Not sure if it's a mutant singleton or conjoined twins/triplets:
Author Archive.
Observing Report 12th-13th September 2018 (Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner)
It's been over half a decade since I imaged a comet and came away with anything half-decent. Here's my attempt at 21P/Giacobini-Zinner which, from here, is currently visible low in the Eastern sky in the pre-dawn hours:
Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, 13th September 2018.
Subs: 27 light @ 300s, dark and bias frames, sensor -20C.
QHY10 on the C80ED-R frac, guided with PHD.
There are some other pics still to process - Uranus and some of its moons - so I might post the results sometime soon if I think they're worth showing.
A run of good form
Quiz-wise, it's all been going unexpectedly well recently:
- 7th August: 4th
- 8th August: 1st (Charity Quiz)
- 14th August: 3rd
- 21st August: 2nd
- 28th August: 1st
- 4th September: 2nd
- 11th September: 1st
One of the other teams keeps a book of nerdy stats about such things, I'll see if I can get hold of more data from them to put things in perspective. I feel a chart coming on!
Nick reckons that we should apply to go on Pointless, I think that we have neither the discipline nor the sobriety required for such a venture:
Gardiani latrina vicit
Smoke without Fire?
As I reported last week, I took the NHS online "What's your heart age?" test and came away with a respectable score of 55.
One of the questions there was "Do you smoke?", to which I answered "I quit", that being the honest answer. It's been over 2.5 years since I had my last ciggie, I've been vaping instead but there was no "No, but I vape"option in the drop-down menu:
As we all know, stopping smoking is a good thing. Vaping is an excellent alternative, even the NHS thinks it's 95% safer than smoking - these posters have been displayed prominently at all three Leicester hospitals for several years:
... or do they?
When I attended my annual Vascular Review test yesterday at my G.P.'s surgery the clinician said that she had me down in her records as having quit smoking and therefore I was classed as a non-smoker. I confirmed that, and added that, as I told them last year and the year before, I have been vaping since giving up the fags. Incredibly, she declared that "vaping is still smoking" and she updated and backdated my status to "Smoker"!
Now, there's no smoke in vapour, there's no tar in vapour, and quite often there's no nicotine in vapour, so how the fecking bejeezus did she reach that barmy conclusion?
Someone somewhere will look at her lies in my results and may well make an ill-informed clinical decision based on them. That won't go down well with me, there's a more-than-slim chance that I'll have something venomous to say about it.
FFS, NHS, can you please tell these people that vaping is not smoking? If you are going to condone vaping, the least that you could do is circulate the same hymn-sheet throughout your empire, even unto the far-flung corners.
Back to the Near-Future
A couple of weeks ago I had a bit of a rant here about my mandatory consultation being bumped five weeks from September 6th to October 11th.
This morning I was woken by a call from the clinic receptionist - she had been told to bump some consultations from October 11th and that mine was one of them. For a few seconds I could feel the adrenaline surge and could hear my next sentence making its way from brain to larynx... "oh, FFS, not again!"
But no! The receptionist had noticed that my consultation had already been bumped, and had decided that bumping it even further into the future was a bad idea, so now we're set up for me to attend this Thursday.
Nice one, Lisa!
Better Rads
I'm getting better at growing radishes:
They're far better than the few stunted-yet-suggestive things that we got last year:
