The Andromeda galaxy shot with a Canon 20D using a 70-200/4L lens set to 126mm and F/5.6. A stack of 17 frames at iso800, each exposed for 30 secods (total exposure 17x30s = 8.5 min). Unguided EQ-6 mount. A hint of M31's smaller companions M32 and M110 is visible.
This chart shows how the water level has been at around +100 cm from normal lately.
Pictures by Eero Laurila and Olle Martonen from the 2008 IOM European Championships last week in Durbovnik, Croatia.
Life is simple at Reynolds numbers much below 0.1
Four 200 x 50 um inlet channels join into one 800 x 50 um main channel. The blue and clear liquids mix only by diffusion. See also here.
I've spent the week in Leeds looking three single-molecule fluorescence microscopes (FCS a.k.a. fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, ALEX a.k.a. alternating laser excitation fluorescence spectroscpy , and TIRF a.k.a. total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy).
Flying back to Helsinki with KLM took close to 24 hours since I missed my connecting flight (due to KLMs late incoming aircraft in Leeds) and had to stay an extra night at Schipol...
Jari got a Hero camera which takes still pictures and video and stores them on a memory card. It weighs about 120g and it's watertight, so it's possible to put it on-board and take some pictures while sailing. Seems to work quite well. This could be used later for looking at how the mast bends in different winds and with different shroud and/or spreader positions. (See here for some statistics from the ongoing IOM Euros).
The fifth MicroMagic ranking race was sailed today in Vuosaari. Due to the location of the sailing water the wind came with variable strength from a variable direction in all races. I was sailing a loaned boat, and will do so in two weeks time at the national event also (20+ entries I hear!). Might think about a microMagic of my own during the spring (no promises...). Results to appear here.
Pictures by Jorma Ojama.
It's about 15 years since I learned to use a lathe at school. Now we got a vintage 1949 Schaublin lathe to the workshop, so I will have to re-learn the art of making all things round again. The lathe will be handy to have around for many projects, both work and play.
We got a new Ocean Optics spectrometer to the lab today and naturally I had to play around with it a bit in the evening. Compared to our 20+ year old Jobin Yvon rotating-grating thing this one is a very small tidy box, with data transmission and power over USB, and an SMA-connector for light input through a 600um core fiber.
Some sample spectra below (the filenames describe the light-source).
Seeing something with the Ronchi test was easy, but the Foucault test proved a bit more demanding. The light-source and the knife-edge need to be securely bolted to the table, and they need to be finely adjustable along the optical axis and perpendicular to the optical axis. The final piece of advice needed to make it work was to sand down the LED used as the light source. The LED then becomes a diffuse suorce, and the knife edge is placed half-way across the LED also.
It turns out that the room we were using for this doesn't have very good 'seeing'. After turning off a printer and some computers that created visible air-current there still remains a lot of disturbances. About the only thing in the photo above that is 'real' and doesn't change with the air-currents is the round spot in the middle.
This is our Foucault tester. The knife edge and light source move along the optical axis using a 50mm-travel translation stage, and everything moves up/down to place the knife edge at the correct height using a small lab jack.