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.