Jack Bruce

I was sad to hear of Jack Bruce's passing. In Cream he was one of the creators of psychedelic and heavy rock. Every kid that picks up a bass guitar learns the riff for Sunshine of Your Love. Those sounds are all around us now, part of the everyday sonic environment.

After that he was in Tony Williams Lifetime, the band that inspired Miles Davis to explore rock music. Jazz-rock also is all around us now, even for people who don't choose to listen to it: TV show themes, film music, even in bloody elevators and when your phone enquiry gets put on hold. Lifetime was pretty much the first jazz-rock band. Full-stop. So there's Jack Bruce helping to kickstart all of that, too. His place in either of his bands would have made him one of the chief architects of the sound of the modern world. To have been in both makes him something very special indeed. We could make a really strong case that he was "Scotland's greatest musician." And that's without mentioning the very many other records and bands he contributed to, many of these really interesting, experimental (like Carla Bley; Michael Mantler; amazing gigs you can find bits of on YouTube).

Recently I'd been listening a lot to Monkjack, one of his solo records. No band, just him singing, piano, one other musician playing Hammond organ; essence of Jack Bruce. It's beautiful - deeply felt, clever, classy classy music. Here he is, not so long ago, with a lovely performance of Weird of Hermiston.

I'm sorry he's gone, a wee bit earlier than many. Our thoughts have to be with his family and close friends. But what a legacy.

"Looking at the night sky"

This time I'm using the blog as a place to assemble some bits and pieces of information about the Astronomy weekend being offered by the Centre for Open Studies, in cooperation with the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. On the weekend of 20 - 22 November, Douglas Cooper and I will be tutors for a weekend titled, Looking at the night sky. Here's the course description from the Open Studies course programme:

We will introduce the night sky, stars and constellations, telescope usage and first steps in astrophotography. Our venue will be Loch Ossian Youth Hostel, a beautiful setting distinguished by its remoteness and consequent dark, star-filled skies. Workshops, computer activities and games in the event of unsuitable weather. See Centre for Open Studies website for details.

So, a weekend introducing Astronomy, in a dark, remote location. Here are some more details:

Where is this place? Loch Ossian is at the eastern end of Rannoch Moor, marked on this map. No public road goes there. Unless you're up for a long walk from the nearest public road (which would be lovely, for those who enjoy such challenges), you get there by train to Corrour station. Corrour station is on the West Highland line, the train line that goes from Glasgow (Queen Street station) to Oban or Fort William. People coming from further south might prefer to leave a car at Rannoch or Bridge of Orchy stations, from where Corrour is just a couple of stops along the West Highland line. The Youth Hostel is about 20 minutes' leisurely walk along a "well made track" from the train station.

Why go there? At left I've included a map showing the amount of artificial light experienced across Europe (from http://www.lightpollution.it/dmsp/). Light pollution now spoils most Europeans' views of the night sky. You'll notice on that map that the biggest remaining dark areas in the continent are in Norway or Scotland. We'll be in the middle of the Scottish dark area, and a long way from even small towns. As long as the weather cooperates we will enjoy very fine views of the beautiful but elusive sights of the night sky. The Milky Way will be obvious. We'll be able to spot the Andromeda Galaxy with our naked eyes.

We're going to the Highlands of Scotland in November. Let's be honest: the weather could be awful! No telescope that you look through with your eyes can compensate for rain and clouds. Even if this happens we'll still be able to discuss the night sky, some modern ideas of planets, stars and the Universe, and telescopes and astrophotography in a remote and beautiful setting.

More on Scottish dark skies here; of course there is now a Dark Sky Park in Galloway, and the island of Coll has been designated a Dark Sky Island.

Youth hostel The SYHA website has more information on Loch Ossian Youth Hostel. You can see that it is comfortable and well managed with due attention to sustainability in a potentially fragile location. We should mention that accommodation will be in its two shared dormitories. No single rooms - sorry! We will supply more hostel information to anybody who signs up.

By the way, just in case there's any doubt, you don't need to be a "youth" to use a Youth Hostel!

What will we be doing? On the Friday and Saturday nights we will look at the sky, clouds allowing, with our own eyes and with telescopes and binoculars, and take some first steps at astrophotography. Douglas and I will help you in this. As we look we can discuss the nature of what we're seeing - some of the best conversations I've ever had about stars, planets, galaxies etc. have been as a wee group of people viewed them in a telescope. If the night is clear we'll keep going until people run out of steam, and start slow and lazy the next morning if necessary.

Bring many layers of warm clothing. You can also bring your own wee telescopes or binoculars, if you want - as long as they'll go on the train! - but Douglas and I will have a couple of telescopes with us.

During the day we'll look at a variety of telescopes and discuss their pros and cons, talk about what's in the night sky just now, how the sky changes, how to plan an observing session, and have a couple of wee talks on modern astrophysics, the natures of the objects we can see, straying a little into big or exotic topics like black holes and the Big Bang. We'll try to respond to suggestions and questions. We'll also have a close look at our very own nearest star, the Sun - "daytime astronomy" (My own research is on the Sun. Solar astronomers talk about "night-time Astronomy", meaning the whole of the rest of the subject!). We'll bring a couple of ideas for astronomical games, etc., for light relief - especially if the clouds do not cooperate and we're stuck inside in the evenings.

Fee The fee of £130 includes accommodation, all meals and tuition. You are responsible for getting there yourself. There are enrolment instructions at this link. If you go straight to enrolment, the title of the weekend is Looking at the night sky and the course code is 16973.

Tutors I work in the Centre for Open Studies, University of Glasgow. Among other duties I teach and organise courses for the public in Astronomy and Physics. I've been doing this job for a long time so I've heard lots of questions and worked out my answers to them. I believe I can speak understandably with all sorts of different people and you can maybe judge that from some of the other posts on this blog (this one, for example, or this one).

Douglas Cooper is a mainstay of several Central Scotland Astronomical societies and a skilled astrophotographer (i.e. photographer of objects in the night sky). You can see some examples of his images here and here. Some of his images of the aurora and noctilucent clouds have been featured on spaceweather.com.

I hope this sounds interesting and indeed exciting and that we might meet at Loch Ossian. I'll probably update and refine this posting over the next couple of weeks.

Credit for the light pollution map: P. Cinzano, F. Falchi (University of Padova), C. D. Elvidge (NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Boulder). Copyright Royal Astronomical Society. Reproduced from the Monthly Notices of the RAS by permission of Blackwell Science.

Shooting a man

I'm working on tonight's class, the second meeting of Hands-On Space Astronomy. This is a course that aims to help people to explore Astronomy in a little bit more depth once they have a little basic knowledge. It relies on the free availability of vast quantities of data from space missions and also some ground-based observatories, and simple tools for accessing, manipulating and combining these data, all tied together nowadays in so-called Virtual Observatories. Some of these tools and the interfaces to them have changed a bit since I last taught the course. Also we would always want to revise a slightly unconventional course like this each time we run it: what went well; what should have been done differently? So there's a bit to prepare and think about.

I needed a breath of air and a wee break from this work so I popped out and went to a slightly more distant sandwich shop than usual. On the way I passed a shop selling home furnishings, devices for the kitchen, etc. A sign in the window said, "No woman ever shot a man while he was doing the dishes." Now, I don't believe this. I think if a woman had decided to shoot a man, while he was doing the dishes would be one of the better moments. His attention would be on the sink, soap suds and what lay beneath them, the thorough removal of fatty grime, etc. He might not even hear the arms-bearing woman come up behind him, far less realise her intention.

You might argue that a man who regularly does dishes is less likely to find himself in the cross-hairs. That might be true but "less likely" does not mean, "never". If the woman has made up her mind to do the deed, an episode of dish-washing won't change her mind. It will only present an opportunity.

Do women themselves sometimes get shot by men while doing the dishes? A whole other, potentially fertile field of discussion is left barren.

So on the whole I will be very surprised if no man anywhere has ever been shot while doing the dishes. Now back to Hands-On Space Astronomy.