Dominic Ford

Crepuscular rays

My dad has given me some albums of photos my Great Uncle Ernie took in 1920s. I'm messing around making high-resolution scans. On 26 Oct 1928, Ernie had just bought a shiny new Sunbeam car and took a 75-sec exposure of the "instrument panel". Original print is tiny, but stunning detail @ 2400 dpi.

Happy retirement, @planet4589.bsky.social ! I've always been in awe of your work and look forward to seeing what comes next. I hope you'll be able to visit us in Cambridge (UK) before long!

I'd be curious to know more about how Superior developed the loading screens for BBC games. Doing low-res four-colour art must have been a special skill, yet they always looked great. Who did this, and with what tools?

Nice! I made a labeled version of a similar animation here: in-the-sky.org/news/eclipse...

I would have thought being an ex-FRS would look pretty awesome on your CV. Also: how often do professors with FRSes ever need to write a CV?

Thanks... it took me a while to figure out who you were referring to. Their bio is weird but not totally terrible; you have to go through all the individual CVs to find the really exciting paragraph...

Night Sky Almanac 2026: A stargazer’s guide Buy Night Sky Almanac 2026: A stargazer’s guide by Topalovic, Radmila, Ford, Dominic, Royal Observatory Greenwich, Collins Astronomy (ISBN: 9780008747824) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

The folks at Collins have designed beautiful covers for our books!

www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Sky-Al...

www.amazon.co.uk/2026-Guide-N...

3/3 As an advocate of open-source software, I have published some of the charting software I wrote to generate the charts on GitHub (though the charts in the books received a lot of tidying-up by hand): github.com/dcf21/star-c...

2/3 Whilst working on this, I was saddened to learn of the death of Storm Dunlop in January. The annual Guides were originally started by Storm and Wil Tirion many years ago, and now both the original authors are gone. I hope that in taking it over, we have done justice to the series.

1/3 Been busy over the past six months, after agreeing to produce the star charts for the Collins Guide to the Night Sky (actually four books, as there are multiple editions). Last week, the last of 421 charts went off to the publishers. Now looking forward to seeing it in bookshops in late August

Yes! The photo is taken underneath the Swedish end in Malmö. The Copenhagen end is on the horizon.

@giobusso.bsky.social Is this bridge big enough for you?

That's super interesting, thanks! Did the timings work unmodified on the Master? I've always assumed Superior must have had to do a heck of a lot of testing on all the Acorn hardware variants.

I misspent some of my teenage years reverse-engineering Beeb games to see how they worked, and recall some of yours had really fun encryption (I recall self-modifying EORs). I always wondered why? Presumably it didn't prevent piracy - cloning tapes was easy. Was it to stop people stealing your code?

Presumably when the BBC was released in the US, Acornsoft had to be a bit careful about what software they offered the US market? I'm a bit surprised Superior even re-released Snapper on Play It Again Sam 7, seemingly without fear of litigation.

Absolutely agree! I think we don't worry enough about the PhD 'rite of passage'. So much depends on a good supervisor, and I can think of some really bright students who've quit after 1-2 yrs. I'd say many of the most delivery-focussed people in PLATO have spent time outside academia. :-)

Long ago, I used to make cakes by melting the butter, and the sponge always came out greasy. And so you and KT told me not to do that, and then the cakes were much fluffier. I always wondered what chemistry is going on there...

If I split my time between my flat and my partner's, should I calculate the time-averaged number of cheese graters in my current abode, together with standard deviation?

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Amazon already appears to be taking pre-orders for these four books! I guess that means we need to get a move on with writing them... 😮

www.amazon.co.uk/s?i=stripboo...

Why the BBC making one journalist redundant matters – for our media and democracy | Jane Martinson Kate Lamble’s reporting on Grenfell was public service journalism at its best. But sweeping cuts will make it far harder to replicate, says Guardian columnist Jane Martinson

Kate is a former colleague from my podcasting days, before she moved onto greater fame. She's a brilliant science communicator, who has really great ideas as well as the patience to teach people as untalented as myself. It's a real pity if the BBC doesn't want to employ somebody with her talents.

GitHub - dcf21/star-charter: A command-line tool for producing vector-graphics charts of the night sky in SVG, PDF and PNG formats. A command-line tool for producing vector-graphics charts of the night sky in SVG, PDF and PNG formats. - dcf21/star-charter

A couple of years ago, I wrote a tool for creating charts of the night sky, and shared the code on GitHub. Over the summer, a client asked me to create a large number of sky charts, which means I've added lots of new features and fixed lots of issues. I've just released these as v6.0.

I feel like I saw the future working in Sweden, where there are basically no titles for anyone. But at times it felt deeply weird. For example, I couldn't quite bring myself to start a job application "Dear [first name]", and so wrote "Dear Prof X" despite knowing no Swedish person would write that.

Hey folks. I appear to have finally taken the plunge and decided to join you on Bluesky... Better late then never! :-)