The last few days have had glorious weather and I have been swimming in (not very) cold water a few times. It’s just the thing to make you feel really full of life.
The sea, the sea …

It’s 50 years since a group of undergraduates from the Cambridge University Astronomical Society had a holiday surveying megalithic sites in Argyll to investigate possible astronomical alignments. It was a lot of fun, and we even wrote it up and the results were published in a paper in Nature 253, 431‑433 (1975) which was probably something of an achievement at the time, though I’m not sure that we realised how much!
We had a great time meeting up and revisiting old haunts in the area.
After a period of rather sporadic posts on here, I am finally (I think) in a fit state of mind to post a bit more stuff, and catch up with some of the things that might have been posted at the time. The last few years have been hard for many people, and though physically I have been fine, the effect of lockdowns and the abysmal behaviour of many governments in particular depressed me greatly. Let’s hope that people are never daft enough to let it happen again.
After several years of enforced absence we have returned to the mainland of Europe! I have now added some more photos here.
Continue readingI have always thought that the Ring Nebula looked very pretty. I had not realised just how easy it is to get a photo of it; this is just a 20 second unprocessed image using my 10cm f/5 aperture telescope, at ISO 400 on my Nikon D3100.
A processed photo is below …
Continue reading
After a long pause I have returned to testing the clock mechanism. I have made some repairs to the components that make the chime work at the right time and for the right number of bings of the bell. One lever had been repaired a long time ago, but the repair had failed. A spring was also rather bent and not acting well enough.
I suspect that the original repairs may have been made by my great grandfather who once owned the clock!
Initial tests show that it chimes correctly, but it needs to be run through quite a few cycles to have some confidence that the repair has worked.