The Moon, Jupiter and Venus tonight converged in a wonderfully clear sky. Grabbing my camera I snapped a couple of pictures which do little justice to this wonderfully serene view. The light pollution from Brighton did a good job of blocking out much of the rest of the sky leaving an extremely clear view of this conjunction. Seeing three close stellar objects in a small window of the sky makes you really wonder about the skies on other planets. Just imagine the spectacular vistas there must be on the surface of far flung systems. Especially the more  active systems or highly compacted clusters and galaxies.

Our skies are pretty tame on the whole with stellar events of significance few and far between. This event even though insignificant held me in fascination; its a shame that only in my imagination could I conceive the jaw dropping and totally overwhelming vistas that must exist throughout the universe.

You can find some lovely images here.

Comet Holmes was a pretty understated but important example of how we are surrounded by a huge variety of stellar objects. Expanding to become the largest object in our solar system whatever happened to this comet must have been pretty dramatic.

Knowing that Comet Holmes was visible to the naked eye myself and some friends decided to go out on the Downs to do some star gazing. We found a great spot in a car park near Devils Dyke and started setting up. A couple of dubious cars were already lurking and we guessed this must be a dogging spot. When two women and three men got out of the car, the lonely sexual desperados must have thought their luck was in. As I got out my tripod they must have really got excited at the kinky potential of what we could all be doing. Unfortunately this must have been shattered when I setup my astronomical binoculars; and tea, biscuits and a hip flask of lovely whisky were passed around.

One of the doggers immediately left in obvious disgust, then after about ten minutes the final car departed but what was truly astonishing was that as the last car past us a bloke leaned out and shouted “GET A LIFE”. After an ironic chuckle, we continued to waste our lives looking at the infinite wonders of the Universe rather than participating in the fulfilling act of sticking our cocks through car windows.

Every morning at about 8.30am a car steams past my window making this awful sound that is obviously trying to sound like a blow-off valve on a high performance car. The thing is the car is a 1990-ish Toyota ‘crap’ model. It would never have had turbo or sports gears. When this thing drives past it sounds like someone has just let the pressure valve off a steam engine. A farty pfffffffffffffffffff sound on gear changing cannot be something serious car modder could truly want.

Well I found the culprit.

http://www.makesyouthink.com/turbosound/

Now if it was a novelty 80’s horn at least it has some entertainment value.

I love facts about Brighton, and there is always something new to find out. I remember talking to a taxi driver who mentioned about an old book called the The Old Ocean Bauble, where he said it is stated that there was at one point an Open House for every five people in Brighton. I think ill try and track down this book and have a look. There was also a Vapour Baths run buy a guy called Sake Dean Mohammed who was a regency ‘Shampooing Surgeon’- fascinating.

One of the things that has held particular interest to me is the old freight railway from Kemptown to Brighton station as it passed directly under our school yard at Elm Grove School. There used to be a great rumour that a worker on the line was killed in an accident and you could still hear him moaning in the now sealed tunnels. Superb!

So I am going to have a little look around as I cannot find any old maps of the route. I have the start and end points and I thought next time its a nice day and I am out and about I will track where this railway line went and put the map on here. So in the mean time I found this great picture of Volks Railway in a storm. The interesting thing to note is that it appears to be at least 10 feet raised above the ground. I wonder if the land was raised or track lowered?