Managed to get a three-dimensional packing of the Sunflower seed-head pattern onto the surface of a sphere (with a lot of false starts) using Mathematica.  Not sure there’s any practical application of this but it was an interesting exercise 🙂

Managed to get today’s EPOD with the image you can see a bit further down the page of a Sunflower Seed-Head and the mathematically simulated seed-head.

Many thanks Jim for continuing to publish my work – both astronomical and like this one, non-astronomical 🙂

I have been going on about intersecting Fibonacci spirals and the like when discussing Sunflower seed-heads, but I haven’t shown a mathematical graph showing just how close the Sunflower seed-head pattern is to a pure maths function.  On the left of this image we have the same (real) Sunflower seed-head image as shown in the article below.  On the right is a mathematically generated graph of points created using the Mathcad 2000 software.  Each X-Y co-ordinate of the points is directly related to the Golden Ratio (phi).  Phi also happens to be the most irrational, irrational number there is.  So it might not be too suprising to find out that the Sunflower seed-head pattern has an infinite rotational symmetry.  An infinite rotational symmetry has applications in optical devices called photonic quasicrystals and so the Sunflower seed-head pattern became the basis of my Patent for an entirely new class of photonic crystal with extremely interesting optical properties.  Lots of mathematics and heavy science – all from a Sunflower seed-head 🙂

Lots of cloud and a bright Moon blazing away last night, so although conditions were no good for deep-sky imaging, there were a few stars to be seen, so time for a different sort of night time photography.  I got out the AstroTrac so that I could take exposures of a few seconds without star trailing, and loaded up the Canon 5D MkII with the Canon fisheye lens.  Using ISO 3200 f#4 and a 3-second exposure time I took the above images which shows (just) the summer triangle directly overhead.  This was actually an experiment to see if it is worth trying to video the space station passing over, again using the Canon 5D MkII and the fisheye lens – but no AstroTrac.  There are two passes tonight (17th August 2011) and if I can see any clear sky at all I will give it a try.

The mini-WASP array was connected up to the two computers for a dry run before transporting everything down to the new observatory.  Cameras, filter wheels, autoguider and Paramount all fired up and ran as expected.  I am hoping for great new deep-sky images to come out of this revolutionary imaging system.  To read more about the mini-WASP array and its development please go to the New Forest Observatory web site.

A slightly better 10-frame panoramic view of the cloud-level lying below the 2390m elevation of the Teide Observatories site from which this image was captured.  Canon 5D MkII camera with a 50mm prime lens and the panorama was stitched using PTGui and processed in Photoshop CS3.

View looking down from 2390m at the Teide Observatories site Tenerife, as you can see, we are well above cloud level 🙂