All your science in here

The urban light pollution on Fetlar is supposed to be an absolute nightmare :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve edited it for clarity. I just didn’t want to sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg. But no matter :wink:.

VB

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Your desire and effort to not sound like that wankstain of an excuse for a human being are to be lauded.

To the South-East we have an unrestricted view out to sea. However, the sun will not set until 21:52 so I’m not expecting to see much. Urban light pollution is practically non existent, as long as we switch our lights off :grin:

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Funzie will need to go dark for the event. Apparently its red light district is visible from Neptune.

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Sorry (again) - all my timings were for London. Pretty much by definition, when there’s a total eclipse the sun and the moon are exactly opposite one another relative to the earth. So moonrise will happen at essentially the same time as sunset. The (BST) timings of the eclipse’s start and finish don’t depend on where you are though. So you’ll be further through the eclipse at the point when you can start seeing it.

VB

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There is no cause, we just happen to be at the place where it’s sunset during the eclipse. Luckier people to our east will be in full night, and get a better view than us.

Oops. I fell into the you/one hole again. This time when I said ‘you’ I really was talking to Paul. So there is a cause, which is that Paul has decided to be on Fetlar.

VB

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It’s now 22:05 and the moon is dead centre of our living room window, which faces due south. It’s still virtually daylight outside, so Friday may not be up to much.

Definitely a wood pecker (Lopwell 10 mins ago)

image

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I think there’s quite a difference between a woodpecker and a wood pecker.

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My friend sent me this pic of Saturn. Held his phone camera to the eyepiece of his telescope.

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This could get interesting

Interesting indeed. Of course, this is how science works. If you publish a paper with an extraordinary claim in it then, assuming you start out with any credibility at all, the rest of the community will be all over it like a rash. If they can neither reproduce your results nor come up with any plausible explanation of them then scepticism will very quickly develop. You’d better expect intense scrutiny. The claims may sooner or later collapse (e.g. cold fusion, the ArCl laser, N rays, canals on Mars …). Or you may be able to support them, despite keeping the details secret for commercial reasons, by actually being able to wave the working object around where everyone can see it (e.g. Nakamura’s blue LED). So far I’d put my money on these claims not turning out to be worth very much. But time will tell.

VB

Been reading up on this
https://www.oxfordpv.com/news/oxford-pv-sets-world-record-perovskite-solar-cell
as a background for pondering a solar PV installation at home. As I understand it, silicon panels and inverters are now mature technology with only minor improvements possible and this is still quite a way from being able to survive on a roof for any length of time.

Silicon PV certainly ought to be mature by now. When I was involved with it (~20 years ago) it was already becoming quite a big industry and it’s grown phenomenally since then. I really wish I’d jumped on the bandwagon early, when the feed-in tariff was at its peak. We have a large plane 45 degree roof facing due south with relatively few obstructions to the sunshine. It’s a near-perfect site for PV.

As far as new technologies go I suspect that they’ll either have to be considerably more efficient than silicon or considerably cheaper to manufacture before they’ll displace it on the large scale. I’m no expert when it comes to the economics though, so that’s just my guess.

VB

This is from 106 years ago yesterday.

image

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Yup. Worries about CO2 and warming have been around for a very long time https://history.aip.org/climate/summary.htm. The problem has been that the atmosphere and its interactions are just very, very complex. So sorting it out has taken more than 100 years and enough honest mistakes were made along the way that mistrust of all predictions managed to get a foothold. For a time scepticism was an honest position to take too. Now it really isn’t, but it’s hard for non-experts to convince themselves of that, particularly if doing something about the problem is going to cost them money or restrict their lifestyle.

VB

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We’re a lot simpler than a loaf

Meh! Genetically modified food is modified.