The Man with No Time

It's been a bit longer than I intended, but I'm finally getting around to putting up my SmogCon photodump. I'm not going to put the full album up here, just to save space; as usual I took an awful lot of photos!  I've separated the photos out into a few different categories for ease of viewing. If you're interested, the complete set of photos (in chronological order) can be viewed on my  Flickr account . Painting Competition Spell Draft Iron Arena Board Games & IKRPG General

As it was a nice day today, I decided to do something a little different to get myself out of the house for a while.  Since I moved back to Coventry I've discovered quite a few interesting sounding museums that I want to visit, and I thought that it was the perfect opportunity. A museum might not sound the best place to go on a summer's day, but this one was mostly open air. It was also the closest one to my house, which may or may not have played a part in my choice! The Midlands Air Museum is a small, volunteer-run museum right next to Coventry Airport. It's more of a collection of aeroplanes than a 'proper' museum, with the majority of the exhibits being planes on display outside. But it's' no less interesting for that. It's not a terribly assuming building. But the true gems are sitting outside, behind the hangar. (Credit: David Brown)

Some astronomy news today that I thought was too cool not to share. Astronomers have, for the first time, determined the colour of an exoplanet ! (I've linked to the free PDF preprint there, as the journal article itself is behind a paywall here ) Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a group led by astronomers from the University of Oxford observed secondary eclipses of the exoplanet HD189733. A secondary eclipse if the opposite of a transit event: the planet passes behind the star, leasing to a slight dimming of the total light from the system. In this case though, the group were observing the light that was reflected from the planet's atmosphere. Generally this is mixed in with light being given out by the planet thanks to its high temperature, but at the short wavelengths used for this work these 'thermal' effects are minimal, so the only light is the reflected starlight.  I'm very excited by this piece of science. A blue planet, with clouds made of part...