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It looks as if I was wrong about the Swallows…

It looks as if I was wrong about the Swallows nest that has been built on an electric junction box. This morning there was half of an egg shell on the side of the nest, and the way that the adult has been acting there could well be chicks in the nest. If the adult leaves the nest I will take a look and let you know.

Most of the day I have spent renewing the digital recorder on the camera system. The one that was installed had a small harddrive and was difficult to download to disc, although it had an inbuilt recorder, The new DVR is a bit of a posh affair, and it could well be that I will have difficulty learning how to work it, but I will have time as it has a very large hard drive installed. I have a couple of hardrives that I have had to take out of previous recorders, that has some good material on them. Last year I managed to record a Badger mating session, I am told that it has never been recorded before. If that is true or not, I don’t know. Renewing the recorder has given me the opportunity to tidy up the whole camera control system, that takes up a largish area in our kitchen. I wouldn’t be the tidiest person in the world, so the area I use gets larger and larger, until I am nearly taking over more than half of the worktop area, with computers, controllers, monitors and there is so much wiring you would not believe. Fortunately we have a very large kitchen. Hopefully this will sort me out. And with luck, but don’t keep me to it, we may be able to show events that many of you have missed. As tonight one of you saw a Kingfisher by the feeders. I take it who ever saw it, that it was on camera two? Let me know.

Although the skies were not so clear that I would have been able to put the telescope on, I was able to try out the piece of equipment that I got from the US. I became an instant Astronomer. My knowledge of the sky when I first purchased the telescope, was zero. I knew the Sun and Moon, and truly that was it. We met an extremely good Astronomers, who came to dinner and showed us different stars and constellation. Most I remembered, but many I forgot. When we do the Astronomy holidays, he will do talks to our guests. The piece of equipment is called a SkyScout. It works in two ways, the first is that through the view finder you point it to any object in the sky, press a button and instantly it tells you what it is. The second way is that you have a choice to locate, by pressing another button, you scroll down the list and select. Again you use the view finder, that has arrowed LEDs to direct you to the object, that you have selected, when the object is found all of the directional LEDs flash. It can Locate over 6,000 stars, planets and constellations from its built-in celestial database and provides scientific information for each object, It also has audio to give descriptions of objects, and every night a tonight’s highlights. A list of the 20 best objects to view for your exact date, time and location, anywhere in the world. Clever is not the word. Within a month or so the manufacturer of the telescope I use are bringing out the own version. It has a much larger database and I will be able to plug it into the telescopes computer, point it to an object, and the telescope will go to that object automatically. Hopefully I will now get the telescope working as it should.

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