New moon



Just after sunset a pale new moon hangs in the sky over the Victorian tenements of Edinburgh



The same section of canal as the earlier canoe photos, only a couple of hours later on (click for the bigger versions on Flickr)

Hunting werewolves

Full moon this weekend, good werewolf hunting weather (hey, everyone needs a hobby and it gives me some exercise and gets me out into the fresh air):



(all this scene needs now is Christopher Lee in his Dracula cape; click for the bigger version on my Flickr)



(the full moon reflecting on the Union Canal; fun to compare this to summer evening pic of this same location I took a while back on my Flickr)

No lycanthropes were harmed in the making of these photographs, although my fingers got sodding frozen.

The moon and the sun

It's that time of year when you can look up on a bright, autumnal morning and see the sun in on direction, rising from the sea and look the other way and see the moon hanging in a clear, pale blue sky at the same time. Somehow seeing the moon in daylight always make me think on a scene from the old 70s show Space 1999...

Saturn

JPL and the ESA have announced that the Cassini probe has found a small, previously unknown moon around the giant world Saturn the sixtieth so far discovered around the ringed world. It may be a tiny lump of rock and ice but I love the fact that almost 50 years after Gagarin's first space flight our own solar system is still surprising us. Makes me wonder what we will discover when we finally get further out (and why haven't we pushed further, we let ourselves get so small after the Apollo missions...)



Elsewhere on the ESA site there's a function to listen to the Huygens probe which descended into the large moon Titan from Cassini. The sound files aren't especially interesting as such, in fact is is just a rather dull sequence of white noise, but the fact the first one is a recording of sounds heard on an alien world is. Sounds from a world no human has walked on, beamed across millions of miles to be heard for the first time in human history. Now that is impressive.