Paul Smith's Blog

After the Trade Union Congress expressed its unconditional solitarity with the Venezuelan Revolution, British students continue the trend. From HoV: The National Union of Students at its Easter National Conference passed a resolution supporting the Venezuelan Revolution. The motion recognised the “enormous social change has taken place in Venezuela in recent years, with the government funding wide-ranging social programmes.” It pointed to the “dramatic increases in democratic participation, especially by indigenous people, women and the poor, including in eight national elections and referenda since Hugo Chavez’s election as President in 1998....

Getting ready for May Day..... Send in any pictures of marches or meetings and I'll post them up. E-mail them to webresponse@smirnov.demon.co.uk thanks!

I'm sure everyone on the left in Britain has heard of the Socialist Workers' Party - they're the largest "Marxist" organisation in Britain. However they are under complete control of a tiny minority of people, they stifle all other groups in their coalitions, like the Socialist Alliance, RESPECT and the Stop the War Coalition. Time and time again they have stamped out any traces of democracy to maintain their control of an organisation that believes solely in membership numbers and nothing in Marxism....

It should be with us at the end of the year. Now where's the beta?

An excellent hour long lecture on evidence supporting evolution carried out by Professor Steve Jones. Science is about disbelief. It accepts that all knowledge is provisional and that any theory might in principle be disproved. Some theories are better established than others: the earth is probably not flat, babies are almost certainly not brought by storks, and men and dinosaurs are unlikely to have appeared on earth within the past few thousand years....

By Alan Woods and Ted Grant, Saturday, 14 April 2001: From the start of the War, Connolly was virtually isolated. Internationally, he had no contact. Outside of Ireland, the Labour Movement seemed to be as silent as the grave. True, there were symptoms of a revival in Britain, with the Glasgow rent strike of 1915. But Connolly feared that the workers of Britain would move too late. The idea of an uprising had clearly been taking shape in Connolly's mind....

Forty five years ago Yuri Gagarin rode a tower of fire into space, Vostok 1 propelled him into Earth orbit. Cosmonaut day became an official holiday the following year. Yuri Gagarin visiting Manchester, UK. And of course one of my favourite monuments; the Space Obelisk, built to celebrate humankind's conquest of space. It stands at over 100 meters, which is about 350 feet and was built in 1964. The guy sat in front of it is the father of space travel - the guy who thought of using multi-staged liquid fuelled rockets to reach orbit - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, born in Siberia in 1857, at the age of 10 he lost his hearing due to scarlet fever and was excluded from any schooling - however he educated himself, he wrote over 500 scientific papers and influenced many Soviet engineers, including Sergey Korolev who became Chief Designer of the Soviet Space program....

So what do the videos I take look like? Here's one, 1.6MB, looking at the Moon through the barlow lens - this is why I use a webcam instead of a normal camera, there's a better chance that by shooting video I'll get some decent frames where the atmosphere for a split second is more stationary. Of course it's then a case of picking out the best frames and aligning and stacking them - luckily tools like Registrax handle the aligning quite well....

Took the same stack as attempt 5, but manually sorted through the 1700 frames to pick the best ones out. The following was composed from a stack of about 160 images. By picking the best ones out it's much improved the contrast in the Cassini Division. Details: 150mm TAL 2M reflector with TAL 3x barlow and Toucam Pro II, stacksize 1700 @ 15fps best 160 images stacked. Taken at 2031 UTC on the 5th of April 2006....

Few more images of Saturn. First off the satellites around it, taken with a Toucam Pro II at prime focus through a Tal 2M 150mm reflector. Managed to pick up Enceladus, which is famous as they've recently got data suggesting plumes of water are being blown out from under the surface. Next up, another image through the 3x barlow.