Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

So a Dragon just launched, heading to the ISS. Luckily for us in the UK, we're in a period of bright ISS passes - and that means we were able to see Dragon and its Falcon second stage pass over the UK shortly after lift-off. Not only that but the solar panel shrouds had just been released as Dragon came over, so there not one, not two but four bright objects in a tight cluster.

Putney is not the best place in the world for astronomical photography, but I figured it was worth a try. So I went up on the roof with my DSLR and a 300mm lens manually focused on infinity. Sadly there was a lot of atmospheric lensing, it having been the hottest day of the year so far here in London - so I wasn't able to take any good photos. With a bit of Lightroom processing, here's my best shot:



The two fainter dots above and below the capsule and booster pair are the solar panel covers.

Low Earth Orbit and Putney, London
April 2015

I have a new phone, a shiny red Nokia Lumia 920.

Among its many nifty features is a fun little camera app, Cinemagraph. It takes a short image loop and lets you convert it into a simple animated GIF. Like this:



A quick way to share images of these animated Christmas lights in New York.

Fun!

How long is a photograph?

According to my back of the envelope calculations, each of these images is about 4.5 miles long. That's roughly how far the plane I was in travelled during each 30s exposure.

But why was I taking such long exposures ten miles above Canada, in the middle of the night?

The answer's quite obvious really: aurora.

I've seen aurora once or twice before, shimmering sheets of green fire in the sky. But this display was something else, bright and spectacular, huge curtains of light hanging from the heavens, glowing gases in a geomagnetic storm. It shimmered across the north, miles long, flickering from green to blue to red and back again, one moment huge whorls of cold fire, the next a long line of light as it rippled in the teeth of one of this solar maximums' most ferocious storms.

How to capture the splendour of the skies?

I've used long exposures for stars, with a manual infinite focs, to some success, so I decided to give the same technique a try. Using a few pillows I cobbled together some semblance of a tripod, stuck the camera into the window frame and clicked the shutter.

The results aren't perfect, after all, the plane was vibrating and moving, but they do capture something of being in the middle of the sky in the heart of a geomagnetic storm...









Beautiful.

But nothing like the real thing.

"I've got a ticket to the moon
I'll be leaving here any day soon
Yeah, I've got a ticket to the moon
But I'd rather see the sunrise in your eyes."

I've always thought sunrise would be a good time to see spaceships, the bright dawn light as the rocket rises up through an empty sky. But now it's a thought that's tinged with melancholy, as I'll remember a foggy morning on a pier in San Francisco, as I waited with a crowd of people to see the final flight of a space shuttle.

With the ending of the space shuttle programme the various orbiters were distributed to museums across the US. The last to be moved was OV-105 Endeavour, on a cross country trip from Florida to Los Angeles, ending with a flypast of space industry sites across California (with a detour to San Francisco). As it was the final day of the conference I was attending, I decided to skip the first few morning sessions and head down to the Embarcadero to watch for the shuttle on its carrier 747.

The dawn mists were slowly clearing off the Bay as I walked down a pier next to the Bay Bridge. There were just a handful of us there, so I was able to grab what I though would be a good spot.

Like much of the space programme, the shuttle was late. The pier slowly filled up, and as we waited we watched pelicans float past, sea lions cavort in the waces, and a parade of various ships pass under the bridge.

Then someone saw it, in the East Bay haze, slowly heading over Oakland and the giant cranes of the harbour. The carrier headed north, over the port cities and round to the Golden Gate for a photo opportunity. The distant aircraft was hard to see, but we expected it to return...



So we waited.

Then it was there, coming in from the south of the City by the Bay, curving round over the Bay Bridge and up back to the Golden Gate, before heading to the NASA sites down by the South Bay. Bright white in the morning sun, Endeavour and her carrier 747 were followed by a jet fighter as it slowly lumbered around the bay, low and slow - just the right speed for the city's massed array of cameras...

Here are some of the pictures I took of that final pass over the Bay.









And it was gone.

The last flight.

A couple of hours later it was on the ground in Los Angeles, ready for a final road journey to a museum, never to be in the air again.

Time for a new space age.

[More pictures, including the two launches I saw, in my Space Shuttle set on Flickr]

Putting aside the distasteful origins of the Olympic torch relay for a moment, today's voyage of the flame down the Thames was, at the very least, a good opportunity for a look at the new Royal Barge Gloriana. So I picked up a camera and wandered down the road to the footpath by the new flats near the mouth of the Wandle to take a few snaps.

The Olympic flotilla was small enough that it was easy to see the barge as it came down the Putney reach of the river, past Hurlingham, and as it turned up to pass under Wandsworth Bridge. The large cauldron at the bows of the barge had been extinguished, and the torch was being held by a young woman, as it rowed down-river with the tide, all gold and yellow, flags fluttering in the summer breeze.









So nice of them to name the barge after one of my favourite Michael Moorcock novels.

Putney, London
July 2012

Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time, with a camera pointing the right way.

Standing on the cliffs of Palos Verdes, I watched a red-tailed hawk speeding to and from its nest, hunting for lizards and the like to feed its chicks. It moved fast, a swept wing bullet in the sky. But I did manage to capture one shot, as I tracked the bird along the cliff face with a 300mm lens.

If I'd been prey it would have been the last thing I saw...


The Rabbit's Eye View
Palos Verdes, California
May 2012

If you're going to watch an eclipse, and you can't get to the point of totality, then there's not many places better than Maker Faire. With so many geeks to hand you know there's going to be lots of different ways to see the return of Fenrir...

And so we saw the 2012 annular eclipse (or around 89.5% of it) through dark film eclipse viewers, through hacked pinhole cameras (ours was aptly made from a Geek Dad postcard flyer), through mylar film, through a solar telescope (complete with sunspots!), and of course, cast in shadows from hands, hats, and trees.


Through dark film


In the shadow of marypcb's hand


Through a pinhole in a business card


In the shadow of a tree


Through mylar film

All in all, an awesome eclipse. And made the more so by sharing it with thousands of people enjoying it as much as we were.

One of the best reasons for having a nice long zoom lens is a garden full of hummingbirds.

And while being Londoners we may not have such a garden, our Silicon Valley friends do. So I spent much of a lazy weekend in the sun photographing little green darts as they flashed around the garden, on their endless quest for sugar. They're fearless beasts, and you can see how the Aztecs believed them the souls of dead warriors, as they engage in wars for flower patches.

There's something ethereal about a hummingbird frozen in time and in space, its wings a blur of pixels, its iridescent fathers locked in one eternal configuration. They're creatures of motion, as they dart from blossom to blossom.

These then are some of the Anna's Hummingbirds that have claimed one small garden as their territory. I can hear them now, in the trees by the creek, angrily disputing their boundaries.











Click through for larger versions on Flickr, along with plenty more images!

San Jose, California
May 2012

Last night we sat in our friends' garden in Silicon Valley, watching the moon rise over the trees that line the little creek that runs behind their house. It was the 2012 supermoon, the closest full moon of the year where the moon is 14% bigger than normal...

I had my long lens with me, and remembering that I was photographing reflected sunlight dialed up my exposure to 1/2500^th of a second. With a little judicious cropping here are a couple of shots taken as the moon floated through a gap on the acacias...





San Jose, California
May 2012

Spring is here, and that means many more mainline steam excursions powering down the line from Victoria to all points west. Today was a special treat, as the recently re-certified for mainline running BR Standard Class 7 No 70000 Britannia was hauling The Cathedrals Express to Bath.

The weather was good too, with the April showers holding off for a while. The book is in, I'd just finished a big feature, and I had a little time spare - so I grabbed my camera and walked down to the footbridge at the end of the street. I wasn't the only one there - a young family had come along to see the steam trains too, wanting to see Thomas go past. Britannia's a bit bigger than Thomas The Tank Engine, but it was good to see children wanting to see history go past in a cloud of steam and smoke.

With a whistle from Wandsworth, and a cloud of steam over the Wandle bridges, Britannia came round the curve into the Putney cutting...







Another whistle blast as the special rushed through Putney station and then silence. Just the gentle rumble of a 747 heading into Heathrow, and the rattle of a Wimbledon-bound tube.

Putney, London
April 2012