A Darker Sky

Over the past few months our local authorities have been changing the orange sodium street lights to warm white LEDs to save on running costs. Of course any savings will really only start once the cost of new lamps and their installation has been recovered.

In my immediate area some lamps are maintained by Lincolnshire County Council.  The remainder by East Lindsey District Council. How long they stay on at night depends on who owns them and where they are. Along my lane they are owned by ELDC and stay on all night. In the small estate immediately behind me they are owned by LCC and switch off about midnight. Another money saving venture.

 

Those along the main street belong to LCC. As far as I can tell they operate all night.

One advantage of this change is due to the design of the lamp housing and LEDs. They concentrate the light downwards with little, if any, escaping upwards. When I looked out of my kitchen window at night there used to be an orange glow in the sky from light spillage. Now the sky looks dark, especially after midnight.

 

Estate lamp at the top, main street lamp at the bottom.

These changes coincided with an interesting, to me, edition of The Sky at Night broadcast last Saturday. (I still miss Patrick Moore and rarely watch the latest presenters) This programme was about spotting and monitoring meteors and asteroids. Of interest to me was a short section about automatic photo and video recording 'shooting stars'. Something I have long wanted to have a go at but not bothered about with the amount of local light pollution. Now it may well be worth a coat of looking at. Mentioned in the programme was the UK group UKMON. Their website seems a good starting point for information on this subject.

A well waterproofed housing looks the first problem as most are designed to be angled below the horizontal. They may not be so efficiently water proofed when angled upwards. Seems like a job for the hot melt glue gun. Then it will need some 12V heating to clear any condensation which forms on cold nights.

I have an old but reasonable quality b/w video camera.

 

The main problem will be how to divide any recorded video into easily viewed sections. I don't fancy scanning through single nightly files with several hours continuous recording attempting to spot a possible 2 second streak of light. I have a spare DVR (digital video recorder) which can record moving objects by detecting changes in contrast in any part of the image.  Not sure its detecting ability is good enough or fast enough to spot a shooting star though. Plenty to research and experiment with as the dark nights lengthen.

Monday Montage

Last week's WidsMob Montage modified photo was



Correctly identified as



a wheelie bin / dustbin by Adrian, Wilma, Ragged Robin and The Weaver of Grass

Now for this week's montage



If you know what it is or would like to have a guess then please leave your answer in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the original photo, next Monday.

Comma Butterfly

There was just one solitary Comma among the scores of wasps on my Ivy today

Of UFOs and Visiting Aliens

I have been watching two fascinating series of programmes on the free Blaze channel on Freesat.

One (Ancient Aliens) is a series about various theories that early civilizations were visited and helped by visitors from another world. Not a theory I readily subscribe to but there have always been questions at the back of my mind about some ancient building works undertaken, some thousands of years ago.  From Stonehenge to the Egyptian and South American pyramids somehow ancient civilizations were able to move hundreds of tremendous blocks of stone weighing anything from 0.5 to 15 tons (or is that tonnes). Not just transporting them several miles but then lifting some high up on various structures. There are massive and sometimes strange ancient stone structures and buildings in many countries around the World.  Intriguing that so much large building work was undertaken by so many different civilizations in the past when populations were smaller than now, available tools primitive by modern standards and much time and 'manpower' must have been needed just providing everyday necessities such as food for the general population.

The other series (Hangar 1: The UFO Files) is examining thousands of files which record sighting of UFOs and several reports of crashed UFOs which have been kept secret. 'Witnesses' reporting that they have been pressurised to keep silent. There are far more of these than I ever realised.

One episode told of a craft which crashed in Texas in 1897.  It was reported in the local paper including noting that a body found with the craft was 'not of this world'. The body was buried locally and a tombstone erected. When investigators applied for permission to exhume the body it was refused on the grounds it was on consecrated ground. If interested there is some more information here.

Recently I read a report that an astronomical observatory in New Mexico has been closed down suddenly and taken over by the FBI with no explanation being given and refusals to answer any questions. Report is here.

The more governments try to keep the lid on certain activities the more people will assume there is something untoward going on they don't want us to know about.

I have experienced one phenomenon which was very startling at the time. About 25 years ago I was driving home one dark, wet, stormy night after a 'meet the parents' evening at school. While driving along a narrow country road I saw a bright orange glowing ball which was hovering maybe 20 feet above the ground. It hovered for a while in a field next to a group of trees and then shot straight upwards, still glowing. Unfortunately I was approaching some sharp bends round a wooded area so didn't see what finally happened to it.  I've always put it down as being a ball of glowing plasma. Something which apparently can occur sometimes during electrical storms. There have been reports and the occasional video of such things moving horizontally or rapidly changing direction.

From Wikipedia:
Ball lightning is an unexplained and potentially dangerous atmospheric electrical phenomenon. The term refers to reports of luminous, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. Full text is here.

A UDO and an IFO

First the UDO (unidentified dangling object)



Every now and then when I notice the DVR is recording from one of my cameras all that can be seen gently wafting in the breeze is a perfectly circular object illuminated by the IR lights.  Is it an as yet unidentified species of legless spider or the world's smallest UFO caught in a web? It shouldn't be a water droplet as it hasn't rained since early morning. No mist and too warm then to cause dew to form.

Now the IFO (identified flying object)



A grounded Common Darter Dragonfly. At first I thought it was dead until it flew away when I tried to move closer. The above is a small crop from the only shot I managed. I've seen several different types of dragon flitting about on our mid-afternoon walks but so far this is the only one I've seen settle for a while.

On a different topic. A bit if a quandary when typing the title to this post. Should UDO have a or an in front of it? If one reads just the initial letters - U D O - when spoken we would say "a U ....". If UDO is read aloud as words one would say "an Unidentified ......" English can get very complicated at times.  Where is my old English teacher when I need him?

Wordess Wednesday

Winter Flowering Pansy

Drying It Out

I have a nice little video surveillance type camera which, if I remember correctly, is supposed to be sealed against water ingress to IP66 standard. Maybe it was IP55. It worked just fine until I fixed it to a fence panel to monitor for any hedgehog visitors. All went well until we had a couple of 'tropical' downpours. After that it started to mist up when the Sun shone on it and at night when its IR LEDs warmed up. Obviously some moisture had got inside.

Fortunately the body is in two halves with just three screws holding them together. I took off the front half and kept the camera powered up in the conservatory for a few days to evaporate any moisture, though nothing inside looked in the least bit damp. The idea seems to have worked. The camera is now re-assembled and fixed to the side of my shed observing anything which moves at the back end of the garden. Also it is under the overhang of the roof with some self amalgamating tape round the join in the body. That should help to keep it snug and reasonably dry.



A quick check yesterday morning to see any captures showed nice clear recordings.
No sound on this video.



It made a change to see something other than moths and spiders being recorded.

I keep hoping to see whether any of the local foxes visit.
They have been in the front garden in the past and fences are no barrier to them.

The final video was made using a free version of VideoPad  which is available for Mac and PC.