New paintings and regular art updates.
Picture from the studio at spode last year. I thought it would be fun to paint a nebula onto a star shaped canvas I found. I’ve never seen another one. I also painted the Earth on a hexagonal canvas, but again I’ve not been able to find more. The shops seem to have less options to what they had even a year ago. I would really like to get hold of a circular canvas.
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Just saw something flying over the house in the night sky. Four really strange star shaped objects, glowing, shedding sparkling light as they drifted across the sky. Glittering and shimmering. Beautiful and obtuse. No signals from them, neither radio nor radiation. They are still visible on the Eastern horizon. I decided to follow them in my car. I realised how hard it is to drive and watch the sky though! Several near misses later and I was driving along a dark road into the countryside. The star shards were lower in the sky, loosing altitude..
How much further? Holographic shimmers, suddenly stopping abruptly in a dark field?
I climbed over the style, up the hill towards a high hedge, eyes accustomed to the dark, I saw….
Not UFOs but four holographic star shaped balloons, tied with ribbon, stuck in a tree!
Now to try and find my way home……
How big is Earth’s diameter? Just under 8,000 miles. How big is its circumference? Just under 25,000 miles. That’s not very big really. There are statistics saying how many Earth’s fit into Jupiter, the biggest planet in the Solar System, or even how many Earth’s would fit into the size of the Sun.
What I’m trying to say is, this is the third planet from the Sun, in the habitable region of the system (not too hot or too cold) and we need to look after it. We are using up its resources at an alarming rate, polluting our home world with plastics and toxic waste, killing off the insects including bees with insecticides and heating it up till the North and South polar icecaps are severely effected and melting rapidly. Why are we doing this? Are we, like Covid19, like a virus, impacting on our host, the Earth.
Discuss…….
From Spaceweather.com
PERSEID METEOR ALERT: Earth is entering a stream of debris from giant comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Although the display is not expected to peak until August 11-13, sky watchers are already seeing some of the most beautiful fireballs of the year. Plan your Perseid watch with sky maps and observing tips on today’s edition of of Spaceweather.com.
I hope we have clear skies in the UK.
I went out for a walk today up our steep hill and then called into the local pub to see our friends in the Boatband who were playing outside in the beer garden. We stayed to listen to the music, it was the first time we had been there since March. Everything was socially distanced with a one way system in the pub so you could use the facilities. The music was cajun. You can find them on YouTube. We had an excellent socially distanced afternoon although I drank far to much gin and tonic! (it’s taken me three goes to type something coherent here).
Yet again my photo content is too high. It’s around 79% and I’m going to have to delete photos off my older posts to make room for new ones.
I like illustrating my posts with my own images and not using many of anyone else’s pictures. But that means I fill up my pages with my work and lose memory. That means I can’t post photos until I remove around 100 images. I did upgrade my plan to give me more space, but I can’t afford to keep doing that. I think once you’ve got the blogging bug it’s hard to break free from it.
See you later.
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Two images taken with the phone on my camera tonight. I took both on the manual setting on the camera as the auto choice was over exposing it. I altered the exposure so that the sky appears darker and the moon is more defined. I didn’t know how to do it. I just clicked on the tools and messed about with it. (This was the last time I took a photo of the moon and I haven’t altered the settings since).
I also had to zoom in x 5 to get a big enough image to see the moon. Then I cropped it to enlarge it. In all of that I was expecting some camera shake but its not too bad. I leant my elbow on a large glass jar on the kitchen cupboard to try and make my image steadier and I also held my breath.
High up in the atmosphere, close to space, Noctilucent clouds start to appear in the summer months. They glow an almost electric blue and are caused by sunlight reflecting off gas particles from meteors that have broken and burned up as they strike the earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. Over the last few years these clouds have become more common and scientists are investigating why.
I see information about these and other atmospheric and astronomical phenomena at Spaceweather.com a fascinating Web page.
A couple of years ago we saw a Dalek on a station (I think it was Froghall) in the Staffordshire moorlands. Memory fades, but I know I had a short video of it perambulating backwards and forwards along the platform. I remember looking for who was running it. The original ones on TV in the sci-fi series Doctor Who, were moved by people inside the Daleks, pedalling them along.
This one was being moved by a remote control I think. I saw a man with a radio controller in his hand. Later we went to look at a model Tardis in the station itself. Tardis stands for Time and relative dimensions in space. Anyone who is a Doctor Who fan would know that.
It’s not often that you bump into an iconic 1960’s TV character in real life.
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In the sky I see stars, not many, the major constellations, ursa major, ursa minor, casseopea. Its hard to make out because the clouds are flitting by. And despite lockdown, the street lights still deaden them.
I’ve only ever felt the greatness and infinity of space when we were out in the countryside. Seeing the milky way galaxy made me feel so tiny. Like I could fall off the surface of the earth, into a whirlpool of stars. Seeing that band of stardust overhead can be overwhelming.
Dark skies, where the town and city light does not reflect back. Where you can lie down on the ground and see shooting stars flying overhead. I may have seen satellites or the ISS but I wouldn’t be sure. We have seen comets…
The sky is there to observe. Look if you can, and learn.
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Mallaband-Brown