chromosphere

I thought I should invent a name for my brewing exploits. I struggled for a bit to think of a name and eventually came up with (drum-roll…):

“The Beorhthelm Brewery”

It’s a strange name, but where we live (Brighthampton) may have its roots from the Anglo Saxon name “Beorhthelm” (or “Beorthelm” or “Brithelm”) and the word “tun” meaning settlement. Over the ages, this has contracted (probably) from “Beorthelm’s-tun” to “Brighthampton”. There have been several Anglo-Saxon discoveries in the area which are kept at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

All I need to do now is come up with a nice design for a brewery logo…

New category of posting here - and the category is “homebrew”!

I’ve made beer before a few times from kits, but wanted to get properly into making my own beer from scratch using malt and hops. It’s actually not as hard as you would maybe think (at least in theory) - the basic process is as follows:

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The lunar eclipse of the 3rd March 2007 brought clear skies and good conditions across much of the UK, with only some thin high cloud arriving in Oxfordshire towards the end of the eclipse. Maximum eclipse occured at 23:20:56 - ideally timed for the UK.

More recently, on the 21st February, 2008, another lunar eclipse was visible from the UK and Europe early in the morning. However, the weather for this event was not as favourable with cloudy conditions across much of the UK (despite having a long period of clear weather in the preceding week!).

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If you are a BT or Yahoo email user, then you may notice occasionally that your email takes an age to arrive. Sometimes you may even discover that an email someone sent you you has never arrived. If you experience this, here’s a bit of an explanation as to why this may be happening…

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Continuing in the migration of my old site, here’s a post with a round up of my best h-alpha solar images. For a while, I owned a Coronado Solarmax 60 with BF15 blocking filter which I used to use on my Takahashi FC60NZ - I traded this more recently for the FLT110 - I found that I really wasn’t getting to use the h-alpha equipment for most of the year (work gets in the way when the sun is up!).

The h-alpha filter works by using an etalon to restrict the wavelengths of light as viewed through the telescope down to only a small region of the spectrum around 656.3nm (typically with a bandwidth of <0.7Å), which is a principal emission wavelength of excited hydrogen atoms (for the transition n=3 to n=2 in the Balmer series). This allows features such as prominences, flares, filaments and active regions to be observed, whereas in white light these are often not as noticable or are invisible.
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So the weekend just gone has had fabulous weather here in the UK - sunny, warm (for February!) days, and cold clear nights - and so I thought I’d try to setup my imaging kit to have a go at some astronomy for the first time since April 2007, and also as a bit of a dry run before the Kelling Heath star party in April. I even managed an image of the moon - 30 images using the ST2000XM on the FLT110, processed in Registax - click the image above to view it!

Of course, nothing goes smoothly:
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