Recent content by Jonathan Scott

A snag with Exbury Gardens is that it is popular in good weather so there are many people there, but I don't like to include random strangers in my photos of nature. I sometimes don't have the patience to wait until there are no people in the picture, or I fail to spot them until afterwards...

Isn't that simply because it's oil for using on teak, not oil from teak?

Back at Exbury Gardens, UK, today. Fewer rhododendrons this time, as most have now finished flowering, but still a beautiful place. And an unexpected beetle - I think it's a rose chafer: All taken with my Panasonic Lumix DC-TZ200 as usual.

I don't know what was intended, but in 1974 I was trying out things in IBM mainframe assembly language and didn't like having to wait for compile job turnaround so I started an interactive debug session on an existing dummy program and poked machine code into storage in hex to test it, saving a...

In my first job with IBM, as a vacation student in 1973, I had some free time and I worked out how to use overpunching on the IBM 029 card punch to create patterns, which could then be duplicated by copying the card. An unofficial version of the IBM logo one was popular (I still have a copy)...

More rhododendrons today, this time at Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, near Romsey, Hampshire, UK. (All taken with my Panasonic Lumix TZ200 "Travel Zoom" camera).

My Panasonic Lumix TZ200 ("travel zoom" camera, compact with up to 15x optical zoom) is very convenient to carry around and has a viewfinder which is very useful on sunny days. I spotted a butterfly which was too far away for me to identify immediately but this photo clearly identifies it as a...

We visited Exbury Gardens (in Hampshire, UK) a couple of days ago. It's an amazing sight all year round, but in rhododendron and azalea season it's quite overwhelming!

For a different strength of gravity, atmospheric pressure and hence density would be expected to be different too (unless in a closed container), giving an additional small buoyancy correction that would actually vary with gravity.

I'm wondering whether the second stage subsequently managed the third (disposal) burn. If it did, then in hindsight it might have been better to have deferred payload separation to have a second attempt at the second burn (needing either very intelligent automation or very flexible control). If...

True of course, and presumably relevant in this case, but to avoid confusion this needs to be accompanied by the important point that if the angular size of an individual object (such as a star) is smaller than the sensor or eye resolution then the apparent brightness is decreased accordingly...

Thanks - I knew that the colours were completely artificial and Hubble photos include wavelengths outside the visible spectrum but I had assumed that some similar shape would be visible. (One can for example see the Andromeda galaxy unaided on a dark clear night, which is a lot further away). I...

That's getting a bit off topic, but from some quick Googling, that image is probably of the order of 5 light years high, and the version of the image you've chosen is about 620 pixels high. The angular resolution of the human eye is about 0.0003 radians, so if you for example wanted that to...

The human eye adapts well to darkness, although it doesn't see colour well at low light intensity. The earth was lit by full moonlight. If I just save the darker image and "auto-adjust" colour I get quite a similar result, although the available copy of the darker image is lower resolution, so...

No it isn't. That looks like a launch from complex 40 (Falcon 9) not 39B, but in any case that picture is quoted in a post by Chris Hadfield from 2024.