Drawing Tuesday - Museum of Docklands

The porter's badges intrigued me, but the lights and darks and subtle angles of the chain won out...

Hard to believe this took all morning - 

It was useful to have a 2D representation (=photo, =another way of looking) of the hook, to get its angle right ... my first attempt was way off the mark -

Another chain, by Judith -

 More hooks (and me), by Jo -

Carol's pattern-making tool box -

 Judith's bell-and-barrel abstraction -

 Uniform coat of a waterman, by Joyce -

 Benin leopard (with embossed spots) by Mags -

 Two by Sue - a ceramic Jamaican lady, and a detail of a door -

Among Jo's output were these coffee cups -

 Najlaa's botanicals from 1828 magazines -

 Janet B's jugs

 Janet K's Benin sculptures -

 Two views of a barrow -

Janet K

Linda

Extracurricular activities 

Carol finished her machine embroidery -

 Weaving is coming out of the woodwork!

Najlaa

Drawing-a-day seems to have a hold on Mags ...

A6 sketchbook

Tiny sketchbook!

Judith developed the marionette puppet she drew last week into a fearsome crew -

Voyager - to Uranus

These images are from a Sky at Night programme from 1986, when Voyager 2, which was launched in August 1977, had travelled beyond Saturn to this distant "ice giant" (temperature about -216 degrees). (Watch it and others on the BBC iplayer, here.)

Uranus has a small rocky core, but mostly consists of a hot, dense fluid of  water, methane and ammonia. It orbits the sun every 84 years, and rotates on its axis every 17 hours.

Interestingly, its axis is perpendicular to its orbit - the "hot spot" in the image is the south pole - and even more interestingly, because of the retention of heat by the atmosphere, and convection in its fluids, the temperature is much the same as at the north pole. The magnetic axis is tipped at 55 degrees from the axis of rotation, and the magnetic field is about a third the strength of Earth's - the planet's fast rotation creates a dynamo effect. 

Images show that Uranus has banding - the red spot is the south pole

The "donut" circles in the images are artefacts, due to the camera, and the pink crescent is an artefact of a different sort. The colours arise from the different filters used in separate photographs, for each of which the radius is different; combining them leaves "bare areas" around the edge -

 Special methane filters were used to look at the atmosphere. The blue crescent indicates the area of the planet that's free of high haze layers; the red ring shows areas of haze around the equator -

The atmosphere is now known to contain hydrogen, helium, and a little methane.

It was known from telescopic observation that Uranus had five moons, and Voyager discovered two more; now, it is known to have 27 moons, all named after characters in the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

Miranda "has canyons like Mars, grooves like Ganymede,
and compressional forms like Mercury" - a range of terrain

Umbriel has an old surface with very large craters

Titania has small craters and lots of rifts

The first picture of the 9 rings - some have "shepherd satellites" that
keep the fine particles of the rings organised

A longer exposure (96 seconds) in scattering light;
the long specks are due to the length of the exposure
as Voyager sped past at about a million miles a day,
50,000 miles above the planet

Next planet: Neptune

Having visited four planets,Voyager 2 is now - more than 40 years after launch - beyond the solar system, in interstellar space, having visited Neptune in 1989. The last solid body it studied was Neptune's moon Triton. It's travelling at 470 million kilometers a year, and Voyager 1, which visited Jupiter and Saturn, has also left the solar system, travelling 520 million kilometers a year on a different trajectory.

In those four decades, technology has made leaps and bounds - state of the art in 1986 still included computers with green screens, remember those? Digital manipulation - making false-colour images - took "a day or so", partly because of the low light levels at that distance from the sun.

Trees 'R' Us

It's Sunday evening and it's been a busy few days. I've been to Norwich to see the Elisabeth Frink exhibition at the university art centre (till 24th) which captivated me completely but didn't allow photography ... which is good because it makes you draw-to-remember, and drawing makes you look, and that degree of looking makes you see things you can't articulate but feel-and-understand.

 Also there was the east-anglian sky, filling half of the visual field (no hills, very few tall buildings) and in the rural(ish) setting, a chance to see trees against that sky -

from the cafe

from the (parked) car

just because ... of its lovely fuzziness...

We also went to Blickling Hall, with its wonderfully wide and long yew hedges, planted in the 1740s I was told - the insides like the path to Sleeping Beauty's castle by now -

 but looking very kempt on the outside... (and with pollarded trees behind) -

And today, a captivating course at City Lit about Godzilla - the 1954 film (Japanese) and its (many! often American!) remakes, and the context of their content. Too short a day, and my head is spinning.

Studio Saturday

Now that the kiln has proved it works, I need to make some more fabric pots - which involves a rethink. And at the moment so much else needs doing! - so I'm having a little break. Besides, it's really cold....

Excuses, excuses. 

This is how I left it -

The window display gets the afternoon sun

January's output from the little kiln

A gathering of screenshots

Star chart used 1400 years ago - before telescopes

Lots of people have no time for instagram and indeed it takes up as much time as you let it. I love to see the pictures and also like to send something along, occasionally, that would interest a friend. And ("once a librarian, always a librarian") I find things that would interest non-IGers, so for these I take a screenshot and - you know how it goes - don't get around to sending them along.

So here are the screenshots from January's posts. We'll start with a lot of info about dark energy, thanks to new discoveries of the Chandra X-ray telescope (click on pic to enlarge and read) -

 This New Yorker cartoon hit a nerve with lots of people! -

One for the woodblock printers - getting baren marks deliberately -

At first it looks like nothing, and then you realise it's a skilled and beautiful and evocative print of somewhere ... somewhere ... you've actually been -

Oh those old city directories - what a source of information! -

Rachel Whiteread's cast concrete house, turning the inside to the outside, looks lonely, the last one left standing ... andvit too is about to be knocked down -

One for those who re-read Virginia Woolf - the subtitle of Katharine Smith's book is "Seeking solace in Virginia Woolf" -

This photo makes me smile -

And so does this one -

Whereas this beadwork makes me gasp -

And this is quite a different view of a zen garden; what happens next? -