sequestering carbon, several books at a time CL

The latest batch:

 

The company who I have been with for over 40 years for insuring house contents is no longer insuring house contents.  So we are looking for a new insurer.  

We have a lot of books (no!)  This causes issues: everyone who is quoting wants to insure them as "antiques", in danger of being stolen.  No, there are a lot of individually not very valuable books (some are indeed old, but not that old, and not rare).  No-one is going to steal these: it would take forever, and they have very little resale value.  We can't be the only ones in this situation, surely?

breaking the trend

We had a lovely start to March: nine sunny days before the weather turned.  

April has been even more amazing.  Fourteen sunny days:

before the weather turned today:

Well, we needed the rain!

moonlighting

While I was up in Scotland enjoying the spring sunshine, my other half was enjoying the clear night, using the 8" telescope and a Raspberry-Pi camera to photograph the nearly-full moon.

Definitely better pictures than using my phone camera.

views from two hotel windows

I travelled up to Glasgow yesterday, via Edinburgh, for a project team meeting the day before a workshop we ran today, in Edinburgh.  So yesterday evening I travelled back from Glasgow to Edinburgh, to overnight here before the workshop.

A nice sunny morning in Edinburgh. 
Some reflection of the double glazing, which was a foot deep and not openable.

We held the workshop -- about 20 people discussing quantum optics and photonic computing -- and then the team travelled back to Glasgow, ready for a project debrief tomorrow (to be followed by me travelling home in the afternoon, via Edinburgh).

A nice sunny evening in Glasgow.

I could care more

I was reading an article the other day that branched off into a discussion about the expressions I couldn't care less (obviously correct) and I could care less (obviously bizarre).  A comment pointed me to the Merriam-Webster discussion.  This is all quite fair-minded, but I definitely rofl'd at the last sentence:

if you can’t get past some people continuing to use could care less, and the fact that there’s nothing you can do about it, you may console yourself with the notion that at least they are not saying “I could care fewer.”

 

asymmetry

I bought some new walking boots today, having worn my previous ones down, had them resoled, and then worn them down again.

The guy in the shop measured my feet on a nifty computerised device.  He wasn't surprised that my left foot is 1mm longer than my right foot.  But he seemed completely gobsmacked that my right foot is 4.5mm wider than my left foot.

not to scale

Eight ways to observe the eclipse

We watched the partial solar eclipse quite closely this morning, with eight different instruments.

Going counterclockwise, we have:

1. A pair of solar viewing glasses from the 1999 total eclipse.
2. The SeeStar telescope with a solar filter.
3. The new solar binoculars.
4. The digital SLR with zoom lens, and, of course, solar filter.
5. The cardboard solar projector telescope, bought for the 1999 eclipse
6. The 5" Meade telescope with, you guessed it, a solar filter.

We used all the instruments, but the 5" gave the best view, and the SeeStar got the best pictures, overall.

Just starting: see the big sunspot near the limb. 
There are some smaller, fainter spots towards the top-middle of the disc.

Near maximum, and the smaller sunspots are close to the edge of the moon.

Nearly over

I snapped the sky with my phone to show that it was getting somewhat cloudy. 

The sun is completely overexposed, of course.  But wait. What's that spot on the dome?  (In case you are wondering, we couldn't use the 8" telescope in the dome for this event, as we don't have a solar filter for it.)

Look at that reflection!

So that's the seventh way we could see the eclipse (although we didn't notice it at the time, only when looking at this photo).  

What about the eighth?  Well, that's the same as the way we "observed" a partial eclipse 10 years ago, with our solar PV:

The big dip: that's no cloud, that's the (partial) eclipse)

The device to attach a phone camera to the 5" telescope arrived in the post later in the afternoon.  Oh well.  In any case, a well observed eclipse.