I’m fortunate (in a cycling training sense) to live about 10 miles from work. This gives me a good opportunity to get some rides in during the week. The distance is about right for a decent ride and it’s very flat so I can push myself a little harder than I would on a longer ride.

There is a good network of minor roads as well so I can vary the route and make it longer or take in a hill or two if I want. I usually cycle home a different way to the morning. Yesterday I was a bit pushed for time so I went for the quickest routes, unfortunately my GPSr and PDA got disconnected about halfway in so I’m missing part of the log, I did however have to go home after the first couple of miles as I’d forgotten something so the total distance isn’t far off! I was cycling with two reasonably full panniers as well with a change of clothes, shoes etc.

On the way in there is one short sharp climb up to Sire’s Hill and then a long descent. I sometimes vary this by following the NCN route which goes through Long Wittenham, Little Wittenham and past Wittenham Clumps, this is a longer steeper hill.

On the way back I chose the very direct route from Wallingford, through South Moreton to Didcot. This does include one of my hated cycling roads though, the Hithercroft. It’s a narrow, exposed, busy stretch where cars often give you little room and there are frequent potholes that a cyclist needs to avoid. Despite being a minor road it is well used as a rat-run to avoid the A4130 and to get to the A417 near Blewbury. If the wind is up or if it’s raining, it’s also a miserable stretch as there are open fields on both sides with no shelter.

This route is very flat, the only ‘hills’ are crossing the railway bridges!

Distance :: 9.36 mi (GPSr track is 13.91 mi)
Time :: 39m24s
Average Active Speed :: 14.25 mph
Run.GPS Training Profile

Distance :: 10.28 mi
Time :: 40m31s
Average Active Speed :: 15.22 mph
Run.GPS Training Profile

First ride on the Ridgeback. I’ve decided only to blog rides from this ride forward, I’ve been doing some training rides on my old hybrid bike over the past few weeks but let’s call yesterday Day One of LEJOG training.

So I’m doing LEJOG with my Brother-in-Law Andrew and his friend Tom at the moment. Andrew and I are both 40 next birthday so maybe this is a classic mid-life crisis thing and you might be right in thinking so! I think my brother, who did the LEJOG with his wife in 2001, maybe tempted to join us. At least for part of the journey, if not the whole thing!

Anyway, back to training ride numero uno. Andrew and I took a fairly easy run through the Vale of White Horse (very flat) from my house through Drayton, Steventon and onto the Hanneys. Turning south through Grove and Wantage we joined the National Cycle Network (NCN) local route 44 towards Didcot. I sometimes wonder if anyone from Sustrans has actually cycled some of these routes, because they are occasionally crazy, making you drop down kerbs and cycle along potholed and dangerous tracks.

Through the beautifully managed villages of Lockinge and Ginge it was a shame it was so foggy as this stretch is lovely and very quiet country lanes. Through the Harwell site (another crazy bit of NCN over a grassy bank) and to the summit of the ride above Upton. A fast descent took us down onto the dismantled Didcot Newbury & Southampton Railway embankment to Didcot. This high embankment has recently been converted into a cycle/footpath and is a pleasure to cycle upon (even if you have to avoid smashed green bottles near Didcot). Through Didcot and joining NCN Route 5 behind the Power Station and home.

Having a good touring bike makes such a difference, the hybrid was hard work over even relatively short distances. Thirty miles on the Ridgeback was a breeze and I could easily have continued.

Distance :: 30.76 mi
Time :: 2h24m36s
Average Active Speed :: 12.75 mph
Run.GPS Training Profile

After much umming and arring over make, model and framesize I eventually plumped for a Ridgeback Panorama. Should I play safe and get a Claud Butler or a Dawes, or play the wildcard? This guys blog convinced me the Ridgeback could do it and would be the bike for me. NickTheTrick cycled from Scotland, across the low countries to Denmark and up through Norway on one! It’s early days for my Ridgeback but so far so good as you will see in the training entries to come.

Patrick Taylor has written a nice review of the bike.

You may have spied a new category on the left. LEJOG, the classic British cycling tour from the bottom left of Great Britain to the top right. And I’m doing it (hopefully) next spring/summer. Over 1000 miles of cycling in around 18 days. I’ve got the touring bike and I’m now officially in training. Follow my training progress here and when the time comes I will hopefully be able to do daily blogs of progress.

Colour me impressed. I’ve not used Internet Explorer for a long time (other than for testing purposes) and been a Firefox user since it was called Firebird. I found it quicker, cleaner and of course it had tabbed browsing long before IE copied it. However I’ve been a bit mixed over FF3, it’s slower and even more of a memory hog than FF2 was in my opinion and I’ve had a few crashes. Not enough to make me even contemplate using the awful IE7 though.

Now today Google released Chrome and it seems bloody marvellous so far. Boy is it quick as well, makes IE7 and FF3 seem very slow in comparison. It’s worked with every site I’ve tried and I do like the form highlighting. I’m using it right now as a matter of fact! I’ll use it for a few days and see how it goes. One thing I have noticed is it doesn’t seem to work very well with cookies but maybe I need to explore some options.

My latest astroimaging acquisition is a Hydrogen alpha filter. This filter has a very narrow bandpass and only allows light within 13nm of a wavelength of 656nm to pass through it (normal human vision at night is between 400 and 600nm). Some types of nebulae (emission nebulae, planetary nebulae and supernovae remnants) glow particularly strongly at a wavelength of 656nm due to the excitation state of the hydrogen gas in the nebula.

The advantage of using the filter is that it cuts out all light pollution and all ‘visible’ light and only allows the nebula and stars to show. The CCD chips in the cameras are sensitive to this light so you can achieve very high contrast images of nebula, impossible to achieve with filters that allow visible light through. The images are inky black where there is no nebula so even the faintest wisps can show.

Over the coming weeks and months expect to see images taken using this filter appear in the astroimages gallery.

I’ve invested in some colour filters and a filter wheel for my astroimaging setup so I’m going to be posting some colour astroimages up over the coming months, I’ve already posted my first LRGB image of M27 into the gallery.

I thought I’d take a few words to explain how this works. The CCD camera I have is monochrome, these are generally better then singleshot colour cameras as they have a higher resolution and there are no filters in front of the chip. So to get monochrome images it’s just a case of capturing multiple exposures and stacking them in software to increase the signal to noise ratio. To get colour you need to take monochrome images through red, green and blue filters. The filters are very precisely made so they only pass through the correct wavelengths, they also block any infrared light which the cameras are sensitive to and can cause problems. They are also manufactured to ensure that they focus the light from the telescope to the same place, so you don’t have to refocus when you change filters.

The filters are held in a filterwheel, this is a mechanical device driven by batteries that rotates the filters into the lightpath at the push of a button. So there’s no requirement to dismantle the setup to put in the next filter.

So what is LRGB? An LRGB image is made up of Luminance data (monochrome), Red, Green and Blue data. What you do is capture a lot of high quality monochrome data. This provides all of the detail in the final image. You then capture some data through each of the coloured filters, this data can be with much shorter exposures and far lower quality. This colour data can then even be binned, i.e. each square of 4 pixels is summed together to make 1 pixel.  You can also blur it with a Gaussian blur filter to reduce colour noise in the final image. Software is used to combine the three images taken through the coloured filters into what looks like a blurred, low resolution colour image of the object.

Now comes the clever bit, the human eye is really good at picking out detail in monochrome images, it’s rubbish with colour. So what you do is layer the colour behind the monochrome (luminance) data. Lo and behold you have a high resolution colour image!

I know you’ve been waiting for it eagerly since I posted Trophy #1 and here it is.

This one was awarded for being runners up in the Pembroke Cup competition in the Newbury league. Don’t worry, there isn’t going to be a Trophy #3 entry.

This is the first table tennis trophy awarded to me for the past season. Best player in Division 3.

Best player means the player with most wins and not necessarily the ‘best’. There were at least three players in the Division were better than me but didn’t win as many matches. This has been the traditional method of working out who wins the best player award for many years.

Rock Band, just how good is this?

I’ve played all the Guitar Hero games from the very beginning so I’m pretty good at plastic guitar now (still get whooped by my nephew though, boo) and played through Hard difficulty without any problems. Nearly finished Expert level as well now.

The game also comes with plastic drums (oh yes) and I’ve never played drums before, I found it pretty tough going to start with on Easy level! But now I can smack out a beat on Medium pretty good, dead chuffed that I can do it although alternate right hand and right foot beats still confuse my brain! So you can see what the drums are like check out this YouTube video of someone playing Expert level, that’ll be me soon!

I’ll not mention vocals, except I can’t sing!