Cyril

Motorhomes under the stars!! They are everywhere.

I live in Scotland where setting fire to the hillsides was once like some sort of ritual to appease their gods, the land owners. But in recent years, even before Covid, it has be actively discouraged, we no longer lose our hills a grey smoke induced smog while our village doesn,t have it's cap of foul smelling open cast coal smog every cold night. Perhaps the way to go is to talk to local environment agencies about air quality. Cyril

If there is free money going those living on these islands will be first in line for it! Rum may not have many midges but it has a lot of ticks,

Does this not still apply "In 2006 the law was changed to include ‘light nuisance’ as a statutory nuisance under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. This new power allows Councils to take legal action against those responsible who continue to cause light nuisance despite being advised of a problem."

We had some really clear late night skies recently, only problem was the temperature, minus 7 is far too cold for my old bones.

I know how it feels to see someone's hobby/life disappear, my brother a military modeller for most of his life passed away around this time last year, he had a room in his house with years of work in it, some winning him awards, I was allowed to keep half a dozen of his models the rest went to a house clearance company and a lot to the bin man. Here's one I kept, the background is my doing.

I was dismayed when I discovered that they had started to erect lights along the A road that passes our village, it's a busy road during the day but at night it's quiet, so I wrote to the authorities about them. The reply was quick and informative. "I can confirm that the street lighting being installed within the extended section will be LED luminaires with flat cut off lenses and a lower colour temperature. This technology is commonly specified in dark sky areas and is sympathetic to astronomy. In addition to this, we have specified dynamic road lighting within this section. The dynamic lighting will operate at full power during peak traffic periods and then dim to 10% power output out with these periods. The system will then only increase lighting levels when a pedestrian or cyclist movement is detected, whereby lighting will be increased gradually for small sections as the user navigates along the stretch, with the section they leave behind gradually reverting back to 10%." Perhaps our wildlife will now have a better chance crossing the road as well.

Pity Musk wasn't flying it and I heard he's just launched a 'spy satelitte.

Nothing on companies house and the last review was 553 days ago. Covid has hammered small companies. But no contact with paying customers should ring alarm bells.

Hopefully rising energy prices will switch these lights off.

Try this guy James Heappey The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence Conservative MP for Wells The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is committed to improving energy efficiency across the defence estate in line with the Net Zero ambition. Energy efficient lighting is one aspect of this and there is a proactive programme to transition to LED lighting. For new builds the MOD policy is to achieve an excellent rating under the Defence Related Environmental Assessment Methodology (DREAM) which requires the use of energy efficient fittings.

I spoke to our council and pointed out that their new LED lights, fitted to the existing high lamp poles, were lighting up the hillside behind our house more so than the sodium lights had done before and could we have a shade put on it, I also mentioned that I dabbled in astronomy, a week later a shade appeared on the light. Recently they have removed some of the old high poles and replaced them with shorter, lower than the roof top, poles with diffused LED lights.

They should drop the word security and change it to nuisance lighting, we have an old folks home that has two of these led 'security lights' that shine straight at our house for why?

Musk's latest is that he wants to launch a satellite Billboard for advertising!!! If he gets away with it there is no stopping at how low he can get when he considers anyone else's view. Our planet is surround by a cloak of satellites, so many that it must have an effect on the planet and atmosphere, who knows but would they tell us.

Ulitimate goal? Money He raised billions of dollars for his starlink with a promise to pay it back in three years.

Big vehicles, HGV , Bus and Coaches, are very dangerous at night for humans to move amongst them, to light them enough for safety reasons means floodlighting them. But these lights can be switched off if the lorry park is locked up at night, infared lights and camera sand some modern digital cctv can 'see' very well in the dark to deter thieves.

I think that modern day humans are scared of the dark, really scared of the dark, there must be big bad murderous beings lurking in the shadows of their gardens, under the eaves of their homes, so you can bet on your life that your new neighbours will be installing 'security lights' that will ruin your dark skies and flicker on and off at the slightest breeze all night long. Same people that ignore their elderly neighbours smoke alarm going off or complain that your car alarm went off and work them up.

For years meade were reponsible for price fixing, especially in Europe, buying a meade telescope in the UK was expensive, a direct conversion from dollars to pounds pushed the prices up astromomically. We had a local dealer that dropped Meade's prices and Meade dropped them!

Musk told us that he wanted to provide 'cheap' internet access to remote people, $99 dollars a month is not cheap for many poorer people, he aims to recoup around $38 billion in three years for his investors.

Any change in the countty's circumstances has always been followed by price rises, today I found out that our local builders merchant's prices have risen by 40%.

A good way of putting a beginner off? The price is okay but there are other mounts that will get you up and running/ viewing the heavens with less fussing about trying to sort things that should have been sorted at the design and manufacturing stages. Perhaps the real problem lies in where a lot of this gear is now being produced, China. My new super fast American company laptop has a small label on the back, Made in China. Theres a lot of help on the PMC-8 group pages https://espmc-eight.groups.io/g/MAIN

Tonight 18:43 Altair 80mm Ed-R PMC-8 Pentax KP 1/400 100 ISO Windows photo crop.

More of Musks litter heading skywards today, who actually gave him permission to launch these satelittes? While it was annouched last week that in the north of Scotland thay have been setting up sites to access the data from the satellites.

I wouldn't bet on it, everything seems to be made in China, even under the labels, we used to laugh at Chinese and Japanese translations in their manuals, but the laugh is on us now.

I watched Mars Attack again, just make sure you aren't carrying any virus when you land there, yak yak