Southwold in miniature

 

'3 Beach Huts and a Starfish' - Acrylic on board - George Roberts

'Booming on the Blythe' - Acrylic on board- George Roberts

'The holiday's not over to the ginger cat sings' - Acrylic on board- George Roberts

All by kind permission of Professor and Doctor Roberts Bassingbourn.

Monkey Puzzled

 

For my first post of 2023 I thought I would get a bit philosophical and so I chose this photograph of the sky looking North through one of the Monkey Puzzle trees in our front garden. It was a beautiful clear night when the stars seemed to be everywhere you looked. I wrote this poem in celebration of how magnificent is the cosmos and how insignificant am I.

Monkey Puzzled

There are many philosophical things to find out about.

How did it all begin and what came before?

Is there an all knowing and all seeing being?

Is he a she and is there one, none or more?

There are many disparate things to care and shout about.

The price of sprouts, polar bears and the demise of planet Earth,

And after a terminal breath, is there spiritual life after death?

Do souls exist at all and in perpetuity from the moment of birth?

There are many fabulous things to wonder and spout about.

Multiverses, the equivalence of mass and energy, singularities big and small,

Is the Universe curved or flat or simultaneously both like Schrödinger’s cat?

Is there meaning and purpose for each diverse and unlikely bit of life at all?

There are infinitely many more things to find out about.

In the past, the present and future and why with age increasing, time locally gathers pace?

Why are we here at all, is intelligent life cosmologically common or actually relatively rare?

And at the terminus where will all we have found out go, if we’re ultimately lost from grace?

George Roberts

A Merry Christmas 2022

 

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our Blog Readers from round the World. 

May we wish wish you well and hope that 2023 brings an end to conflict, poverty, hunger, prejudice and suffering wherever it exists.

Barry the Snowman 2022

 Christmas would not be Christmas without our friend Barry the Snowman resident in his garden office. This year Barry has abandoned his usual location and taken up a more prominent position in front of the sitting room window. Nice one mate! 

The Winter Milky Way

 

The view from our Backyard last night. No Moon to dilute the starlight but hazy cloud moving in from the west was a problem when combined with a little light pollution. Image taken with an astro-modded 200d Canon DSLR and a Sigma EX zoom lens at f=11mm. 10x30sec exposures at ISO1600 were stacked and processed.

What a beautiful night, only marred by light intermittent cloud. Mars and Uranus are visible in this image. Other astronomical delights on show include:

• The constellations; Orion, Taurus, Canis Minor, Monoceros, Lepus, Aries and Gemini.
• The show piece stars; Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Saiph, Alnitak, Mintaka, Alnilam, Procyon, Castor, Pollux, Sirius and Aldebaran.
• The open star clusters; the Hyades and the Pleiades.
• Orion's Dagger and the Great Orion Molecular Cloud..

Apart from all that scientific stuff, it makes for a very pretty picture.

Oh those Summer Nights!

 

The Summer Miky Way from summers past and remixed and cropped by Kurt Thrust using Starnet GUI and Affinity Photo. The original data was captured using a tripod mounted 400d Canon DSLR with a standard EFS 18-55mm zoom lens at f=18mm.

"The weather continues 'exceptionally inclement' at the Jodrell Plank Observatory and so, along with polishing our equipment, observatory staff members have been keeping on their 'astro-imaging toes' by reprocessing data captured under past and better conditions. I clearly remember the warm summer night when we collected light from the Milky Way running through the constellation Cygnus. The bright star centre right in the above image is the white super giant Deneb and the bright star top right is the nearby (25 light years distant) Vega. Vega has at least two large planets and a debris disk orbiting it. Vega is spinning so fast that it has a central bulge created by centrifugal force (or as my old physics master Mr. Rawlinson used to say " a lack of centripetal acceleration").- Joel Cairo CEO Jodrell Plank Observatory.

The sky aglow with ionised hydrogen gas.

 

The night sky between the Constellations Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Triangulum and Camelopardalis. A wide sky image taken with the Canon 600d DSLR camera on the Star Adventurer equatorial mount at the Jodrell Plank Observatory. Image credit Pip Stakkert.

"Whenever I see images on which the 'spinning wheel' of our nearest neighbour galaxy Messier 31 features, I cannot help but wonder whether intelligent life forms inhabit planets orbiting any of its trillion stars" - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.