Of pulpo and parties and all things Galician

Edit: In the end the door to door time from Santiago to Munich yesterday was 13 hours, an average speed of 80 miles. Thankfully the pulpo in my bag neither defrosted nor did the ice-packs which I'd wrapped it in, making it look quite convincingly like an octopus in a suicide vest, set off any security alarms.

--------------------

I have a five hour wait here in Barcelona in between my flights from Santiago and onto Munich where I'll be getting home late tonight. I've been in Iberia for around a week but it feels like far longer. It's been interesting to see Santiago from a very different perspective to that which I used to see it from when it was my home, and in fact I'm able to appreciate it a great deal more as a tourist. It's not a secret that I'm a fan of larger cities, and Santiago always felt pretty limited in many ways, and especially in its cuisine. Though I remain convinced that Galicia has some of the best seafood in the world, there are only so many times that one can eat octopus cooked in the same way, the only variation being in the quantities of salt and paprika before tiring of it. In terms of a city to live in I'm hugely enjoying Munich, the variety of food on offer is world class, the museums are truly spectacular (I went a couple of weeks back to the Alte Pinakothek where there's the most impressive collection of Rubens I've ever seen) and having one of the largest gardens in the world running through the centre is a great luxury which is only going to get better as the weather improves. However, on going back to Santiago this time, able to see the city without the foreshadowing thoughts of having to stay there for many more months gave it a new perspective and freshness.

On the day I arrived in Santiago, having risen at 4 am and having been traveling for the past 12 hours I came straight into the department and gave a talk. I'd spent some of the previous week experimenting with hand drawing slides and then scanning them into the computer, then playing with them in Keynote and had come up with a few ways of illustrating my last paper which I thought should come across pretty well. Unfortunately I only got four slides in before the computer froze and I had to give the rest of the talk on the blackboard, in the absence of slides. This was fine in the end, though thankfully a friend in the audience gave extremely useful feedback on my blackboard technique (which hasn't been exercised very much).

The next day, Saturday, as normal, I got dressed up in my Celtic Monk's robes, my sandals and headed out to the park in the middle of Santiago. I got a few looks, but not as many as the lady in the roman dress that I was walking with. We got to the park and were soon greeted by a crowd sporting everything from gowns and cloaks, to tunics, crowns and kilts. A funny sight though this must have been, this wasn't in aid of accurate historical reinactment, but part of the wedding of a couple of friends from Columbia and Galicia. We'd been requested to dress in traditional Celtic dress, and somehow a monk's robe was the only thing that could be found to fit me.

The wedding itself was a little out of Santiago in a former stables and now restaurant called O Fogar de Santiso, a truly rustic setting for the event. This place is known for the queimada which is held there every week and involves the chanting of ancient incantations over a cauldron of flaming alcohol with coffee beans and sugar. The brew itself is incredibly strong, but the combination of sugar, caffeine and alcohol gives you quite the kick.

The time spent partying was an interesting cultural experience, given that most of the participants were very definitely Galician Galicians. Songs were sung in Gallego and the gaita and drums pumped out the rhythms of local tunes. It was a lot of fun, but as a non-Galician speaker it wasn't easy to join in with this part of the party. I find also that the contrast between my Englishness and the Spanish fiesta ideal is sometimes a stark one and these cultural differences push me even more to an extreme. It's an interesting distinction which I'd like to know how to overcome - drinking more seems to be most people's solution, but somehow it's not something that I feel so comfortable with. Anyway, despite all this, partying with old friends was a lot of fun.

I never had much of an interest in Galician (the language) while living in Santiago, given that I struggled enough with the Spanish, but on returning I can see how rewarding it would be to speak a minority language in a relatively closed and protective culture. Though I can already understand Galician and Portuguese (at least as spoken by Brazilians and Mozambiquanos) I can't string a sentence together in either. As long as I kept up the Spanish actively, learning a variation on the same theme should be pretty enjoyable. Anyway, given that I'm flailing around with German and concentrating on the Chinese at the moment, the task of learning another Iberian language is going to have to wait for now.

A few photos from the event:

My usual Saturday garb:

(on the most part) Galician revellers:

Balkan dancers with Galician beats:

and the happy couple:

It took a couple of days to recover from the wedding and I was back in the office on the Monday, chatting with friends and former colleagues about various projects as the number of people in the department quickly diminished as Easter approached. On Wednesday I took the bus from Santiago down South into the North of Portugal to Braga, where a friend works and we've had project plans for a year or so now since we met last year in Buenos Aires. I was greeted at the bus stop with a bike and we cycled to the university a little outside the city centre and headed to a restaurant to indulge in Francesinha - I've suffered the wrath of the little French girl before and this time was no exception in terms of the barrage of calories which one is faced with. Blood sugar levels in chaos we went back to the department where I set myself up for another talk. I transferred my talk to another computer and got things set up in the seminar room before noticing that where the projector should have been hanging there were bare wires. Given the choice of hunting down another projector or just getting on with it I suggested that I scrap the original talk, and given that the audience was made up of non string theory experts I just gave a talk introducing the basic ideas of the calculations I'd been playing with and tried to steer things roughly towards the results of my last paper. There were plenty of good questions form the group who specialise in General relativity on the one hand and differential equations on the other, and I think that at least they got the basic idea which was all I could ask for.

After the talk we just had a couple of hours to set up our calculation and get things going before we would go our separate ways. Thankfully this was enough time to find all the right references and work out the angle of attack and the interesting questions to ask, so hopefully we've got things to a stage that we can now push things separately over the next couple of months. A meal of Bacalao in the evening, a local white wine and then a stroll into the city to watch the Easter parade which was putting on a pretty extensive set of bible re-enactments was enough to finish me off for the day and I collapsed into the hotel a little before midnight.

Back on the bus the next day after a quick stroll around the rather charming old town of Braga, and I was back in Spain before I knew it, heading on to catch up with old friends and relax a little for the weekend. On Thursday evening the rain was full on in Santiago and I left the flat, unusually for me without my camera. As the light changed and the last evening rays hit the churches with the background of heavy clouds, I realised that I'd probably made a mistake leaving my camera at home. Indeed the rainbow formed quickly and before I knew it we had the most spectacular double rainbow I'd ever seen. Something more interesting was happening though as below the first arc there were several other lines of red, an effect I'd read about, but never seen before.

The classic rainbow display can be calculated easily by looking at how light is reflected  and refracted through spheres. However, if the size of the droplets of water is small enough compared with the wavelength of the light, another effect takes over and the wave nature of light becomes important. As light is diffracted through similarly sized water droplets an interference pattern emerges and distorts the rainbow to give the so called supernumerary bows which were clearly visible on the display I was watching helplessly without my camera. I phoned home desperately to ask my friend to try and find my camera and take some photos for me. Thankfully she did just this, and these are the results:

 

Anyway, this brings us up to Sunday and I'm sat back in the same cafe I was, last week, waiting for another flight and about to get back to the calculation which I've put on hold since leaving Germany. Once I'm back there are three projects which all need a lot of attention and will hopefully start to take form over the next few weeks.

----

Edit: now back in Munich and hoping to be able to find some food today given that my house is devoid of it and the shops are shut. For now I'm just going with caffeine and I'll see how long I can keep going with just this.

I have a full two weeks now in Munich before taking off again early next month to give a talk in Paris and then go on to a conference in Brussels straight after. The adventures continue...

Back in Santiago

Time in Munich has been passing quickly but relatively uneventfully, the sunshine comes and goes and we have hints of summer between the cold snaps in which walks through the elegant streets of Schwabing and into the English garden are really lovely. I've been meeting a few new friends here and there but I'm keeping to myself a little more than I was in Spain, mostly in order to not drown in the various piles which are taking up the rest of my life, the three active projects are going pretty well, though on the language front I'm finding motivation a little hard with the German given how easy life is without it. I discovered the main university library a week or so ago though which looks like it may be my refuge in which I can't escape from the study.

Right now I'm back in Santiago after an exhausting day on the road yesterday - a 4.30 alarm clock followed by a 7am flight to Barcelona and then arriving in Santiago at 3pm, only to give a talk at 4pm. The talk itself was on my last paper and while I'd spent a long time getting the slides ready, the computer breaking down half way through meant that most of the talk was given on the black board. I still need a lot of practice with blackboard talks!

Today is a wonderful sunny day in Santiago and I'm about to head off to the wedding of a couple of good friends, a Colombian and a Galician. Hugely looking forward to seeing lots of good friends again! This will be a super-traditional Galician wedding and I'll be dressed up in something akin to a medieval monks outfit which could be interesting, given the soaring temperatures. Photos of me perspiring are likely to follow.

Next week I'm in the office here for a couple of days before popping down South to the university of Braga in Portugal where I'll be giving a talk (though I can't quite decide what it's going to be on as the group there isn't stringy so yesterday's talk would certainly not work). I'm also hoping to start a collaboration with a friend there as we've been discussing a possible calculation for a year or so now.

Anyway, that's where life is up to at the moment. After I get back to Munich I have a couple of weeks and then the annual silly-season begins with too many travels to even think about, but we'll cross that boarding gate when we come to it....

Jupiter, Io, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa and Uranus from Santiago de Compostela

This may not look like much, but it took a fair few shots to capture it. Jupiter at the moment is one of the brightest objects in the sky, rising around sunset and shining through the night, it's currently the closest it's been to us for almost 50 years. I've caught Jupiter with the four major moons before, but this shot was a bit special. When I enhanced the image, a bright green spot jumped out. I knew what it was having seen on Stellarium a few days earlier what else was in the sky, but I double checked to make sure that I'd really captured the very faint image of Uranus around 2 billion kilometers away from us, just to the top left of the Jovian system. Here's the result (my photo on the right) as compared with Stellarium (on the left):

Here's another image from the same set of shots, but at a different setting on the camera, such that I could get the moons in better resolution. Here's Callisto, Europa, Io, Jupiter and Ganymede

Sundogs burning over Santiago

Back in Santiago and with an intimidating amount to get done in a week before I hit the road again, but I wanted to post some photos I took yesterday.

I was heading into town to see a friend I haven't seen for a couple of months and on the way I noticed the hint of a sundog as the cirrus cloud tickled the 22 degree peripheries of the suns reaches. We went for a walk in the Alameda park in the centre of the city and by the time we got to the point overlooking the hills in the distance, the lone sundog had turned into two brilliant points of light in the sky, dazzlingly colourful and being bisected by a sun column and the faintest hint of an upper tangent arc. It was the strongest display of a double sundog I've ever seen and so I got my normal volley of shots off before the sun disappeared into the clouds:

Keep an eye out over the next few days. It tends to be as the seasons change that we see more of these glorious scenes.

On the road again

I've just moved out of my flat in Santiago, a place which has been my home, when not on the road, for the last three years, and has been a truly wonderful place to live, with a kitchen which could accommodate even my most ridiculous dinners, with rooms to house many friends and couchsurfers, with a view of an amazing palette of greens and wide skies, looking out towards the setting sun.

I've had a friend living with me for the last few weeks while she finds a place of her own, but last night I asked to be alone. I arrived in the flat three years ago, alone, without a bed to sleep on, without memories or knowledge of what life had in store for the next era of my life, and I rather wanted my last night to be alone there as well, sitting, thinking about the last thousand days, about the dinners and friends who've come to eat and stay, about the 120 or so couchsurfers from almost 30 countries who have come into my life for just a few days, to share their stories and to hear tales of the universe, of life in China, of crazy meals and lost days, of a life in research, of what we know and what we don't know. The number of art's students who now have a basic knowledge of the holographic principle is non-negligible, thanks largely to these walls in el Calle Romero Donallo. I wanted to think about the work I've done in this flat, of where I've come since leaving China, of the papers I've written and the papers I almost wrote, of the new collaborations, of the arguments, heated and impassioned which I've had, and which have increased my understanding, or decreased my misunderstanding of the field, of the time spent silent and motionless on the sofa, trying to play mathematical tricks to solve a problem,  of the nights where I couldn't sleep, because every time I started drifting off, mathematica code would stream across my visual field and I would jump out of bed, only to realise that my idea was ludicrous, or not. I wanted to remember the kimchi making parties with crowds of Korean friends coming round to get their taste of home, of the dumpling evenings where a bunch of friends would be put to use in a production line around the dining table, filling jaozi after jaozi with scallions and pork, of the sushi, paella and pulpo lunches where we would take advantage of the wealth of seafood off the Galician coast...and so much more.

This isn't my farewell to Santiago, but I will be here for only another two weeks before Christmas and on the road the rest of the time, at conferences and programs, and so it didn't seem worthwhile to keep the flat. My belongings, boxed and labeled, are taking up most of the spare room of a friend's flat, for the time being, until I send them off to Munich some time before December. My life is temporarily reduced to a rucksack of clothes and a bag with my notebook, my laptop and my camera. The rest of my belongings will sit in silence, enshrouded in cardboard and tape for the next few weeks. This minimisation is something I rather like, though I feel there is more I could do without.

For now I'm waiting to take a train, to catch a bus, to take a plane to England where I'm off to a wedding this weekend, before flying straight on to Vienna where I'll spend two weeks at a school on applications of AdS/CFT to the quark gluon plasma, a subject that I haven't worked actively on this year but which I hope to get back into over the coming weeks. There are still some ideas from last Christmas that one of my collaborators has reignited and I hope to give a push to as soon as possible.

So, for now I say goodbye to my home in Romero Donallo, to the library which has been my home from home over the last two weeks where I've been calculating furiously, to the cafe which has been keeping me well caffeinated and whose waiters would greet me with a sly grin every time I popped in for another giant mug of cortado upon cortado, to the swimming pool which has cleansed my mind every few days and has almost certainly saved me from complete melt-down, while working late into the night, and of course to friends, who I'll be seeing again in a few weeks time when back for the penultimate time, just before heading off to China.

Ugli fish

Tis the season to eat lamprey...

I headed down to the Southern edge of Galicia, where it borders Portugal (a noted absence of guards with AK-47s at the frontier was welcomed!) with some friends this morning to sample the legendary lamprey, an animal which I first came face to face with a couple of years back when I took this photo of the creature in a fish tank outside a restaurant in Santiago.

It's not the most beautiful of fish in the world but I had been promised that, like monkfish and a few other beasts, it tasted a whole lot better than it looked.

Santiago is not the place to sample the best lampreys, but the South of the province is legendary for their fresh fish and fantastic preparation (warning, the squeamish amongst us should perhaps skip this) - the animal is cooked in its own blood, making a rich, luxurious sauce.

We made our way through the Al Barino and Ribeiro wine regions, stopping off in Ribadavia to see the Jewish quarter of this ancient town and wander the streets for a bit, before heading to a pulperia nearby for a little tapas to get the stomach juices going. Traditionally the best pulpo is found inland, where it is taken after freezing at the coast - the non-frozen pulpo is generally quite a bit tougher.

We arrived at the restaurant a little after 3 and started with a cold dish of smoked, stuffed lamprey (lamprea rechea). I have to admit to being a little disappointed with this dish, as the fish is both tough and the flavor of the smoke overpowers the subtle strengths of the meat itself. The stuffing was also nothing to write home about.

When the main plate came along however it was an entirely different story. The simple dish of lampreys stewed in their own juices and served with crutons and rice is not an elegant looking piece of cuisine, but the flavour and texture of the lamprey are truly wonderful. I was taken aback by the amazingly smooth flavour of the meat, somewhere between a white meat and rich fish taste, it's really a powerful meal and I would recommend it to any foody in the area.

Finishing the meal with postres and coffee we made our way to the border with Portugal to burn off a few calories with a walk around the riverside and watched the clouds roll over the hills for a while:

On getting home, just in time for the sunset, I set up the camera from the window of my flat and watched not only a green flash, but a blue flash, as the sun disappeared behind the hills. Sadly I only managed to catch the green flash on camera, but I'll keep a look out over the next few days for similar conditions.

Anyway, no time today to go through any more Mozambique photos but hopefully a couple of evenings this week should see that finished off.

On chaos and the teaching of mathematics, in no particular order

The normal busyness continues apace but I fancy punctuating this chaos with a little update. I'm currently doing some proofreading of a book (not my own) which is both fascinating and densely packed with information (I'll reveal details when possible). At the same time I'm attempting to get two papers finished before Christmas and if at all possible next week.

Ah, yes, and I'm back in Santiago, if only briefly. My carbon footprint continues to increase month on month and December is no exception as I had to come back to Santiago for a week in between my Dublin trip and Christmas. After an 11 hour mammoth journey back to Spain on Thursday (starting from Oxford at 4am and culminating in a 4pm collapse back home) I have lots of things to finish before I head off again on Thursday including giving a short talk to the postdocs and grad students in the department. I'll be introducing in 15 minutes the depths of string theory, gauge theories, the problems with strong coupling dynamics, AdS/CFT and its applications to heavy ion physics, and more importantly why they should care about all this. This will be aimed at a diverse audience ranging from the groups which work on non-linear systems to those in nanotechnology and beyond. Anyway, it'll be a challenge but it should be a fun one.

Christmas farewells are filling the evenings, with a big party last night (in which I managed to make sushi for a group of 30+ whilst avoiding food poisoning, the latter being my principle triumph) and dinners until I leave but somehow I have to get these papers finished and as much of the book proofread as possible in the meantime (snide comments about my own bad spelling are not strictly necessary/neccessarry/necisary/nessacary).

On the night before coming back to Spain I had dinner with a friend of my parents, an ex maths teacher who has spent a great deal of time attempting to spread his ideas for teaching maths not only more effectively, but in a way which avoids the building up of the normal hierarchy of students in a class which leads to a range of bad feeling between those who can and those who can't. The method is simple and I'd like to talk more about this some time, but the basic idea is to get the students to read out a very short section from an appropriately chosen text book following which another student will explain what the section means. I think this is an extremely intelligent way to get pupils not only to be able to solve maths problems but to truly understand the workings of mathematics as they are introduced to it. Far too much emphasis is put on getting kids to learn through repetition of solving problems and not enough is put on building up the background of true understanding which is needed for getting onto ever more complex concepts without getting lost in the forest of terminology and notation. Clearly problem solving itself is necessary for polishing the edges but problem solving is infinitely easier if one has a thorough understand of the internal workings of mathematics rather than simply knowing how to turn the handle.  Unfortunately it seems that getting teachers to try this method is extremely difficult, especially in the current climate where schools are terrified of trying anything new for fear of dropping down the league tables - one of several curses of the current UK education system. Anyway, I'd love to devote some more time to discussing this so we'll see if the Christmas 'break' allows. Until then, it's back to reading and typing...

Cineuropa coming back to Santiago

Just a quick note to advertise Cineuropa, the annual film festival here in Santiago which shows a great array of recent world cinema (all undubbed which is unusual for Spanish cinemas). The program doesn't seem to be up yet but the festival starts on the fourth of November and goes on all month.

Three years ago I went to no films, two years ago I saw one and last year I saw two. If the most obvious sequence holds I should see 720! films this year which means I definitely won't get to finish the papers I've been promising for so many months already. I heated few hours on google chat this week has cleared up a few issues with one paper and muddied a few others. I enjoy the challange of individual problem solving but for me the greatest pleasure of what I do is to discuss with other people and together evolve a coherent picture of a problem and a solution. This has been happening a goodly amount this week on a number of problems which has been a lot of fun!

Jupiter Moon conjunction

It's one of those days where I have a huge list of things to do but somehow nothing can be done in parallel and there's a lot of waiting around, never with quite enough time to get on with something else useful. I write this as I'm waiting for two programs to finish running and give me results for a paper I'm finally writing up having met up with a collaborator in Greece last week - of which more, perhaps, soon.

Anyway, after dinner with some friends last night I got home and saw the moon in near conjunction with Jupiter. I took a few shots and put two of them together to make the following, where Ganymede, Io and Calista were easily seen with the 300mm lens.

Islas Cíes (With thanks to Daniel for the correction)

It's been a decent 13 hour work day so far and it seems like the week is going to continue in this fashion. With two projects to finish off, a talk which I desperately need to write for Milos next week, a friend and visitor (one and the same) turning up on Wednesday, a precarious pile of papers which I need to catch up with before the conference and a dozen other things which absolutely have to be done in and out of work, it looks like it's going to be a busy one.

Sunday saw a trip to the Islas Cíes which I'll post up if I have any time in the next couple of weeks. The Isla is one of Galicia's greatest treasures and the Galicians are very proud of pointing out that it was once voted the best beach in the world in a Guardian list a few years ago. The water is beautifully clear, the sand is truly some of the finest I've ever walked on and the forested hills covering the island are stunning, but any beach which backs onto such East Atlantic waters is going to have some problems in the water temperature department - I managed nothing more than a five minute swim. Anyway, definitely worth a trip across on the ferry from Vigo if you're in town.

A little light and colour

It's been a non-stop week with a depressing number of hours spent simplifying a pair of equations - finally to good effect, but such mindless work is pretty tiresome.

The weekend has also been pretty non-stop but I'm taking a couple of hours this morning to catch up on a little Chinese. I've had some great couchsurfers from the States this week including a photographer who has passed on some great photoshop hints and tips.

I like to follow the position of the sunsets through the year, the position of the moon in the sky through the month and the planets as they pass through the constellations. I find that having scraps of this knowledge mean that wherever I am I feel quite settled because I can orient to these phenomena. We've been having some great sunsets for the last week and the position of the sun right now casts a shadow from the hills in the distance across the slopes to the South with some spectacular sunbeams. This was taken last week as dusk set in.

When my friends were out from England last week we went up to the church on the hill at Pontedeume, a lovely fishing town with some wonderful windy streets through the old town on the slopes. The walk up to the top of the  hill is a good few km of stunning views as the bays below pan out. On the way down we passed some felled trees, and the colours in the early evening were particularly vibrant.

Next week a good swathe of the department is out of office at a meeting but I'll be busy preparing for the conference in Milos towards the end of the month. I'll be talking on a paper we wrote earlier in the year and have to remind myself of a fair few subtleties which have faded in the mean time.

so, until next time...

Glorious

This one was going to wait, but I've just been informed that it's been made the Atmospheric Optics Photo of the day, with many thanks to Les at Atoptics.
Taking the morning flight from Stansted to Santiago on a cloudy day meant that the only place to sit in the plane was on the right hand side, opposite the sun, with a good view of the cloud cover below. I got lucky and had a great view of a glory during most of the flight:

This was one of the clearest I'd ever seen with a very nicely defined double defraction pattern. See here for the partial explanation of the glory.

Atempia

Ten hours on a train from Beijing to Shanghai, eleven hours in a plane from Shanghai to Frankfurt, an hour from Frankfurt to Heathrow, an hour and a half in a bus from Heathrow to Stansted, four hours on the floor overnight in Stansted airport, two hours stood in queues in Stansted, two hours from Stansted to Santiago - home, tired, happy, in need of nutrients, will update when lucid thoughts flow with less interuption from bodily needs.

La noche de San Juan

It's been a hugely busy week and I'm pretty exhausted. Somehow my weekend routine helps at these times as it gets my body clock back in order. I'm in the cafe having just gone through my Spanish and Chinese practice and I'm about to dive back into the book I've been studying for the last couple of weeks on mirror symmetry, which I'd like to speak about at some point soon. It's an excellent book, both for your mind and your body, weighing, as it does, about the same as small child.

I've also had a former collaborator out here for the week which has been enjoyable. He gave a talk on his current work on ABJM and we've chatted through a few ideas for future collaborations, though we admit that we're both too busy with current projects to start anything new - I count this as a good state to be in.

On top of this I've had a couple of great couchsurfers - a brother and sister from Israel who were extremely friendly and talkative but understanding when I had to sit down and get on with work.

One night this week though I headed out to see one of Spain's most famous festivals, La Noche de San Juan. In Galicia on this night, celebrating the summer solstice, fires are lit around the city, Sardines are barbecued, and people come out to party. The big event of the night however is when the partygoers jump over the fires, three times (or more depending on who you speak to) to ward off the evil spirits for the next year. The lighting of fires really does seem to bring people back to a very primeval state and something is triggered in the brains of those around which can be seen in the eyes of the jumpers.

Not being superstitious, but certainly not wanting to miss out on the fun I got my three jumps in, and the buzz of jumping over a large fire in front of a big crowd was certainly worth the risk of a roasting. There seemed to be few casualties other than a couple of twisted ankles from landing on bits of wood, and the evening was generally a lot of fun.

Anyway, here are a few photos...

I hear there may be some photos of me mid-leap so I'll see if I can get hold of them

...now back to the book!

Summer solstice astrophotography

What should really have been one of the worst nights for star-gazing happened this year to be both a moonless and cloudless night here in Galicia. So, I got a few people interested and we all headed up Pico Sacro a little after midnight to go see the stars. Pico Sacro is a hill around 20 minutes outside of Santiago, and deep enough into the countryside to have little light pollution. Indeed half way up the hill you are surrounded by trees and there are a few fine spots to stop at the side of the road and marvel at the night sky.

Indeed it was just as I'd hoped and the swathe of the milky way was very clear. Unfortunately my knowledge of the positions of nebulae is pretty poor and so I wasn't quite sure where the biggies were sitting in the plane of the galaxy. Andromeda was not visible from where we were but looking at my photos after I see that the Lagoon nebula was sticking out very clearly and the Triffid nebula and Eagle nebula would have been easy to spot had I known quite where. Still, this is a learning experience and next time I'll have a much better idea. It's amazing the detail you can pick up with a truly bog standard digital SLR.

Unfortunately it was a pretty windy night (and I haven't yet got hold of the tripod I'm going to be using in China) and so I had to turn the exposure time down to around 20-30 seconds and the ISO up to 1600 to get these shots, which means that they were rather noisy. I've reduced the noise which of course has reduced the clarity a little, but it's still pretty clear what's going on. On the first picture I've annotated a few objects (the nebulae are all just to the left of the names, the Lagoon nebula being the clearest). As usual, click for larger:

If the weather continues like this, I may go again next weekend and by then I should have a Manfrotto to my name which will help with the stability issues.

The nebula I looked up afterwards using Stellarium.

Solar photography, for starters

As I have mentioned before and will probably mention many times before the event, I'll be heading to Shanghai in a few weeks to go and see the solar eclipse with the longest duration of totality this century. I'll be in and around Shanghai for a couple of weeks, and have my eyes set on a few locations for the event itself, though that depends in large part on the weather.

Of course I hope not only to see the event, but also to get some good photos of it, and that requires some preparation on my part. A couple of weeks back I ordered a high grade A4 solar filter sheet and have just had a chance to cut out a part of it to make a trial filter box for my camera. I've made a simple setup with cardboard for now and plan on making something more solid for when I make the trip East. The current setup goes over the end of my 70-300mm lens which I've used on numerous occasions now for solar system photography, with moderate success.

Sadly although we are finally coming out of the period of minimum solar activity, with the first sunspots for many months (ok, there are some subtleties to that statement), right now the surface looks pretty featureless and so there's not much to search for with the new piece of kit. Still as a first try it's looking pretty good and I'll be keeping an eye on the sunspot activity over the next few weeks.

Click to view much larger versions, where some uneven features can be seen at the edges of the solar disk:

Lunar halo over Santiago de Compostela

I went for a walk on Wednesday night and sat in the park for a few hours after a heavy but very enjoyable meal. Though the moon wasn't yet full, as it rose I was witness to a phenomenon I've wanted to see for a long time. Though I've seen perhaps a dozen solar halos this year, this is the first lunar halo I've ever seen. Sadly taking it at 3 in the morning from my lounge didn't give a great shot, but it's pretty conclusively there...

soaking up the sun

I've just arrived home from the library, a little after midnight, walking back in shorts, tea-shirt and flip-flops, feeling wonderfully comfortable. We've been having a fantastic few days of weather here, occasionally tipping the scales a little over 30 degree.

This weekend was the first (almost entirely) non work weekend in quite a while, as an old friend came to visit. Having not seen each other for several years there was plenty of catching up to do over some excellent Galician food and a few local brews.

Saturday we attempted to go to the beach in A Coruna, just fifty minutes by train north of here, but the final couple of kilometers saw us drawn into the sea fog and the temperature dropped by 15 degrees, leaving us shivering in the rather strange twilight zone. With no beach to be seen we found our way to a Japanese restaurant and indulged for lunch, before going to the Museo de Bellas Artes, housing a fine collection of Spanish paintings chronicalling some of the best work of the last 500 years. A nice, well set-out museum and definitely worth checking out if you're in the area.

After a typical Spanish night (something that I can rarely manage), terminating as the sun rose on Sunday morning with venus glinting in the dark blue sky, Sunday was spent lazing around in a park, attempting to defrost after the previous days meteorological surprise. I managed a little reading of the papers I'm currently trying to read through but it was slow and ultimately rather unproductive.

I have around 1000 pages of papers left on my desk at home, of the 3000 or so I had a few months ago. The routine of going to the library at night seems to be working nicely and the simple act of getting away from the computer makes a big difference to my non-programming productiveness. The students in the library on the other hand seem to have different ideas and those sitting around me with laptops are constantly plugged into facebook, their attention spans limited to around 2 minutes before another input of stimuli are needed to get the neurons going again.

Anyway, travel adventures are on hold for now as my passport is in England, awaiting the Chinese visa I'll need to go and see the eclipse in July. For the mean time life revolves around Santiago and while the sunshine lasts, I'm happy to continue this way for a few more weeks.

Santiago Feria and Pulpo Gallego

Another busy week comes to an end. After two set-backs when the battery in my laptop ran out of juice twice, I've managed a full 24 hour run through of the latest code and this allows me to get onto the next stage of a current project.

This week the fair has come to Santiago and the big-wheel in the central park, the Alameda, can be seen from everywhere in the city. After a goodbye dinner with some Korean friends we headed there on Thursday evening and took a stroll around the park with the hoardes of fair-goers, the smell of freshly fried churros and candy-floss mixing with the petrol smells from the engines driving the rides and the sounds of screaming kids. From the top of the big wheel you get a stunning view of the Cathedral, although the wheel spins at a startling speed, giving little time to enjoy the view.

The dynamism at the fair also gave a good chance to try out some rather tricky shots of people in the rather unevenly lit situation. This one of a good friend, and fellow photography enthusiast came as an unusual but rather pleasing shot:

After this the group went off to see a concert (one of many this week) given by one of Spain's top female pop singers. I might have gone had it not been for the fact that I simply can't stand Spanish popular music. Other Spanish music I can enjoy a great deal, but the pop which is played constantly on the radios in the cafes I frequent drives me crazy - the melodramatic female voices and lyrics grating on me like fingernails down a blackboard. So, I ducked out early and headed home.

Friday saw another first when my US couchsurfer suggested we try and get hold of an octopus to cook, Galician style. An hour of boiling the beast later and we had a reasonable rendition of the most popular dish in this region of Spain, together with pimientos de Padrón and a revuelto of asparagus and mushrooms. Together with guests from Columbia, South Africa, Russia, and another American, we ended up with a pretty successful meal though I now realise how subtle the timing of octopus is.

Today I've spent back in the cafe working on code, but have a fantastic meal promised tonight by a Taiwanese couchsurfer who is here with his Japanese friend. Having taken a two year cooking course, this should be quite a meal, and together with the Latvian and Swede due to arrive here some time tonight, it looks like being another thoroughly international evening.

Anyway, this leaves me with some more time to continue these code wars, so I should get on....

Weekend exodus

It's been an enjoyable but busy week. I've spent many hours every day deep in messy coding with Mathematica working on a few different projects in parallel - this is parallel processing of the inefficient variety. Still, they seem to be getting there and I'll be running code on multiple machines over the weekend.

As I was walking home today I was struck, as I always am on a Friday, by the strange weekend exodus from Santiago. The city has a population of around 100,000, around 20 percent of whom are students. I would guess that at least 95% of the students here are from nearby towns and villages and still have strong connections to their homes. On a Thursday night and Friday throughout the day, lines of students can be seen, making their way to the train and bus stations to go home to their parent's houses in the country. I can't help but feel strange when I see this; the idea of university and independence are simply so far removed here from such ideas in England. At university in England the independence that university affords is one of the great benefits, and weekends that can be spent with newfound friends are a large part of this side of life. The idea of going home every weekend to spend time with your family so that your parents can cook and clean for you (frequently, so I hear, supplying several days' food for the students when they come back on Sunday night), is a strange one and I can't help but feel that such a continuous dependency on parents causes students to be less 'worldly' in a rather abstract sense, than their counterparts in other countries where home ties are loosened at a younger age. Note that this is not to equate the number of drunken weekends with maturity, but simply that such strong ties to home (as opposed to family) were rather alien to me at that age.

I write this simply because whenever I see the students heading home with their small suitcases, I can't help but feel a certain sadness. Students should be out, getting away from home, seeing the world and experiencing the highs and lows of life alone, making and breaking friendships and making the mistakes which we all make which turn us from children into adults.

Living in different cultures is not only about observing the differences in lifestyles and values, but trying to understand them so I'd be interested to know the opinion of anyone who takes part in this weekend exodus.