Michael Merrifield

Time to update my pinned post, just because this selfie makes me very happy. (Monku View Point on @hermisland, 26 July 2022 at 11PM. 2s exposure on @SonyAlpha 6600 with Samyang 12mm f2 lens, pushed to ISO 10000, just reprocessed with @Lightroom’s amazing AI noise reduction.)

And amazingly this echo of a quasar was visible in my back yard last night. Here I compare the original discovery image of this object (from arxiv.org/abs/0906.5304) with my image from last night, both shown as negatives. It’s very faint… but it’s there! 4/4

This bizarre object is the dying echo of a quasar. An active supermassive black hole in the galaxy, which has since faded away, emitted a beam of light or particles that is only now exciting oxygen gas, which glows green. This tells us how rapidly such quasars can shut down. 3/4

Last night I decided to really push my luck with the Celestron Origin to image the remarkably uninspiring spiral galaxy IC 2497. Here it is in the middle of the image: 1/4 🔭🧪

Last night on the garden camera: just the regulars.

@TimurNegru Sainsbury’s.

69 acres of private Tuscany for €690k ($797k). The land includes an olive grove, a fruit orchard, a cork oak grove and 20 hectares of woodland. A natural spring produces 3,000 litres of water a day, solar panels cover the electricity and yes, it does have wifi. It's also been renovated, 370m² (3,983 sq ft) across 3 floors, 3 beds, 3 baths, with a pool and a sauna. 50 km to Volterra. Off-grid, self-sufficient, sauna, pool..what's missing here?

@elonmusk @Andercot You understand that we get on with stuff in the meantime? And we find plenty of new uses for old data along the way — my first post-PhD paper came up with a novel analysis of data that was already 18 years old. ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992AJ....…

@Andercot For a long time, physics has consisted of waiting around for a new collider or telescope

Physicists: "The greatest issue of our time is that physics is fundamentally incomplete, that we have no firm footing from which to explain our best theories" Also Physicists: "That's completely impossible, the laws of physics forbid it."

@skdh The latest generation of telescopes hasn’t ‘slowed discovery’ in astronomy. And I don’t think I have heard many say that astronomers have lost the plot. Maybe that’s just a less lucrative group to go after, since people really like the pictures and ideas like life elsewhere.

he's entirely right of course. even if you think he is wrong, at the very least physicists should think about why everyone else agrees they've lost the plot.

@Nigel_Farage @TheSun If only the Bank of England had consulted people on what they wanted on their banknotes. Oh wait, they did: bankofengland.co.uk/news/2026/marc…

New polling in @TheSun shows Brits of every age group want to keep Winston Churchill on the £5 note.

@TRobinsonNewEra Didn’t you try to get into the USA using someone else’s passport a few years back? I guess the lifetime zero tolerance policy only extends so far… (8 U.S.C. §1182(a)(6)(C)(i))

From the streets of Luton to addressing members of congress in the United States of America. This time last year I was in solitary confinement, in a maximum security prison full of Islamic extremists - for the crime of exposing the UK's corrupt government, judiciary, and media in a now deleted documentary called SILENCED. Well @Keir_Starmer your attempt to destroy me hasn't worked, I'm in the USA to give a presentation that will expose every failure of consecutive British governments that have been either unwilling or too cowardly to deal with the civilisational problems we now face. I am here to warn all those in congress, the time is now! People must be politically engaged and prepared to fight the battle that is already here - to save the land of the free. #OpenBorders #Immigration

Lovely day for a visit to Clumber Park. Part 2: the birds.

Lovely day for a visit to Clumber Park. Part 1: the flowers.

@NeilDotObrien Shouldn’t a journalist find out what fraction of these entrants are mature students for whom A-levels would likely not be appropriate? You know, if they weren’t pursuing a specific agenda rather than actually reporting…

Endless expansion of higher education is not helping either young people or taxpayers

@SianGriffiths6 Shouldn’t a journalist find out what fraction of these entrants are mature students for whom A-levels would likely not be appropriate? You know, if they weren’t pursuing a specific agenda rather than actually reporting…

One in ten new university students do not have a single A-level thetimes.com/article/0cd60d…

@nickhillman @guardian It’s an irregular noun: the plural is syllabub.

I have a question of supreme (educational) pedantry. Is it ‘syllabuses’ or ‘syllabi’? Years ago, I was taught to use the former (eg on applications for teaching jobs) but I know the latter is common, as here, and the @guardian style guide is, oddly, silent on the matter.

“We want to set the record straight” says @UKRI_News… and then immediately goes on to misrepresent the expenditure on curiosity-driven research by including all QR funding in that “bucket”, though it knows full well that QR does not all go to fund curiosity-driven research.

Garden camera update: squirrels are not sensible.

@alan_shropshire @jfnaylor @MollyAhmed @Barker4Kate @david_sheryn @PaulRussellExp Did an Alan. 3/10. A king, a settlement and a sign were all I managed.

3/10 on “Islands and Inventions" #quizoftheday quizoftheday.co.uk Appalling - only right on ⏰ 🇨🇳 🇸🇭 @AstroMikeMerri @jfnaylor @MollyAhmed @Barker4Kate @david_sheryn @PaulRussellExp

Such a nice night that I stayed up to image a 2nd target, the spiral galaxy NGC 2903. As an experiment, I left Celestron’s nebula filter in. It lost stellar continuum light, but did a lovely job picking up the emission lines that characterise star formation in the spiral arms.

Inspired by last night’s success pointing the Origin south across Nottingham, I had a go at imaging a very well-known piece of sky even lower in the gap between roofs. I think the Horsehead Nebula came out rather nicely.