Physicsman

Hope it's not one of those little blue ones! Just stay clear of Jonathan's blue tablets then, Shaun!!

An update that's not really an update.... Work progressing well. An awkward, arm-stretching task to come, but hoping to get pics up by Saturday. Enough of a tease, Jonathan? 😇

Hi Shaun. Good to hear from you, and the humour is much appreciated. Very much in keeping with the input from the rest of the gang on here. The elements of the layout - viaduct, bridges, shed, walking etc. - take a lot of time, as you well know from your own experience. For some things it'd be easy to go for the quick fix, but then it wouldn't be my own work. The current construction might be at a presentable stage in a week's time, we shall see!

Railway modelling is really great fun all the time, isn't it? Don't think I was being serious there. Watching glue dry isn't exciting, but productive. No clues or hints, except to say don't expect anything spectacular! I'm simply modelling a prototype situation on the S&C and it's going to take quite a while to build all the components of the scene. No further comments from me until I post something modelling related, whenever that might be..... 😀😊

I'd better put a short update on here as I DID "promise" some pics on Thursday. And, of course, they didn't materialise..... I'll post 3 pics below, but I have to admit that no work has been done on the underbridge area for a couple of days, so the rear embankments are still in need of tidying up and grassing etc. I'm currently working on something that I think may take me 10 days to 2 weeks to complete. A really fun project, but I'm just going to get on with it and I'll post details once things are finished. And I'm not giving any teasers or hints!

Absolutely fine, Richard. There'll be a flurry of layout stuff in a few days, so discussing Kubrick's film, space etc sounds good to me! I went to see the film when it was released. I was in awe of the special effects, music score and enormity of the whole thing. Though as a ten year old, like many older people, I hadn't a clue what the ending meant. Worth reading Clarke's early 50s novella "The Sentinel" and the original 2001 book - set at Saturn, not Jupiter - for insights. First time I read the phrase "It's full of stars" I tingled all over, and it still has that effect. As a Physicist I'm strongly in the camp that there are many, many discoveries yet to be made. Revising current theories based on evidence, throwing them out if necessary, is just part and parcel of the Scientific Method. Very exciting! On the subject of the Moon, one of my April images has been published in the June 2022 issue of the national magazine "Astronomy Now", so chuffed about that.

Bridge, Ade? What bridge was that? I've actually just (in the last 2 hours) sprayed the track on the bridge with sleeper grime. Assuming I can breathe in there tomorrow I'll get more grass down and by Thursday it may be presentable enough to get the pics I promised. I also, in the steps of Putin, have an on going "special operation", but that will be evident by the end of the coming weekend. I hope.... Glad you like the moon pics. More moon over the next few months and Jupiter later this year.

Right, here are a couple of images from last week. For those not interested, switch off now, as I want to explain something about these pics. What you see is not a simple "fit the camera, press the shutter, take a pic" type of thing. You can do that, but the results wouldn't be anywhere near as good - for reasons that I'd have to ramble about, and you don't want to hear it on here! The first pic is a composite image of 5 separate images, "mosaiced" together. EACH of these separate images is the result of 4000 images taken over a 45-50s interval, with 80-90% rejected (so keeping the best 10%, or 400 frames), and the best ones stacked by software to produce - effectively - 400 pics superimposed EXACTLY on top of each other to produce one, low noise image. Amazing that the pic you see is really the end result of about 30,000 images taken over 5 minutes and using 30Gb of hard drive space. The final loss-free TIF file comes in at around 40Mb. I can't post that on here, so have to degrade it to a 2Mb Jpeg file. Similar story with the second image. The first pic shows the northern part of the moon, covering around 800 x 800 miles. The large "curved" feature at middle left is the Sinus Iridum. This is the north/western remnants of what would have been a 150 mile wide crater, whose southern/eastern flanks were flooded by lava fill when the large, plain area (Mare Imbrium) was created around 4bn years ago. The Mare is covered in smaller craters, but by the time this formed, most of the major bombardment of the moon (and Earth etc) had diminished as debris from the early solar system had already impacted other objects or had fallen into the sun. The second pic shows the southern area of the moon. Very heavily cratered, with the newer (3.5bn years!!) superimposed on the older. The moon's crust was thicker here, and no major bombarding objects penetrated deep enough to cause large scale lava flows to "smother" the craters. The very large crater is Clavius, around 140 miles in diameter - it has several craters inside it. The smaller (55 miles) crater towards the top is Tycho, one of the youngest large craters on the moon (300 million years?) Tycho was the site of the discovery of the black sentinel in Kubrick's 1968 classic film "2001, A Space Odyssey". There you go, a potted summary in a few paragraphs! Btw, these pics are very data rich - the original TIF files can be expanded to larger than laptop screen size with no pixellation. Don't think the jpegs will be so obliging! Jeff

No problem, David. I'm away from the laptop at the moment, but if you look on here in an hour or two I'll post another mosaic from last Wednesday, from a totally different area of the moon with much older terrain.

Rob, agreed, about 60ish miles. So, Ade, the distance from left to right across the photo is about 600 miles, or the distance from Land's End to John O'Groats. The moon is 2160 miles in diameter, a quarter as wide as the Earth. I'll remember to put data in both metric and Imperial in future.

As requested by a few people, another moon pic - this one was taken last Wednesday, May 11. The original TIF file was over 20Mb, obtained from 4Gb of data taken over a 50 second period. The large crater is Copernicus, one of the youngest on the moon (only 800 million years old) and about 100km across.

Give 'em an inch....... and they take a millimetre!! Good response, lads. Sorry that you'll have to wait, but I have a few (thousand) things yet to do. Rob, tell Burton to stay tuned in!

Update.... The underbridge is now sat in position with track fitted in place. Track will be grimed tomorrow. Embankments to the rear of the bridge are in, covered to the flock stage. Base grass tomorrow. Around 1000 stones are in the walling moving away from the bridge. More will be needed - maybe in a few days. Pics will appear later this week, probably Thursday.

Thanks for that, Peter. It was a really lovely evening in the "far" north (Cumbria!!), too. I obtained some spectacular images of the moon last night - may put a couple in here when processing is done. 248Gb of data in 36 images in 90 minutes. Good job I've got some SSD back-up drives.

Additional pic. Will upload a few more in 2-3 days when some grass has gone down and a bit of stone walling added in.

Quick update, then. The underbridge isn't yet fixed in place. I have a little bit of tidying up to do with the pointing, yet. The "retaining wall" - just a standard square-block stone structure to keep the left embankment away from the road - has only just been built and had a quick wash of paint. The position of the demarcation "proper" stone walling is clear, veering off to the left. The flock is a VERY rough base cover. I sometimes wonder why I bother as it nearly always ends up covered in grass fibres of one length or another. The Paint masterpiece gives the general idea of what is planned.

Bit busy with non-modelling stuff at the mo, but will put a couple of pics on here later. You bunch of slave drivers! 🤣

Jonathan, I COULD NOT AGREE MORE. And there is one specific layout/train set on this Forum where exactly that happens - though Rule 1, of course, can be endlessly invoked. Nobody forces us to look at any of the threads, so I suppose the "thread holder" can choose to post whatever they like. For Gill Head, I'm very much aware of a core group of 15-20 people who regularly look on here. I'm not here to entertain, per se, but it bugs me if I feel I'm endlessly repeating myself (which I'm not). I could add some variety with a video or ten.....NO, not my style.

DAS just not true........ May be able to find an incy wincy pic for you, Ade.....tune in later!

Good to see those pics back on the thread, Jay. Keep up the excellent work on both layouts. Jeff

A lot of work has been done in the underbridge area since Friday. Landforms, a roadbase and a basic flock covering have gone in and the (completed) bridge continues to soak up dilute paint washes. To avoid "same old, same old" postings, I'll show the state of play in a few days. Tomorrow I'll be starting on an embankment retaining wall, so that'll keep me busy. I know some people like the daily format, and it's no inconvenience to me. However, I'm acutely (too much, probably) determined to avoid posting "similar" stuff (5 hours additional daily work may not be visible in the pics) and switching people's interest off. J.

Next update will probably be the end of next week, at the earliest. Daily updates are rather pointless, aren't they? Should be something different for people to look at by then.

Pics 1/2, front of underbridge, as it stands. Pics 3/4 - rear of bridge, arch ring etc done today. Pic 5 - location of bridge when in use.

That's a very good guess, Jonathan. Just opening the 28th 1kg pack of DAS that I've used on Gill Head. Proper pics coming very shortly!

NOT an error in posting. Reminded me of something I'd recently seen on the Forum.