargazing sessions (when I could actually see them, which let's face it has not been all that often this summer).  The standard of my imaging kit has gradually improved, and the investments are paying off.  The milky way is a busy bit of the sky and we're in it.  It's our neighborhood.  So from bottom left say hello to some of the neighbors - Heart and Soul Nebula's, The Double Cluster, The Pacman Nebula, Cedarblad 214, and a bunch of other stuff.   It was photographed from Chippy Airfield on a cloudless July night (One of the few).  Below is the Cygnus section of the milky way taken on the same night.  All in all a good night to say "Open Uni work, what Open uni work?"

Cygnus section of the Milky Way

The neighbors in this one are the Elephants Trunk Nebula, the tiny Cocoon Nebula, the North America Nebula, the Pelican Nebula, the Butterfly Nebula, the Crescent Nebula, and the Veil nebula.

Milkyway

It's our galaxy.  The Milkyway is our galactic neighborhood.  The image here is taken with Hydrogen Alpha filtration allowing the camera to see what is invisible to the naked eye.  It is the area of the constellation Cygnus and is very rich with wispy nebulosity - The North America and Pelican Nebulas are at the top left of the image, the Butterfly below and right of them, and right again is the tiny (in cosmological terms) Crescent Nebula.  The whole image is shot through with unnamed gassy wisps, and towards the bottom left is the feint crescent of the Veil Nebula.

Moho Mojo

Serpentine at Dolar Point

Day 1

I woke up. Had breakfast, packed my last bits of clobber – bag with geo hammer, various chisels, hand lens, compass-clinometer, square protractor, surveyors note book, as well as other toys – cameras, astrotrac (incase the clouds clear), ukulele, clothes, fruity malt loaf. All the essentials. Set up various lights on timers so it looked like I was at home randomly wasting electricity. Gave the neighbours the spare key.

The sun was shining, what could possibly go wrong? Four and a half hours later, my car started to make a most distressing squealing noise which stopped for a while when I tapped the brakes and then started up again ten seconds later. Not good. I did the last 20 miles expecting a wheel to fall off.

Coverack was the last word in quaint. It also has zero mobile phone reception. Some people – even me some of the time – would call this a blessing, but right there and then, I needed to call the RAC. Lucky me – Hostels International put payphones in their establishments. Half an hour later the man from the RAC was jacking my car up. He couldn't see a problem with the brakes, or anything else that should make a squeal, so he took it for a spin. Three miles later, he pronounced that there is nothing wrong with it. It's like going to the bloody doctors. Well I didn't imagine the squeal!!

Moho under water

Ah well, I'm was here at least – The centre of the earth. Well not quite. Coverack has the unique distinction of having a sequence of rocks exposed that represent the transition from the earths mantle to the earths crust (known in geoscience as the Mohorovicic discontinuity or Moho for short), and as a geoscientist I was here to see it. A problem immediately became apparent. It was at that moment, under water, and the tide would not be all the way out for another 5 hours. Bugger! Scrambling over the rocks behind the the lifeboat station (now a restaurant) at Dolar Point enabled me to get up close and personal with the mantle, and despite the dire predictions of a salty old sea dog who was fixing his foc'sle or something at the slipway, the tide had turned and after an hour or so there was a widening strip of pebble strewn beach to examine, but as the light was failing, I thought it might be more productive to visit in daylight.

Day 2.

Serpentine Pebbles

Breakfast at the hostel with a nice family from Wales was followed by a short walk down to the beach. It rained briefly. At last luck was with me – the tide was out and the sun started shining. I started my traverse from the harbour north of Dolar Point. What is immediately apparent is that the simple layer cake sequence I had imagined Peridotite/serpentine – Troctolite-gabbro- basalt, would not be immediately apparent. Hundreds of years of sub-aerial exposure followed by exposure to sea water had ensured that the shore line rocks possessed a routine brown-black colour – that's all of them. This was of course not strictly true. On closer inspection of both the exposures themselves and the adjacent pebbles it was possible to track the differences. The mind blowing realization that I was walking across the Moho (!!!) was tempered by the obvious fact that hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people had already done so at Coverack over the years – it is a small seaside town – there is a beach – the equation is simple enough... (Sloshing seawater) x (sand and pebbles) = (screaming children)/(dog walkers)... But enough ruining my Moho Mojo! I've crossed the Moho and I knew I was doing it – so there!

Bastite Serpentine with Chrysotile (white asbestos) veins

To walk at low tide from the picturesque little harbour to the northern end of the beach takes you from the depths were the mantle peridotite reacted with water and heat to form the more easily flowing serpentine; across the Moho, represented at Coverack by the unfamiliar mottled red cumulate rock troctolite, the boundary between the mantle and the crust; and into the course grained mafic lower crust represented by gabbro and basalt dykes. All of it helpfully squeezed up 10km from the earths depths and laid end on at Coverack beach for those in the know to walk over and wonder at. The reality is not as clear cut. The exact points were mantle ends – Moho begins – Moho ends – crust begins are blurred by erosion, cross cutting intrusions this way and that, and a couple of geological imposters (several huge lumps of gabbro and basalt that appear were no gabbro or basalt should be – the remains of a former coastal defensive structure).

Gabbro Veins

Basalt dyke

Moving swiftly on. A short car journey (in the car with nothing wrong with it!!), in a howling gale and hideous rain shower, took me to the basement, the rocks onto which this slab of ophiolite was thrust at the closure of the Rheatic ocean. This is a sequence of what were once volcanics. The heat and pressure created by the collision of two continent sized sections of crust re-assembled the minerals into forms that were stable in such extreme conditions. The result is seen at Lizard Point itself – Man o war gneiss. This rock has been through a lot, and one look at the painful contortions that can be seen in the rocks at Lizard is enough to tell a double story – First of all the heat and pressure that caused the minerals to reconstitute themselves into gneiss in the first place, and then a pressure so great that it can cause solid rock to bend! The tide was coming in rapidly, and the swell was big, and the shower had started again, so finding a piece of Man o war gneiss on the tiny swatch of beach below the old lifeboat station was exciting, but I got a little bit with a nice s-bend in it to illustrate the meaning of pressure.

Contorted Man o war gneiss at Lizard

During yet another shower, food with the nice family from Wales who seemed to have adopted me by this time was eaten in a cafe at the top of the path. This was followed by a trip to Mullion Cove were exists the geological frontier between the materials from the mantle and ocean floor, and the sediment into which they smashed. The resulting rock is hornblend schist, and the cliffs on the north side of the cove are made of it, whereas those on the south shore are serpentine. By now the tide was 95% in, which left a strip of harbour beach about yeah wide on which to find a sample of hornblend schist, and it was getting more exciting by the second as huge waves raced to meet me and the frequent showers (did I mention the frequent showers?) turned to hail stones. Another bracing British seaside day. After several advances into the fray, and a corresponding number of retreats, I had a worthwhile sample of the hornblend schist and the serpentine, oh and wet feet too. The storm was getting worse, and I thought that discretion was probably the better part of valour. An almost endless phalanx of rain heavy clouds marched in from the Atlantic like an invading army, I was soaked to the skin, and I thought my day was about over.

Serpentine from Mullion Cove

Day 3

I got up. It was raining heavily. I went home.

Global Warming

Fossil Coral (Miocene) from Zanzibar

There's a lot of unnecessary clap-trap talked about global warming.  By that I'm not talking about the patently hilarious, visually stunning scenarios presented by the overblown Hollywood offering The Day After Tomorrow, or the similarly hilarious attempt by ex-vice-president Al Gore to present himself as some sort of eco-warrior (eco-crusader?  eco-messiah?), well intentioned as it was.  I'm not even talking about the barely concealed climate change denial exhibited on an infrequent basis on Top Gear.

No, what I'm talking about is the oft recycled argument that global warming has happened many times in the past and therefore it's not our fault.  The issue here is not whether it has happened in the past or not, the issue is are we a contributing factor.

Many or the people who are the strongest proponents of this point of view are the same American Christian Right-Wing oil baron types who also insist that evolution is a bunch of hogwash and the Lord made the heavens and Earth in six days before taking a break and having a Kit Kat on the 7th - the irony here being that on the one hand they condemn the science of Evolution, and on the other they misuse the scientific evidence of sequence stratigraphy and paleontology to justify their assertion that there is no need to change their wasteful and destructive ways.

The fossil coral in the picture above is from one of those warmer periods in the Earths history - about 25 million years ago - It tells a tale of warm shallow seas, close to a river delta, but the rock strata from which this fossil came also tells a tale of the time scale over which this warming trend happened - tens of millions of years!  By comparison, it has taken about 300 years to warm the Earth in a similar manner since the start of the industrial revolution.  And we have absolutely nothing to do with it?  Really?

Stray Light...

Panorama from the Rosette, through Barnards Loop to Orion Nebula

One of the minor annoyances of living in Britain is the amount of council tax paid for stray light there is.  I'm sure that there are a quite substantial quantity of the street lights in this country that automatically switch on at the predetermined time and illuminate the ground 30 foot below, but actually benefit no one and nothing.  The purpose they serve is for the council to be able to say - we have done our job.  The streets are safe.  Would the streets be any less safe though, if unnecessary lighting in less travelled areas was turned off, or sensor operated?  Aylesbury Vale were I live is a corridor of relative dark surrounded by the light bubbles of Bicester, Buckingham, Milton Keynes, Oxford, High Wycombe, and of course Aylesbury itself.  It seems inconceivable that a true dark spot could be found in such a place, but copious research and a few telephone conversations with local farmers have secured me two good spots (I am sworn to secrecy about the locations).  Sites with few or no street lights and little passing traffic are rarities to be appreciated if you enjoy looking up at an unpolluted sky.  These two images were taken at my favorite dark site.  The local farmer knows me  so he does not call the police when I arrive in the middle of the night!

Panorama from the Pliedes to the California Nebula

Rocks...

Pretty much everything we do is somehow effected by rocks.  Right now, beneath your feet, there are rocks.  The planet we inhabit is made of rocks.  The power we take for granted, the thing that enables us to live the sort of lives we wish for is sourced from rocks.  Pick up a mug of tea and the mug is made from china clay which is, when all is said and done, rotted rock (the end product of the weathering of the feldspar in Granite to be exact).  You catch my drift.  Yet many people would struggle to make the connection between rocks and their lives.

Rocks (along with minerals and fossils) have been intimately connected with my life for as long as I can remember.  I the first rock I ever got was an exotic green lump of Amazonite which I was given as a small child,  and the fascination has never really left me since that time.  In more recent times it has become important for me to learn the fine details of geoscience because of my career ambitions, but once I did it purely for the joy of collecting.  The idea that by hammering a pebble on Charmouth beach, I could be the first person in the world to see something was (and still is) quite intoxicating.

Nowadays, it is all far more serious and erudite, as I learn the principles that govern why geological structures are what they are, but sometimes it is nice to just experience the joy of collecting, and when some one I know goes abroad and asks me if I want anything bringing back, I say yes, bring me back a rock.   The rock below is a piece of Himalayan Leucogranite brought back from Everest Base camp by Maria.    

Himalayan Leucogranite

HA

HA or Hydrogen Alpha is a feindishly hard way to take photographs of the stars. The filter cuts out just about everything apart from the HA wavelength light that is being pumped out by the emission nebulas - a vivid shade of red.  This means that it is more or less impossible to see through your view finder and only really bright objects will show up on a camera live view screen - something that makes focusing a wee bit problematical.  It is difficult enough already to focus on a pin point of light against a black back ground.  You then erect additional hurdles by fitting the HA filter and things are about twenty times harder.  Fortunately techniques such as pre-focussing on a really bright object like Jupiter, or spending the time in the dark and cold to locate and mark infinity for HA (which is different to infinity without) pay dividends.

Then there's processing.  Your images arrive back from the dark site, a rather shocking shade of red, but Photoshop soon sorts that out, with the final touch being to convert the image into striking Black and White images like the one of Barnard's loop above.

California Nebula

Heart & Soul Nebulas

The very feint Cone Nebula and the Rosette Nebula

Why Quarks'n'quasars

Why Quarks'n'quasars?  Quarks - Little wonders that are the building blocks of us, of everything we know, of the screen you're looking at and the picture on it.  They're everywhere, so familiar and yet so unknown to us.  Quasars are the other end of the known unknown spectrum.  Something so stupendously powerful, deadly, crushingly dense, totally alien to anything we know, but look up the Crab Nebula (on Google - I don't have any pictures of it yet) which has one spinning at its core, and you'll see that it is the core of something very beautiful.

For the last 4 years I have been on a journey (i.e doing an OU Degree) that has seen me embrace science in both its more traditional forms Chemistry, Physics, Biology, etc, and in to some people the less familiar forms which are my particular interests, Geoscience and Astronomy.  This is a back-dated, belated account of my adventures so far, and an ongoing  account of my adventures to come.

The picture above is of the nebulosity in the area of the sky commonly referred to as Orions Belt (two of the belt stars can be seen - the third is out of shot).  There are 4 nebulas in shot - From left to right the Flame Nebula, the Horse Head Nebula, the Running Man Nebula, and (a little tiny bit of) the Orion Nebula.  The image was taken at the Rollright Stones in the Cotswolds in January 2012.