Here's something to play with your mind... it's just a simple exercise in counting... how many people are in the picture?
Tuesday 1st January, 2008
Saturday 29th December, 2007
Reporting from No-Man’s Land
Here we are, in that period of calm between the Christmas festivities and the New Year revelry. Just time for an update before the mania starts again!
Santa and his helpers were kind to us again; we must have been good peeps this year, because we all got everything we asked for, and a few surprises thrown in too. Folks have been very kind to us all.
My haul included a new trainer-kite (a 2m Ozone Imp) which was taken out for testing a couple of days ago when the wind picked up a bit. For such a small kite, it's got a lot of oomph, more than enough to lift me off the ground and scare me witless. Great stuff! Oh, and the yellow and grey colour-scheme is exactly the same as my now-defunct Wild Country Supernova tent, so that brings back good memories. I'll be taking this up a few mountains next year, I reckon it'll be fun.
I've just about finished reading a superb book by one of my all-time heroes, Gene Kranz, former Flight Director at NASA. "Failure is Not an Option" is his compelling and informative account of his involvement in America's space program. His account goes way deeper than the details reported by the media at the time, covering much more than the key events that hit the headlines. OK, so I'm biased (being a born-in-the-sixties lad), but I reckon this is a great book.
I'll not bore you any further by listing every single gift, but I'll express my gratitude for each and every one that was received, and hope that folks are happy with what they received from me.
Now, back to the blog. Stat-whores may have noticed that it went past a minor milestone earlier today...
I finished a review of 2007 and set the post to auto-publish at the turn of the year, then went to John's blog and found that he had stolen my thunder. Undeterred, my version of events will be published as per my plan, now that I've reformatted it.
Right, that's all for now. I'll see you next year. Have a good time!
Sunday 23rd December, 2007
Do they know it’s Christmas?
We do! The Beeb confirmed that festivities have begun in earnest when, this afternoon/evening, it screened "The Great Escape".
For the few who've never seen this Great British Christmas Institution, here's the classic bike scene:
OK, the movie's probably not that "PC" these days, but the Beeb had no qualms about showing it... again.
Top stuff!
Friday 21st December, 2007
A cheap Christmas pressie for all you commentators
Because you've all been behaving nicely, I've decided to cut you some slack and let you edit your own comments. The recently-installed plugin allows you to make edits during the first five minutes after submitting your comment, you should see a timer telling you how much time you have left to make your edit.
Abuse of this facility will lead to it being confisticated and put on a high shelf, visible but just out of reach, and I'll probably dock your pocket-money as well. 
Tuesday 18th December, 2007
Comments plotted
Just for the hell of it, I decided to follow up on my idle threat to delve deeper into the comments to see what I could find.
Here are a few graphs, deduce from them whatever you want.
The total number of comments was 183, left by 37 readers.
Saturday 15th December, 2007
In from the cold
The Thursday night / Friday morning skies did indeed stay clear, so a session watching the Geminids was on. The car was de-iced, packed and soon I was at the chosen venue. The temperature had dropped to -2 by then, so I donned a fair amount of insulation. There's something weird about dressing like the Michelin Man, complete with buff and balaclava, then walking through a very posh neighbourhood at 11:30 p.m. while carrying a small pack and a reclining chair. It certainly earned me a more than fleeting glance from a couple of car-cops.
I was set up within 20 minutes and soon I was snapping away with the camera. Sitting back while the D50 did its work, I could see that catching these meteors on camera was going to be difficult. There was no shortage of them, indeed for some periods they were showing at a rate of about 50 per hour within my field of view. The problem was that most of them were too fast and they weren't leaving bright trails like the Perseids tend to. I know that I caught at least 50 of them on camera, but, aside from one that left a bright trail, no amount of post-processing of the raw "NEF" files was going to bring out enough detail to make satisfactory images.
I stayed until 02:30, by which time the temperature had dropped to -6 and the camera was frosting up too much to take decent pics (note to self: buy a lens heater-band).
So, here are a few of the resulting images, feel free to mouseover for the annotated versions. There's plenty of room for improvement, I reckon.
Orion and neighbours
Faint trail in Ursa Major (at the top left)
