Author Archive.

Nutty Spuds

Posted by on July 2nd 2011 in In the garden
Tags: , ,

We've got two varieties of spuds in bags this year. For quick crops we're growing Charlotte because they're versatile, and we're growing Anya because they're unusual, tasty, relatively expensive to buy and difficult to find (Anya is grown exclusively for Sainsbury's, according to Wikipedia). For each variety we planted bags a month apart so now we've got three bags of each on the go. It's making good use of the "dead area" in front of the observatory shed:

We cropped the first bag of Charlotte three weeks ago, they were tasty but there weren't many of them, I reckon we cropped them too early. We'll leave the next two bags a couple of weeks longer.

We've been waiting for the first bag of Anya to mature for quite some time, this variety is reluctant to flower so when the stems wilted we decided that we'd waited for long enough. This morning, we cropped them:

After a good rummage around in the home-made compost, we found these little beauties:

I'm quite chuffed with them, it was a sizeable crop with hardly any effort. We'll taste-test them this evening :mrgreen:

I'll put some aside for chitting so as to be able to get another two bags on the go ASAP, hopefully we'll be able to keep the supply going for the rest of the year.

Observing Report 26th-27th June 2011 Part 2 (A late-morning crescent Moon)

Posted by on June 30th 2011 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics
Tags:

After doing my bit to get the rest of the family off to work, school or whatever I went back to the obsy to pack away the kit. By then it was getting on for 10a.m. , the sun was beating down again and the sky was clear and blue. High up and almost due south I could just make out the thin crescent of the waning Moon, and I was compelled to have a pop at it with the DMK. A red filter was needed to cut the blue glare and to reduce the effect of the bad seeing and so the resolution's not great, but it was worth playing those ten minutes of extra-time...

Moon (27/06/2011 @ 10:05 approx).11 panes stitched with MaxIm DL5.
Each pane is 150/3000 stacked frames. DMK mono CCD camera on the GSRC6M.

Observing Report 26th-27th June 2011 Part 1 (A double and a cluster)

Posted by on June 29th 2011 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics

A warm clear night after one of the hottest day of the year so far. Clarity was good although the seeing was only fair at best. Still not much full darkness but managed to get two targets before it got too light...

Albireo, the fifth brightest star in the constellation Cygnus.
Albireo appears to the naked eye to be a single star but through a telescope even low magnifications resolve it into a double star.
The brighter yellow star makes a striking colour contrast with its fainter blue companion.
Subs: 10 light @ 150s, darks and bias frames, ISO400.
1000D on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.

M39 (aka NGC 7092), an open cluster in the constellation Cygnus.
Subs: 12 light @ 300s, darks and bias frames, ISO400.
1000D on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.

It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it

Posted by on June 29th 2011 in LMAO!

 

Allegedly, Ella cleans and tidies her room at least once every week. Lately, however, we've come to question the effectiveness of the process.

The festering aroma in there was getting worse with each passing hot day. There was something in there, something bad.

Eventually an investigation was needed, so I donned the HazMat suit and ventured inside.

At length the cause was found...

in her school-bag...

unused since before the start of her GCSEs...

Friday 13th May, in fact.

Besides the collection of paperwork, used foil and moulding sarnies, there was an "interesting" array of fruit in various states of decomposition.

Anyone care to work out the number of oranges in the picture below?

 

 

A stern rebuke and a pair of yellow Marigolds were issued.

😈

Lumbar Jack

Posted by on June 28th 2011 in Health, or lack thereof

I had intended to get away with Mike last weekend to do some coastal walking/drinking and sea-fishing on the Lleyn, but during the preceding days I was a competitor in a BG! v stepladder v gravity competition while hedge-cutting. As usual Sir Isaac was triumphant, I was awarded third place and now my lower back is crocked. No bruises or broken bones but plenty of muscle-pullage.

This means that I didn't get to test the Lifeventure Downlight 900 bag that Adam Smith sent for review. Even worse, I didn't get to help Mike to test his beer-coolers.

There's a second opportunity for me to test the bag the weekend after next, as I've planned a wildcamping weekend in The Lakes. Whether I'll be match-fit in time is a moot-point - all this forced rest isn't conducive to staying in shape. Besides, a week of doing absolutely jack will send me round the bend.

Looks like I've a week of DVDs and blogging to look forward to.

 

😥

Drop-ship

Posted by on June 24th 2011 in A bit of a rant

Although the lappy's CPU fan hasn't caused any more trouble, it sounds like it's on the way out. Working on the basis that surfing for a replacement would be difficult after it croaks, I've been trying to source a replacement.

The obvious place to start looking was the IBM/Lenovo webshop. That's the UK webshop, so the part should already be in the UK. It found the required part, not cheap at £23.17 plus VAT, but it was what I expected to have to pay for a genuine replacement part.

What I didn't expect was the size of the shipping charges. FFS, I wanted it shipped, not a ship!!!

That's just mad. I've had huge packages, containing telescopes with delicate optics worth hundreds of pounds, sent fully-insured almost halfway around the globe for less than half the shipping cost of this fan which, even when packaged, is small enough to fit through a standard letterbox. How can it cost so much for p&p? For that price I'd expect them to do the main send on a NASA space-shuttle and have the final delivery done by The Pope driving a DeLorean.

Needless to say, I've dropped the idea of buying from IBM and now I'm looking elsewhere.