Scientific Artist

I have been recently beta-testing Noel Carboni’s new flattening tool for deep-sky images.

This plug-in makes flattening even the most difficult image data a doddle (even I can get good results).

If you carry out deep-sky image processing, then you must have this tool in your digital darkroom toolbox – it’s sharp!

http://www.prodigitalsoftware.com/AstroFlatPro1_News.html

See a You Tube video of last night’s 10 p.m. ISS pass here.

Mute the audio when playing.

The ISS will make an appearance about a minute in towards the centre/right.

The ISS exits top-left.

Canon 5D MkII and 100mm Canon macro for a deep inside the Poppy shot:

It’s been pouring with rain outside since first thing this morning, so a good time to dust off the microscope and do a bit of photomicroscopy.

Here is a 10-frame mosaic of a Thyroid Gland taken with the Canon 5D MkII.

OK – so things are now getting very interesting indeed here in the UK. Just a few weeks before a rather important General Election, Theresa May announces that she wants to bring back Fox hunting. No, this is not fake news, this is the real deal!! And here’s a prediction for you – she will drop a few more of these bombshells in the next few weeks. Why?
Well, I’ve had my suspicions about this election from day one. This business about a mandate just doesn’t hold water. She will still get untold flack from her opposition even if voted in, and if she does get voted in, it won’t give her any more leverage in the Brexit negotiations, she still has a very hard and very difficult job to do – a job that I think is well beyond her capabilities, as it was well beyond Cameron’s capabilities, which is why he quit (after clearly stating that he wouldn’t).
Theresa May was a staunch remainer and now, finding herself in the impossible position of heading the Brexit negotiations – she is doing a Cameron – she desperately wants to lose this next election. The trouble is, the so-called opposition is so flaky she might win even though she doesn’t want to. You just couldn’t make it up.

This country is currently in the shittiest state I have seen in 63 years on this planet – and it looks like it is going to get a helluva lot worse before it gets any better.

If you had clear skies last night you may have noticed that Jupiter was very close to a 12-day old Moon.

The main image is a fisheye lens view of the scene over the New Forest Observatories, and the inset top-left is a telescope view of the encounter.

So the Prime Number the MegaNode computing facility just found has now been confirmed – it is:

3438759891285*2^1290000-1

Which is 388,342 digits long and is in the top 5,000 largest primes.

I just ran the numbers through Mathematica to see what the whole thing looks like – it takes up many pages – and the last digit is a 9.

Yesterday – 2nd May 2017 – the DELL Quad Node number cruncher came up with a new Prime(s).  Don’t know how many digits or how many Primes yet until my “checker” reports in.  However a kind Admin ran the number through his machine and confirmed I had found my first new Prime Number.  MEGA!!

Is a stereo view of asteroid JO25 2014.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work and Dr. Brian May for creating the stereograph.