The Bike

After much umming and arring over make, model and framesize I eventually plumped for a Ridgeback Panorama. Should I play safe and get a Claud Butler or a Dawes, or play the wildcard? This guys blog convinced me the Ridgeback could do it and would be the bike for me. NickTheTrick cycled from Scotland, across the low countries to Denmark and up through Norway on one! It’s early days for my Ridgeback but so far so good as you will see in the training entries to come.

Patrick Taylor has written a nice review of the bike.

Land’s End to John O’ Groats

You may have spied a new category on the left. LEJOG, the classic British cycling tour from the bottom left of Great Britain to the top right. And I’m doing it (hopefully) next spring/summer. Over 1000 miles of cycling in around 18 days. I’ve got the touring bike and I’m now officially in training. Follow my training progress here and when the time comes I will hopefully be able to do daily blogs of progress.

Chrome

Colour me impressed. I’ve not used Internet Explorer for a long time (other than for testing purposes) and been a Firefox user since it was called Firebird. I found it quicker, cleaner and of course it had tabbed browsing long before IE copied it. However I’ve been a bit mixed over FF3, it’s slower and even more of a memory hog than FF2 was in my opinion and I’ve had a few crashes. Not enough to make me even contemplate using the awful IE7 though.

Now today Google released Chrome and it seems bloody marvellous so far. Boy is it quick as well, makes IE7 and FF3 seem very slow in comparison. It’s worked with every site I’ve tried and I do like the form highlighting. I’m using it right now as a matter of fact! I’ll use it for a few days and see how it goes. One thing I have noticed is it doesn’t seem to work very well with cookies but maybe I need to explore some options.

H-alpha

My latest astroimaging acquisition is a Hydrogen alpha filter. This filter has a very narrow bandpass and only allows light within 13nm of a wavelength of 656nm to pass through it (normal human vision at night is between 400 and 600nm). Some types of nebulae (emission nebulae, planetary nebulae and supernovae remnants) glow particularly strongly at a wavelength of 656nm due to the excitation state of the hydrogen gas in the nebula.

The advantage of using the filter is that it cuts out all light pollution and all ‘visible’ light and only allows the nebula and stars to show. The CCD chips in the cameras are sensitive to this light so you can achieve very high contrast images of nebula, impossible to achieve with filters that allow visible light through. The images are inky black where there is no nebula so even the faintest wisps can show.

Over the coming weeks and months expect to see images taken using this filter appear in the astroimages gallery.

LRGB

I’ve invested in some colour filters and a filter wheel for my astroimaging setup so I’m going to be posting some colour astroimages up over the coming months, I’ve already posted my first LRGB image of M27 into the gallery.

I thought I’d take a few words to explain how this works. The CCD camera I have is monochrome, these are generally better then singleshot colour cameras as they have a higher resolution and there are no filters in front of the chip. So to get monochrome images it’s just a case of capturing multiple exposures and stacking them in software to increase the signal to noise ratio. To get colour you need to take monochrome images through red, green and blue filters. The filters are very precisely made so they only pass through the correct wavelengths, they also block any infrared light which the cameras are sensitive to and can cause problems. They are also manufactured to ensure that they focus the light from the telescope to the same place, so you don’t have to refocus when you change filters.

The filters are held in a filterwheel, this is a mechanical device driven by batteries that rotates the filters into the lightpath at the push of a button. So there’s no requirement to dismantle the setup to put in the next filter.

So what is LRGB? An LRGB image is made up of Luminance data (monochrome), Red, Green and Blue data. What you do is capture a lot of high quality monochrome data. This provides all of the detail in the final image. You then capture some data through each of the coloured filters, this data can be with much shorter exposures and far lower quality. This colour data can then even be binned, i.e. each square of 4 pixels is summed together to make 1 pixel.  You can also blur it with a Gaussian blur filter to reduce colour noise in the final image. Software is used to combine the three images taken through the coloured filters into what looks like a blurred, low resolution colour image of the object.

Now comes the clever bit, the human eye is really good at picking out detail in monochrome images, it’s rubbish with colour. So what you do is layer the colour behind the monochrome (luminance) data. Lo and behold you have a high resolution colour image!

Trophy #2

I know you’ve been waiting for it eagerly since I posted Trophy #1 and here it is.

This one was awarded for being runners up in the Pembroke Cup competition in the Newbury league. Don’t worry, there isn’t going to be a Trophy #3 entry.






Trophy #1

This is the first table tennis trophy awarded to me for the past season. Best player in Division 3.

Best player means the player with most wins and not necessarily the ‘best’. There were at least three players in the Division were better than me but didn’t win as many matches. This has been the traditional method of working out who wins the best player award for many years.

I am the music man and I can play!

Rock Band, just how good is this?

I’ve played all the Guitar Hero games from the very beginning so I’m pretty good at plastic guitar now (still get whooped by my nephew though, boo) and played through Hard difficulty without any problems. Nearly finished Expert level as well now.

The game also comes with plastic drums (oh yes) and I’ve never played drums before, I found it pretty tough going to start with on Easy level! But now I can smack out a beat on Medium pretty good, dead chuffed that I can do it although alternate right hand and right foot beats still confuse my brain! So you can see what the drums are like check out this YouTube video of someone playing Expert level, that’ll be me soon!

I’ll not mention vocals, except I can’t sing!

Season Summary

Now the table tennis season is over (I think) let me summarise how it’s gone this year…

Newbury League
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My 2nd season in the Newbury league and my first in Division 2 and as captain. I was planning on avoiding relegation but we got off to a storming start and we were 1st or 2nd for a good chunk of the season. We ended a bit poorly, losing several matches including a disappointing 10-0 defeat at AWE Aldermaston in a match I thought we had a good chance in. An 8-2 win in the final match means that we end up with a three-way tie on points for 2nd place. In the Newbury league this requires a playoff but I haven’t heard if we need to play this yet. In the cup competition we had a terrific run and ended up in the final of the Pembroke Cup against very tricky opponents. We lost (no surprises really) but a runners up trophy in our first season was a good result. I was aiming for a 33% average for the season and won 19 of 44 matches (43.2%) so very pleased with that.

Didcot League
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Our final league match was last night and we needed an 8-2 win to pip our opponents to runners up spot. It was highly unlikely as they are very strong but we managed to win 6-4 and that was our 16th tie unbeaten for the season. We finish 3rd in Division 3 and it was the first two matches of the season which proved to be costly when we could only put out weak teams. I won 50 of 60 matches (83.3%) which is my best performance for several seasons, playing tougher opposition in Division 2 in Newbury has forced me to be more attacking and seems to have improved my game a bit. This was enough to win the “Best Player” trophy for Division 3 which is awarded to the player with the most wins in the season. I entered the Divisional Championships this season, I usually don’t as I’m not keen on individual competitions, I lost all 4 of my matches in 5 games. In the cup competitions, we lost in the semis in the club competition and we were knocked out in the group stage of the team competition.

Star Camp

Reading AS held their first ever Star Camp last weekend. We took the Eriba and joined some hardy souls on a hillside in Powys on a working farm. Some stayed in the B&B in the farmhouse and others chose nearby self catering accommodation. We were blessed with four clear nights although it was bitterly cold. I managed to get some imaging done on the final night and I will be posting the results in the Astroimages section. It was a really good social weekend and I’m hoping we can make it a regular thing within the society.