affable-lurking

After a long relaxing weekend in Germany, it’s best to ease yourself back into work gently. What better way to do this than to take advantage of contacts and go on a guided tour of the Royal London Hospital museum and medical school samples collection?

The tour had been arranged just over two months ago,  and I had some idea of what to expect from DG’s visit to the museum earlier this month. A half dozen or so of us turned up at 10 AM for the tour led by the archivist of the hospital  - a chap who quite obviously loves his job and could have kept us entertained for far longer than we’d allowed for.

The museum is open to the public Monday to Friday, 10 - 4:30; however, the medical school collection isn’t open to the public, and this is what we’d really come to see.  Leading us up a back staircase of the hospital proper and through a nondescript door, the archivist introduced us to the remains of Joseph Merrick (better known as the elephant man) and a small display for medical students with information on the latest ideas of what exactly had been his disease.

It seems the jury is still out on what had caused Joseph’s condition. Attempts at DNA analysis from the skeleton and teeth have so far proved fruitless due to the bleaching and boiling of the bones prior to display.

Around another corner is kept the temporarily relocated core samples collection - the anatomical samples that medical students should see. These form a small part of the total collection, currently in storage until funds allow their rehousing.

There being nothing like seeing half a human head in an oversized jam-jam to give you an appetite,  we decided to decamp for an early lunch before back to work.

It worked!

Clockwise and anti-clockwise beams though the ring with minimal tweeking of the focus and steering parameters. Yay!

Between gaps and breaks in the clouds I managed to record pretty much the whole eclipse. The filter I used gave a slight ghoating to the edge of the sun, making it look out of focus.

Today (if you are reading this in my tomorrow) or tomorrow (if you are reading this today) or at some point in the past (if you are reading this after tomorrow)
Scratch that - start again.

August 1st, 2008. Solar Eclipse. Moon passing in front of the sun, sky darkening, a bit like August 1999, except it will not get as dark (no totality visible from anywhere in the UK).

The NASA animation below shows a tiny black dot (in reality ~200km oval) shooting across the face of the earth - somewhere where this passes over is where you need to be to see a totally blacked out sun. At the time of maximum eclipse in London only ~12% of the sun will be occluded by the moon,the further north you live, the more of the sun will be occluded.

Seen from London, the edge of the moon will make contact with the sun at 9:33 AM (BST), maximum eclipse occurs at 10:18 and the whole show is over at 11:05 BST. There isn’t another Solar Eclipse visible from the UK until March 20th 2015.

That’s not all for the sky shows in August though. The Perseids Meteor Shower takes place between the 11th and 13th of the month - pick somewhere with dark skies and look up, predictions indicate this will be a good show.
There is also a partial eclipse of the Moon on the 16th August 2008. That’s when the Moon goes dark.On that date the moon is fairly low in the London sky and rising. It is only around 10 degrees above the horizon at maximum eclipse, so might be a challenge to see anyting unless you can get high up with a good clear view to the south east.

If you do plan to watch the solar eclipse do it safely.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/04/21/guest-post-juan-collar-on-dark-matter-detection/

Summary - it’s good, but is it real? Could be many other things.