view from a hotel window

I arrived in Dublin yesterday evening, ready for a two-day research project meeting.  The hotel room has an ... interesting ... layout.

Which way round are you supposed to sleep?

The bed takes up the entire end of the room.  The "wardrobe" is three coat hangers on the wall.  There is a perfectly normal en suite next to where I'm standing to take the photo.  The two wall switches by the bed raise and lower the blinds on the window.

I slept across the bed, so I didn't have to scramble across it (except to grab a pillow), and could have my phone (aka alarm clock) by my head.  It was perfectly comfortable.

What's outside the window?  In the morning light, I could see out (after scrambling across the bed again):

a view into an office block

Now off to hear about progress on our interdisciplinary computational synthetic biology project.

dis-mantle-ate!!

 One of the blue roundels came loose on our dalek, and we had to dismantle it to repair it.

not so tough now, are you?

Once all the spider webs had been cleaned out, the roundel could be reattached, and the dalek re-mantled.

electric car

We changed car in January, and now have an electric one.  The idea is to use our solar power during the day to charge it, and cheap rate electricity at night as needed.  We don't have our 7kW Zappi charger installed yet (watch this space!), so are charging off the mains more slowly, at just over 2kW.  Even so, we get about 20% added to the battery overnight (exact amount seems to depend a bit on temperature and starting charge in an as yet ill-understood way; I am gathering data), and about 10% on a sunny February day (we anticipate more during longer summer days).

Here's our electricity usage for the beginning of February (more details on my solar stats page).   The vertical axis runs from -8kW to 8kW. The region above the axis represents our usage: orange is generated usage, red is imported from the grid. The green region below the line is surplus generation exported to the grid.  The numbers are total kWh for each day.

On 1st Feb, a nice sunny day, we charged the car on solar power (the orange block around midday), adding a reported 9% to the battery, with an estimated range increase of 25mi, for "free" (as we broke even on the cost of the PV installation several years ago).

Then on 4th Feb we charged overnight (the red block, midnight to 7am), adding 18% charge, with an estimated range increase of 37mi, for  £1.42 on our low cost overnight tariff.  That's 3.8p/mi.

The fuel consumption stats are a bit more fiddly to calculate than with petrol, going from filled tank to filled tank, as not every charging session "fills" the battery.  And the cost of charging varies wildly, from free off PV, to low off overnight tariff (9p/kWh), to eye-watering in service stations (79p/kWh).  So, no "filling up" at service stations; rather, adding just enough to get home.

I do like the fact that during charging, you can measure how fast the estimated range is increasing, in units of miles per hour.

another telescope

Actually, as well as buying a dome at Astrofest 2024 for the telescope we bought in 2020, we also bought another (small) telescope, a SeeStar S50.

This one is entirely computer controlled, through an app, with no eyepiece.  Which means photographs are easier to get!  We'll try it out once we have a good clear night.

view from a hotel window

We went to AstroFest in London, four years after our previous visit (two events missed due to the pandemic, last year missed due to illness).

We stayed in the same hotel; just as noisy due to the trains:

We travelled down Thursday night, thus avoiding the train strike yesterday, and travelled home this evening.  The event was as great as ever, with lots of fascinating talks, including several about new large telescopes and their Petabytes of data, arriving soon.

At the 2020 AstroFest we bought a telescope.  We decided it needed a permanent setting, since it is a bit too big and heavy to be easily moved.  So this year, we bought a dome!  It will hopefully be installed around Easter.