Macro Shots of Katydid(?)

Another few macro shots I took a while ago. Found this fella (or girl) sitting on top of my wheelie bin. I am not quite sure what it is and am struggling to identify it, so if someone recognises it, please leave a comment. I have seen a few of these.

So of course I stuck a camera in his face. What was quite amusing was that he/she seemed to get a bit offended and took an offensive stance and even seemed to make attacking type moves towards me as if to say 'piss off!'.

Anyway, click here for a few more shots.

Scale

The Sun is ~1,392,684 km in diameter. That's hard to envisage.
The Earth is ~12,750 km in diameter. that's also hard to envisage (although, travelling around the World in a plane is kind of within our brain's capacity to envisage.
Pluto is ~2300 km in diameter. That's a decent plane flight, within distances we talk about on Earth, but still hard to visualise.

The distances between these bodies, I think, are too big to visualise;

Sun to Earth = ~150,000,000 km.
Sun to Pluto = ~ 5,874,000,000 km. (on average, it is an elliptical orbit)
Sun to nearest star (Proxima Centauri) = ~4.243 light years = ~ 40,142 x10^12 km = ~ 40,141,750,100,000 km (40 trillion km!)

For whatever reason (fun) it is interesting to scale things down to try and give perspective to these sizes and distances.

So, if the Sun was the size of a basketball (dia. 238.5mm) then the Earth would be ~2.2mm and located about 25.6m away. You can picture that. It might surprise a lot of people how much bigger the Sun is than the Earth and just how far away it is. Although now we start to have the reverse of the problem: realising how small a human is on that 2.2mm sized Earth!

Pluto is a mere ~0.4mm about the size of a grain of castor sugar (not granulated but castor - not sure about other places, but in the UK, castor sugar is finer than granulated - granulated is about 0.8mm diameter, hence 2x bigger than the scaled Pluto). Scaled Pluto is located 1km away from the basketball-sized sun! That's getting hard to picture. I can picture 1 km, but I can't picture a grain of sugar 1km away.

But the best bit is that the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) in this scale is a whopping 6875 km away! ****ing far, even on this scale!

Its this scale that so many people fail to realise. Its this scale that is going to keep the fantasy of travelling to distant planets and stars (and galaxies) exactly that, a fantasy, at least for a very long time until maybe one day technology moves somewhere that we just cannot predict yet. 

I don't want to seem negative, just realistic. I'll still enjoy science fiction.

Car Logs Added to j0nr.org

Started moving my car logs over to car-logs.j0nr.org. Again, I am making use of Blogger for ease of use and backup.

I have been keeping a running log of work, maintenance and anything of interest to do with my cars for the last few years. This is my own kind of service history. So if I try to sell a car I can show the buyer a log of all that's happened to it whilst I have owned it.

Also, I try to make some of the work I do into DIY guides which will hopefully be useful to others.

I have only got the Volvo (my current car) copied over so far, but will back-fill the older logs and guides soon.

New Blog for New Domain - j0nr.org

Thought I would make use of Google's Blogger service instead. That way if my site goes a bit Pete Tong, I don't loose everything. Plus the integration with Google services (e.g. Google+) is a lot neater.


My new blog address is blog.j0nr.org

I use j0nr for most of my online activity, so wanted it as a domain. jcrdevelopments.com I have had for ages, but its a bit long and cumbersome,  plus I want to move my personal stuff away from there eventually as I may want to keep it for more work related stuff.

This will be my personal blog about all things that interest me. I will probably move all my car related stuff over here but on a different blog.

Another Moon Shot with Registax

Another attempt at a shot of the Moon using 14 images from my HS10 and then stacking them with Registax.

Still unsure whether there is a marked improvement over just one of the originals. Not sure if I need to try and get more images to start with...will try more next time.

Reaction Engines Skylon and SABRE

Just been to a really interesting talk by Richard Varvill of Reaction Engines Ltd at the IMechE. It was really interesting and got me really excited.

Reaction Engines Ltd are a UK company who are developing a spaceplane called Skylon. Skylon is a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO), unmanned, reusable and low-cost (comparable with today's expendable solutions) vehicle, with the intention of being a simple to use solution to putting hardware in low Earth orbit.

To achieve a SSTO vehicle (which has not been done to date) a special kind of engine is required, one that has not been made before or anything similar. Conventional vehicles achieving orbit today use rocket engines for the entire flight, as these work in both air and vacuum as they have their own supply of oxygen (oxidiser in the form of liquid oxygen carried in a tank with the vehicle). They also, importantly, provide thrust when the vehicle is not moving. The biggest problem trying to send a vehicle from stationary to orbit (0 - Mach 25) is the amount of fuel you need to start off with. Fuel for a rocket engine consists of a fuel, e.g. liquid Hydrogen and an oxidiser, e.g. liquid oxygen. These can burn together regardless of the atmosphere, or lack of, surrounding them. But, carrying enough fuel and oxidiser for the whole flight is both heavy and expensive.

So some way of making an engine that did not require carrying both the fuel and oxidiser with it for the entire powered flight was needed. Also, the propulsion would have to cope with the fact that it would be transitioning from ~1 bar atmospheric pressure (i.e. being in the air) to a vacuum when it left the atmosphere and approached orbit.

Founder of Reaction Engines, Alan Bond designed a Liquid Air Cycle Engine (LACE) engine which became the Rolls Royce RB545. This design has been taken by Reaction Engines and evolved to become the new SABRE engine for the Skylon.

I won't try and go into detail or replicate what can be said better on Reaction Engines' website, but basically, it is a combined air-breathing engine / rocket engine. From stationary to about mach 5.5 it is an air-breathing engine, using the oxygen in the atmosphere to burn with the hydrogen fuel. Then as altitude increases and the atmosphere starts getting too thin, it transitions into a conventional rocket engine, burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen from tanks on board.

The key stages are:

1. Air is taken into the engine. At mach 5.5 the temperature of the air once it is taken in can be up to 1000°C
2. The air is passed through a heat exchanger, called a pre-cooler, where it is cooled (using a closed loop helium system) down to -150°C
3. Compressed to ~150 bar
4. Fed into the rocket combustion chamber and mixed with the liquid hydrogen fuel to then burn and exit as hot gas out the nozzle.
5. Air pressure drops as altitude increases and at about mach 5.5 the air-breathing part of the engine effectively deactivates and the on board liquid oxygen starts to be fed into th combustion chamber instead to complete the flight to orbit.

Benefits are that it is a single engine which can make use of the oxygen in the air whilst at low altitudes, therefore it does not need to carry the liquid oxygen that it would otherwise need for the first part of the flight. This reduces weight and cost. Cost would be more for extra liquid oxygen and the bigger tanks and therefore bigger vehicle to accommodate it.

I really love the fact that this is happening in the UK. I always dreamed of working in rocket science but would never get the chance to work for NASA. But here is something happening not far away from me, which is really exciting. I hope this project works and is successful and I will be following its progress and looking forward to seeing first flights (although I think these may be at least 15 years away unfortunately).

Here's a video of Richard Varvill talking about the SABRE engine.

A Photo Of The Moon

A photo I took of the moon with my HS10. I used the 'A' (Aperture priority) mode, set AE to 'spot' and maximum F number for the aperture (smallest physical aperture).