Nine Years

So, nine years of affable-lurking. That’s a lot longer than I thought I’d keep this up. Not that sporadically updating a website is particularly hard work.

The domain started as a laugh, a feeble ‘joke / pun’ for those in the know, then having paid for the domain for two years, putting some content here seemed like the thing to do. Nine years ago, blogging was all the rage, so let’s install some software and start writing. Well, I got the software installed, then kind of stalled at the second part. Most of what I’m interested in interests few other people, and what of that I do document goes on another site.

Perhaps I’ll make the tenth year of this site worth reading?

Stacking

I’ve been playing with some time-lapse photography lately. There’s really two things you can do with time-lapse, make a video, or stack the images and get a single dynamic image.

I’ve done the latter of the two in this image. It’s around a thousand images taken at five-second intervals over the course of a few hours. The stacking software is StarStaX 0.6 in Lighten blending mode. The moon ends up horribly over-exposed because the camera’s exposure is automatically set for the dark skies and low light of the stars and aircraft.
A few hours of fireworks, aircraft, stars and the moon.

Prime Time (-ish)

Today at 2:03:05, the date and time, if you write it in a particular form, is a string of the first six prime numbers: 02:03:05:07:11:13

This only works if you use DD/MM/YY format for the date, and not the American MM/DD/YY, or the more sensible YYYY/MM/DD format.

So, just after lunch take a look at the clock and ponder this celestial / mathematics alignment.

Touching Mars

The Natural History Museum in London is one of my favourite places in the world, so it was wonderful to spend two days there last week at a conference on X-raying stuff.
On the last day there was a presentation by Dr Caroline Smith on Martian meteorites. She spoke on how X-ray imaging allowed the detection of voids and inclusions in the meteorites, possibly sampling ambient conditions on Mars at the time the meteor was ejected from the planet.
As part of her talk she handed around a small piece of a Martian meteorite.
I got to hold a piece of Mars!

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