Reach for the Moon

And to dispel any ideas I had completely gone....



I caught this quite by accident when walking from the KFC to my Liverpool place. My NEW Liverpool place, courtesy of my stalker, DPH.

It was about 5 pm , GMT, on the last visit but one, about 100 yards from my front door.

I don't JUST take portraits!

See you in the Partial Differentials!

Genius

WARNING SUBJECTIVE POST!!

This man is an absolute genius.

The album (Tubular Bells II) was recorded with just him playing ALL instruments, rerecording it time and again, in his own studio.

Take a look at how many musicians (keyboards, etc) are needed to perform the same thing LIVE.

John Gordon Sinclair joins Viv Stanshall (RIP) and Alan Rickman (Hans from Die Hard)in the announcement of the instruments. The post person spelled "Edinburgh" wrong

Note the change in guitar at the end. Wonderful! Note also the way he plays the guitar. Side swiping the strings, not up and down (Space Invaders???) and unique.

One is all You Need

This image shows just what anyone can do with a camera if they know how.....




Location, back of the Manhattan Inn, Tacloban City, Philippines, in the laundry room, overlooking the market and the decrepit wharf.

Only in this case, it looked beautiful. This was taken at dusk, at about 6 pm.

I noticed the water vapour from the rainforest forming clouds in the mountains. The shack on the left was perfect, as was the tree on the mountain to the right. So I used natural light, no filters, and waited for the fisherman in the foreground, who started off at extreme left.

17 minutes later, he was where I wanted him, and his presence made the perfect counterpoint to the perspective, as I applied the 2/3 rule to the water/mountains. The film was normal ASA 100 and i steadied the camera on the rail because the shutter speed was less than 1/60. Lens was a normal 50mm, on an aperture of f1.8, so as to get everything in focus.

The result was, as can be seen, quite stunning.

I only took the one. Sometimes you only need the one.


However....this is what the left hand side looks like in the daylight...








To myself...it is just as beautiful.


Smelly, squalid, wretched, decrepit, rancid, and quite simply POOR.


However, I love it anyway.

Oh Frabjous Day!

As Cassini wends its way in and around the Saturnian system, scientists around the world have gazed in awe at the images sent back.

This is Dione, one of the more well-known satellites of Saturn. The probe's closest approach was 500km, at 1820 GMT on October 11th. This was taken from about a million km away. We have an artist working on a better painting, but we don't hold out much hope.

Our previous photographs of this distant moon were blurry at best, but the quality of these is as if we are actually there.

It takes over four hours for these images to reach Earth.

Although I am a nuclear scientist, my research leads me to digressions in other fields, one of them astronomy.

As we usher in the year 2006, one has to wonder what prospects science will offer us, given that we have come this far.