Running Around The Two Lakes

Today, suffused in mizzle under a uniformly grey sky, I did 11km around the lakes, nature reserves and parks.

I was in quest of winter ducks and winter thrushes, but saw neither. But on a muddy clay lane, there were flocks of chaffinches, tail bars flashing white against the trees, and a Goldcrest's tiny body flitted into a bush. This made the run worthwhile.

Balderton Lake canada geese squadron

Some angry geese in this shot

London Road lake waterfowl

Two swans a piping

1 swan a leaping

Proper running conditions, back of Beacon Heights on the hill

Lake at Beacon Hill development getting bigger

Running Adventure to Cotham

The run out to Cotham village involves the long 7 km slog along the Sustrans route 64. As you can see from the picture, it was a grey and green and slightly damp trudge, enlivened by the gulls at the tip - the wind was blowing the odour away from me thankfully, and the scaredy cat antics of the fieldfares in the hedgerows.

I came across two flocks, and both of them started flying off when I got to about 50 metres or perhaps more. It is funny how the sturdy redwing is rather more flappable than the slender redwing, which seems much happier for you to get a look at them.

After the turn on the road back to town, I investigated Cotham church, a very simple affair attended by a couple of donkeys - nativity service duties for you lads! - whose stable seemed rather flasher than the church. It had a clock, for a start.

Further along, gulls had rendered the surface of the fishing lake white, so numerous were they, and I had a splendid view of a kestrel. Its speckley reddish back always reminds me of a strawberry for a some reason.

The 14.7 km run was finished off with tea at Rumbles, as the sun made a sort of after thought appearannce and folk threw tennis balls for wet dogs to hurtle after.

The 64 slog

Gull tip

Posh stable

Spotted at distance

Sad eyes...

...as my phone doesn't dispense sugar lumps

Cotham church

Evenings with Orion the Hunter

Once again I am at work, and even now my fingers still feel the -4 6am cycle to work this morning. I was wearing two pairs of gloves and thus accidentally changing gear every few metres, but it still isn't preventing the familiar freezing pain from nipping at my fingertips.

Winter thrushes are appearing in numbers on the farmer's field next to the showground; impossible to confirm at this distance but they would appear to have very pale breasts and thus most likely be fieldfares. Above them gulls squabble, and occasionally a kestrel makes its way to find a favoured hunting spot around the margins, looking for any mouse not frozen into the semblance of concrete.

At least there are benefits to these freezing nights. Like two nights ago, the clearest, darkest night I have seen for a long while. The stars were glittering diamonds on their velvet display case; the Milky Way was overhead in Cassiopeia, flowing like Cleopatra's bathwater. Straddling the southern aspect, most prominent of all winter constellations, was the mighty hunter himself, Orion.

Orion from wikimedia, uploaded by Mouser

From my garden as midnight approaches, he appears to have suddenly leapt out from behind a tree in order to shoot a terrible creature of myth, or perhaps even me. To his upper right his bow is raised, and if that isn't enough, he is wielding a club with his other hand.

Confusing overkill? Some representations have the bow as a shield, but I can't stop my brain convincing me it's a bow. After all, who hunts with a club?

However he hunts, it has certainly been successful, because in clear skies you can see the body of Lepus, the celestial hare, at his feet. The hare was present the other night, and to see it from my urban garden is all but miraculous, thus illustrating how clear the sky was.

I didn't use my binoculars; when you do, the starfields are magnificent, probably the finest you will see from the UK. There are stars everywhere, and not the faint ones associated with Cygnus and the Milky Way within; these are genuine jewels of the sky. The great nebula sits ghostlike, illuminated by the light of the searing hot iota orionis "trapezium" and the new stars forming within.

It is a beautiful view.

However, even without the binoculars there is still plenty to see and think about. The hot coal of Betelgeuse glows firey at the top left, big as 20 suns, monstrously unstable and thus variable in brightness. It is reckoned to be candidate for going supernova within a few million years, and it will be as bright as the full moon when it does.

At the opposite corner sits Rigel, a hot, blue white star that is a single to our eyes, but is actually a triple star system adding up to a whole 120,000 times more luminous than the sun. There is, of course, the nebula, still plain to the naked eye - and then the belt, the central star of which, Alnilam, is a blue-white supergiant also doomed for a supernovic ending.

It is 350,000 times more luminous than the sun, and all in all is the intrinsically brightest star you can see easily in the night sky.

After Christmas, Futurelearn are running a course on this constellation. So, why not familiarise yourself with it now, as the great hunter bestrides the night sky.

A Spot of Newark Heritage

Was nursing a slight twinge yesterday, so nursed it by walking instead of running...

...I was saving myself for the Parkrun I overslept for this morning.

Still, even on a grey damp day, there's always something to look at.

Market behind the barricades

Autumnal castle

The south corner tower

The Corn Exchange. A beautiful building, home of awful nightclubs

The lock slowly fills

My Winthorpe Lake Adventure

Yesterday, I was out of the house well before midday - ha ha - and on my way on a new running adventure. I've headed this way on a bicycle many times, but not often on foot, and certainly not to this distance.

I was heading for Winthorpe Lake, actually nearer to Holme Village than Winthorpe, and rather more of a cross country slog than heading for, say, Muskham. It was a grey day, with a sky that looked like it ad been mummified, pale grey and lifeless. Meanwhile, the ground was a variety of greens, the lush greens of autumn, but rather muddy once I found myself off the road and onto the bank that marked the Trent Valley Way.  Luckily a pretty flock of goldfinch were on hand to brighten up the surroundings.

I've been to Winthorpe Lake before, in warmer months with sedge warblers at work at some of the reedy margins, but today, it looked very very bleak. Out on the water were a fair number of great crested grebes, some tufted duck and a couple of mallard. A very handsome heron sat on the riverside edge of the lake, outfishing the fellows with their rods and lines.

Around the lake, the famous concrete barge, and the two smaller boars, were marooned on the water's edge as they had been for many years.

I ran back in along the river, all the way to the "other" town lock. This is all fishing country, with rather unfriendly signs on display, and the riverbanks, like those of the lake, denuded of vegetation.

It is lifeless, and depressing.

Concrete barge, Winthorpe Lake

Open water

Grey reflected in grey

Tented fisherman

Under the bridge - the bypass

Under the bridge - the railway

Barges at "the other" lock

Leonid Meteor Report

After an utter drenching cycling to work at 6am, and light drizzle at 6pm coming home I wasn't hopeful of seeing any clear skies above my head for the 2014 Leonid meteor shower. I more or less forgot about meteors, got on with my oceanography studies, and had a few cups of tea in the warm.

Typical Leonid night for me really. I've never had much luck with this most spectacular - every 33 years or so - of meteor showers. There's always a full moon, or the weather is bad, or the sharp maximum has failed to coincide with UK darkness. The fact that the best viewing for the shower. is found in the early morning hours doesn't help either.

 In fact I've barely ever seen any.

Which is a pity, because this shower is a historic one indeed. Associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle, which orbits the sun every 33 or so years, spectacular meteor storms can occur in years when the comet is at perihelion. In 1833, meteors fell from the sky like rain, and some (possibly exaggerated) estimates put the Leonid count at 100,000 per hour.

A later (1889) depiction of the 1833 storm, in a 7th Day Adventist book.

Similar storms occurred in 1866 and 1966, although famously in 1966 huge numbers of meteors were seen in the USA, while after a huge build up from Patrick Moore, very few were seen in the UK, indicating the short but intense nature of the Leonid maximum.

Hopes were high for the years around the 1999 Tempel-Tuttle perihelion, and indeed around 1000 meteors an hour were seen in these years, although not by me as the weather was rotten every single damn and dratted year. Since then, with the comet now gone, rates have dwindled.

However, as I had the pleasant surprise of going outside at midnight and finding the sky crystal clear, I was still hopeful of seeing a few meteors. As it happened I saw exactly one Leonid, a faint specimen racing through the constellation of Auriga. A non-Leonid sporadic, rather brighter too, appeared through Ursa Major.

So my 30 minute or so watch went mostly unrewarded in meteor terms, but it was hardly wasted. The sky was beautifully clear, and I could even see one of the Auriga open clusters with my naked eye, which I've never done before. Perseus' sword handle was also plain, and the milky way ghosted across the zenith in Cassiopeia.

So you see, time under a clear sky is always valuable. Even if you can't find find what you might have been looking for, there's always something to see.

The Lullaby of Philae

"My #lifeonacomet has just begun @ESA_Rosetta. I'll tell you more about my new home, comet #67P soon… zzzzz #CometLanding"

So read the last tweet from the Philae lander, sat in its awkward little shady spot on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Unable to recharge its solar powered batteries, the power threshold was breached and the probe fell silent. Just minutes before, the probe was jauntily telling us that it knew time was short, but it would carry out its experiments and send its date back to Earth via its Rosetta mother ship to the very end.

On twitter, thousands of people tweeted their support for the plucky little lander, making it the number one trending topic, before they watched its dignified end with tears in their eyes.

It wasn't actually Philae tweeting; it was a PR worker for the European Space Agency. Philae is a (much quoted) "washing machine" sized instrument package and landing system that landed on Comet 67P last Wednesday. It is not a person.

Artist's impression of Philae coming into land (DSL on Wikimedia)

But no-one treated it like that.

Some people profess to dislike this "anthropomorphising" of non human entities. But in this case the ESA PR guru was doing their job, and brilliantly at that. Philae isn't even alive, yet we have seen it as a courageous, independent little robot engaged in a life or death struggle in a hostile environment far from home. We have created human interest in the inanimate, a huge human interest that will help help to justify to their Governmental backers that their investment was worthwhile, let alone the huge amount of science Philae has carried out in its short lifespan on the surface.

Then there are the scientists, who have put perhaps twelve years of their lives into Rosetta and Philae. They must have got to the point of seeing Philae as being alive too.

Someone on twitter said that Philae wasn't David Bowie's Major Tom. I agree. Philae was the Tin Can, while we were the Major Toms, projecting our hopes, our optimism, our dreams of success and our fears of loneliness and abandonment. We gave it a soul. Philae lifted our eyes away from a world of Ebola and religious wars,and grinding low paid employment into a world where the human race is still capable of wonderful things.

No wonder we wanted it to be alive.

And so many of us were awake towards 1am, watching the little spaceship slip into deep hibernation, and perhaps thinking of Huey, the little robot from Douglas Trumbull's classic ecological sci-fi movie "Silent Running", tending his plants with his little watering can as his space greenhouse drifts off into the forever void.

And perhaps we had a moist eye or two as we tweeted a lullaby to the craft, although, you know, I have a very heavy cold. It was probably that. Or maybe something in my eye. Yes, that was it.

After all, who gets sentimental over a washing machine sized chunk of metal on a lump of ice?

Copyright Creamcrackerednature 15.11.2014