Yeah, it's amazing how trees will step out in front of traffic. They ought to have to buy insurance like the rest of us road users

There was an X class flare in the early hours of the morning (Feb 15) - first since 2006 - from AR 11158 which is just about on the centre of the disk, so any ejecta should be headed our way. Pity any aurora will coincide with full moon but that's the way the cookie crumbles - the cloud gods probably won't help either.

Don't know (or care much) about convection but there seems to be strong wind around somewhere ... the surf is really up with very large, very long waves crashing onto the northern coastline

The swabbing procedure is not hard, maybe it's scary the first time or two but the results are worth the effort. Offset the cost of the swabs against the time wasted repairing dust spots ...

Lens changing. Do it in a clean environment if at all possible. Keeping the mouth of the camera pointed downwards seems to help.

OK, you may need to stop down to get depth of field, but small apertures risk deterioration of image quality due to diffraction effects ... f/8 is small enough for most lenses and with the better ones there's little if any benefit from stopping down below f/5.6. Use the biggest aperture you can get away with, the effects of small dust specks (a few are inevitable) will be far less noticeable & for most images you probably won't need to patch the image at all unless the sensor is really mucky. Also, when stopped well down, dust on the rear element of the lens can become an issue.

Yes. No problems, just use the right swabs, the right fluid (Eclipse) and follow the instructions. Might take a couple of goes to get it right.

OK, here's my definitive Full Moon mosaic - taken just a few hours after the instant of the full "Wolf Moon".


2011 Jan 20, 0105 - 0131 UT. William Optics FLT 110, 2x Powermate, W29 (deep red) filter, Imaging Source DMK41 camera. 20 frame mosaic, 23% resize - full size version here (3450 x 3450 pixel JPG, 892KB download size).

Apparent Diameter 33.26 arc min. Colongitude 95.6 degrees. Illumination 100.0%. Libration in latitude +03 deg 52 min. Libration in longitude -03 deg 41 min. Altitude 51.3 degrees.

Transparency moderate, seeing moderate. Temperature -02C, wind SE force 2-3, baro 1037 mb, rising very slowly.

Looks like a "classic" contrail smear to me ...

Shoot RAW and there is no quality loss in adjusting colour balance in software ... But white balances are dependent on the light source being an object shining by black body radiation, there's no way of cutting the red to reduce the orange cast given by sodium lighting without removing red from natural sources which you probably want to keep unless you use a "notch filter" of some sort.

Didymium glass works fairly well. Hutech IDAS light pollution suppression filters work even better but are much more expensive; SCS Astro quote £326 for 77mm (even the 1.25" eyepiece threaded version is £173).

The B+W #491 "Redhancer" is now a "special order" item which accounts for its high cost when ordered ... if it's any help, SpeedGraphic have 49mm & 55mm in stock at £26.50

Rip-off WHE, in this case.

You could try a "Redhancer" (B+W 491) which is didymium glass & does a pretty good job of notching out sodium emission.

The incident is well documented fact but this isn't a spoiler because I don't know how carefully the production sticks to the history.

Well Sunday was unusual with gradual cooling to below 0C under a solid grey sky. Yesterday evening (Mon 3rd) it just rained steadily with temp (+2C at 1800) gradually increasing - still raining this morning with temp +5C which is very close to normal for the time of year.

Hmmm. Bear in mind that if the water supply is interrupted it isn't safe to drink without boiling for 14 days so I really think we should be being supplied with bottled water for drinking for a couple of weeks.

My water came back on this afternoon. Of course it's discoloured & full of air bubbles but OK to get a much needed bath & wash some clothes.

The real issue here is the customer service response - it was this morning before I got someone who actually appeared to know more than was on the web site (incomplete and completely inaccurate) - from their response & subsequent developments I think they had actually turned off the whole supply for Portballintrae & forgotten about it ...

I hope not; haven't got the water supply back after the last lot yet.

The public services round here never cease to amaze me; no gritting anywhere locally for 10 days when there was snow & ice on the roads but now the temp isn't falling below +5C they're being gritted twice daily. Probably using up the grit they claimed to have spread when the weather was bad.

The issue here being that (a) you have to supply your own containers and (b) the nearest supply point is 20 miles away .... how on earth are you supposed to cope if you don't drive?

It's a fiasco, they need to provide standpipes and/or water tankers NOW.