first astronomy ventures

By Adam, June 17, 2009 12:35 am

Becky’s dad recently lent us his old telescope. This typically crappy British summer meant that we had to wait a few days for a clear night sky, but we amused ourselves passing the time by counting the number of people in each capsule on the London Eye and reading the time off Big Ben. One the first night a gap in the clouds appeared, I randomly picked the first bright star I could see, pointed the telescope at it, whacked on the most powerful lens, and saw something like this (if you are reading this on facebook or can’t see the following image, view the original post):

a first look through the telescope

“That’s weird, it’s got a strange line through it”, I said to Becky, and then 3 seconds later swore loudly as I realised what it actually was:

Saturn and Titan as shown by Stellarium

These nice images come from an amazing piece of software called Stellarium which is free and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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An overdue visit

By Adam, June 15, 2009 11:17 pm

Registered with the local dentist this morning. When filling in the registration form, there was a box labelled “Date of last visit”. I had to take a wild guess and wrote “1993 ?!” Based on that, you would expect my first check-up in at least 16 years to reveal some horrific stories of tooth decay, gum disease, rotting tongue etc. wouldn’t you?

But actually after my mouth got X-rayed, peered, poked and prodded at, my new dentist announced with some astonishment that indeed apparently all my teeth are basically fine. So I’m remaining a member of the elusive “zero fillings” club for now. Ah, the virtues of being raised with good dental hygiene habits by a health-conscious mum …

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