This is fusion-food and fusion-lessons gone too far:
I mean, just how "authentic" will it be with Cheddar in it?
I seem to recall that the French have some minging cheeses of their own, so why bastardize the thing?
All this makes no difference to Anna - just like me, she doesn't like cheese of any persuasion.
And yes, "Cheddar" is a proper noun and hence needs a "C".
Education, eh?
Late last night I went up Croft Hill to get ready to observe the 2012 Transit of Venus. I managed to get all the kit up there in one haul and was soon sitting in the pop-up shelter and looking at the thick low clouds that stretched across all of the sky. The forecast of rain was wrong but they got the cloud-cover about right, things weren't looking good. Still, it was a good place to be - almost 360-degrees of visible horizon and I had them all to myself, apart from the rabbits and the foxes which came surprisingly close to the shelter. And it was warm, almost tee-shirt weather. With a couple of hours to go until sunrise I grabbed some shut-eye, hopeful that the cloud would clear before the celestial performance began.
Of course, when the sun broke the horizon at 04:45 I couldn't see it due to the 8/8 cloud cover. I set up the kit anyway and waited for nearly an hour before the cloud started to break. It cleared overhead but the trailing edge of the pall was still making its way slowly towards the north-east where all the action was going on unseen. It was going to be a close-run thing - would the clouds clear the sun before Venus did? The critical time was 05:53 - "Fourth Contact". After that the show would be over.
The clouds refused to part but there was a reasonable thinning in just the right place at 05:49 so I stated to rattle off frames like a madman for the next four minutes, continuing even after the thinning had closed up. Talk about cutting it fine!
And then it was over. I went up to the trig-point for a brew and a smoke, it took me a while to notice that the sky was almost clear and all around was bathed in sunlight. Typical.
I was soon hauling the kit back to the car, cursing the weather. I cursed all the way home and cursed even more when I first looked at the pics on the laptop. It took me ages to realised that I did actually have four really poor frames which showed Venus crossing the Sun's limb.
Those four frames were dim and noisy but I've managed to drag this piss-poor result out of them:
Transit of Venus 06/06/2012 @ 05:49 BST - Venus crossing the upper-right section of limb.
Nikon D50 with 2x Powermate on the C80ED-R.
Baader Planetarium AstroSolar™ Safety Film (neutral density 5.0).
Hand-held shot, 1/100s exposure @ ISO200.
And plenty of clouds.
This has to be the worst solar image I'll ever post but I suppose it's better than nothing.
Although Croft Hill SSSI has well-trodden footpaths and access is encouraged, the land is privately-owned and permission to be there "out-of-hours" or for "irregular purposes" should be sought. My thanks go to Phil Jackson (Biodiversity and Restoration Advisor (North), Aggregate Industries) for granting me permission to access Croft Hill for this observing session.
A movie with brilliant effects but this great opportunity was spoiled by a less-than tense ending following after a plot that was a tad weak. Not as good as Alien or the much-better Aliens, probably on a par with 3 and much better than Resurrection. Mind you, of the five it's the only one not rated "18" so maybe we should have expected less anyway. The AvP stuff isn't canon so there's no comparison.
I should mention that the scenic shots of Skye and Iceland were excellent.
I'll not post any more so as to not let loose any spoilers, but I'd guess that most of the folk at the same screening as us left during the credits and so would have missed the easter-egg at the utmost end... the Weyland logo followed by the words "Building Better Worlds since 10.11.12"... I suppose I'll have to get sad and find out what that's all about, after I've sussed if the date format's UK or Yankee.
On the bright side, the trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey looked good.
I'm planning a local mini-expedition to observe the 2012 Transit of Venus on Wednesday morning. As part of the kit-prep I rattled off a few frames this afternoon using the stripped-down gear that I'll be taking, here's a sample of the test-results showing a fair spread of sunspots and active regions (mouseover the pic for the labelled version):
Sunspots and Active Regions 04/06/2012.
Nikon D50 with 2x Powermate on the C80ED-R.
Baader Planetarium AstroSolar™ Safety Film (neutral density 5.0).
Hand-held shot, 1/100s exposure @ ISO200.
Of course the weather forecast for Wednesday morning is crap so all this prep could be a waste of time, but as as the next transit will be in 2117 this'll be my last chance to see such an event for real.
Went into town today and was surprised to meet The Queen, I even managed to get a few pics:
Her make-up could do with a bit of attention, though.
And that Corgi looks a bit out-of-sorts.
There's an interesting/nerdy story about the design-evolution of the wheels on NASA's Curiosity Rover. The tale goes something like this...
An early suspension-test prototype rover was equipped with metal wheels which prominently featured "JPL" in raised letters which would imprint the company's initials onto the surface of Mars:
According to one of the scientists on the project, NASA was extremely upset by the "JPL" raised letters on the wheels, wanting them to read "NASA" instead. JPL assured NASA that this was merely a prototype and that the letters wouldn't appear on the final model.
Eventually the design was finalised and approved, and the wheels were made and fitted:
I'd imagine that the NASA folks would have felt that they'd won a little victory over JPL - all of the lettering on the wheels had been designed-out.
And I'd imagine that JPL's lot would have felt far more victorious because they'd got their initials in there anyway in the form of Morse Code which NASA, apparently, didn't notice:
🙂
Well, they launched Curiosity back in November 2011 and it's scheduled to land on Mars in August 2012 so there's no chance that they'll call it into the pits for a tyre-change. JPL will leave its mark on Mars despite NASA's objection. And those marks will be useful - the regular Morse patterns in the wheel-tracks will act as index marks, Curiosity's camera will count them to judge the distance travelled across the surface.
I reckon that's a cool story.
Of course you don't want to read too much into these things or you might start to believe that this pattern:
bears some similarity to this logo:
Building Better Wheels Worlds
😉
