Scientific Artist

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. 

As well as capturing asteroid JO25 2014 on the single Sky 90/M26C – I also managed to grab 16 subs on the two 200mm lenses with the Trius M26Cs.

Sub number 12 (counting down from the top) is missing as I had cloud over the region during that 5-minutes.

As I couldn’t properly process this data myself, I sent it over to Noel Carboni in Florida USA who did the most superb job as you can see below.  Thank you Noel!!

I was blessed by (mostly) clear, Moonless skies at the New Forest Observatory on the night of 19/04/2014.

I set up a single Sky 90/M26C and both 200mm lenses/Trius M26Cs on the asteroid JO25 2014 which was moving through Canes Venatici at the time.

The negative black and white image below shows the asteroid in 5-minute exposures with 1-minute gaps between exposures.  The field of view in this image is 3.33 x 2.22 degrees, so you can see the asteroid is really moving through at quite a pace (because it is so close to us).

I was actually in two minds as to whether I could be bothered to go out and get set up that evening as I wasn’t sure whether I was going to get clouded out or not – you cannot imagine how pleased I was that I wasn’t lazy that evening!

As we are entering galaxy season, Leo is well-placed for imaging.  So I went for a deep shot of Regulus as I wanted to get the dwarf galaxy Leo I.  What I was not expecting to get was this object in the FOV – http://epod.usra.edu/blog/ 

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.

A 22-degree lunar halo from last night (09/03/2017) taken around 8:20 p.m.

The red flashing light is a military helicopter that photobombed the image.  What doesn’t show is the military helicopter it was tailing that had NO LIGHTS showing!!

Got today’s EPOD with the recent deep image of the Pleiades.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.