Archive for the 'Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)' Category

Observing Report 10th – 11th October 2024 (Aurora borealis)

Posted by on October 16th 2024 in My vids, Observing Reports, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)
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Over the years we've been to Iceland, The Faeroes, Norway, Denmark, the far NW of Scotland and various dark-sky locations... each time we've had reasonable expectations of seeing the aurora borealis... and each time we didn't see it. Who would have thought that we'd get our first ever view of it from our back garden?

Here you go. ~3 hours condensed into a few minutes. Canon 1000D, 10mm, ISO 800, 15 second subs. 600 subs converted CR2 > tif in PS, resized to 1620x1080 in Irfanview, 4fps avi created in MakeAVI. It's best viewed in full-screen as it's 1080px high. Enjoy.

Note to self: clean the lens next time.

 

Observing Report 30th January 2023 (ISS Lunar Transit)

Posted by on January 31st 2023 in My vids, Observing Reports, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)
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https://transit-finder.com/ flagged this transit a few days ago. I wasn't too confident that it would happen, as the ISS sometimes gets boosted or gets redirected at short notice to avoid space debris, but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway.

Everything turned out well - the ISS was there as predicted, and the weather-gods were on my side. The ZWO ASI174MC camera on the 80mm refractor scope captured 27s of full-frame (1936 x 1216 px) raw .avi data at 160 FPS. I reprocessed it 30fps and then hacked out this 10s clip which covers a mere 1.7843s of real-time. It's best viewed in full-screen at 1080p:

 

When life is cheaper than booze

Posted by on November 14th 2022 in A bit of a rant, Car stuff, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)

Why is it that I have to stop my car on a blind corner for can-toting jay-walking piss-heads who can't be arsed to wait for the pedestrian crossing's green man?

Next time, I might give natural selection a helping hand by removing them from the gene-pool.

Courage

Posted by on March 14th 2022 in In the News, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)
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Writ large:

The Beeb's article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60744605

BANG! and the dirt is gone

Posted by on March 6th 2022 in In the News, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)
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It's sad that the crew died while following the orders of a deranged idiot,
but I dread to think how many innocent lives could have been lost if that crew had managed to execute those orders.

Idle hands

Posted by on December 19th 2021 in Making stuff, Projects, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)
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I'd stumbled across this Veritasium* clip about the behaviour of rotating bodies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU (don't ask why I was stumbling anywhere near there). Interesting stuff. I've lost count of how many times I've thrown objects into the air since watching it.

Then I watched the clip about using a domestic microwave oven to make plasma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCrtk-pyP0I

Chris was intrigued and we were bored (me with being more-or-less confined to barracks, Chris after far too many months of working from home), so we spent an hour or so nuking grapes.

Like most experiments, it was a mix of success and failure. Yes, we made plasma. No, we didn't contain it. The oven door now has a hole where said plasma tried to escape:

 

 

Maybe we should have watched this clip before we rushed headlong towards meltdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0u8Vtf2GoQ

Stay safe, have fun, and remember this: if the two conflict, always go for the fun.

🙂

* If you enjoyed those two Veritasium clips, you should have a look at the huge list of other interesting content there - there's something for just about anyone. I recommend the item that deals with the science behind tenpin bowling.
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