June 2010

Features

View to the north

The day after I sent last month’s piece to press, the swallows arrived on the power line in North Road. In the past, there was more than one line and the swallows looked like notes on a musical stave. A few days after the swallows, the swifts appeared with their characteristic screeching in the sky. In the fields to the north, the goslings are getting bigger, and both Canada geese and greylag have reared successfully. A pair of oystercatchers has been sitting devotedly on a nest and it has been interesting to see the changeover as the male and female swap duties. Last year, I heard the North Road cuckoo on May Day. This year, as I go to press, nothing, although I am told that some have been heard in Reydon. It is surprising, considering the chorus from the warblers early in the morning. We have also witnessed the aerial display of bats in the late evening; they are so quick that I am not sure which they are.

Continuing the birding theme, I have been asked about my pseudonym, Halcyon. It is an old English word for kingfisher. I have seen kingfishers along North Road, but sadly not for some time. When I was very young, I had an imaginary person living at the bottom of the garden; he was a kingfisher. My parents bought a beach hut in the early 70s named ‘Halcyon’. Finally, it means ‘calm, peaceful, tranquil’, an apt description of the area to the north of North Road.

It has been a strange month, with high seas and the temperature dipping to zero over night. The high tides have made it difficult to walk up to Easton Broad except at low tide. The cliffs continue to disappear into the sea. .  . However, I did find an old ‘303’ cartridge, showing that remnants from the War continue to show up.

I have been looking at some old maps of the area and am interested in the two areas of allotments that were at both the seaward and landward end of North Road. The ones to the landward side now form a wildlife haven, but why were they abandoned? The 1928 Ordnance Survey map shows allotments to the seaward side. This land now appears to be a field which houses a horse. When, and why, were the allotments lost?

I am pleased to report that I have been sent more postcard images, which are on the website. I have even picked up some on eBay. If anyone has old postcards that they would like to share or any other historic anecdotes of the area to the north of the Pier, please e-mail me. Hilary sent me this image, which shows the ‘fishing village’ of huts on the North Beach. Does anyone know when it was taken?

Halcyon

halcyon@southwold-northroad.com

www.southwold-northroad.com

The 51st in our series of articles specially written for the Organ by astrophysicist, Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson.

The HERSCHEL space telescope

In May last year, I wrote about the launch of the Herschel Space Telescope, the largest space telescope ever launched. Working at far infrared wavelengths, Herschel’s goal is to study the cool universe, especially the clouds of gas and dust between the stars, where new stars are being formed. Last month, I travelled to Noordwijk in the Netherlands to attend a big conference at which the first scientific results from Herschel were presented.

Herschel is in orbit about one million miles from Earth, on the far side of the Earth from the Sun, so overhead at midnight. After a perfect launch from the European Space Agency’s space port in French Guiana on 14th May 2009, Herschel took two months to reach its orbit and cool down to its operating temperature. The telescope is at –200°C and the detectors are within a small fraction of a degree of absolute zero at –273°C. Science operations began in September and most of the results presented last month at Noordwijk were based on the first month’s observations. Most of the people attending were in their 20s and 30s, but there were a few old-timers like myself who could reminisce with each other about the early days of this project in the 1980s. Four hundred scientists attended the conference, but at least another 1,000 scientists and engineers were involved in the construction of this vast and complex machine.

What has Herschel found so far? The images of dust clouds in our Galaxy are stunning, with a wonderful complexity of filaments and condensations where new stars and solar systems are starting to assemble. The Herschel spectrographs have identified hundreds of atomic and molecular spectral lines, especially from those interstellar molecules that are impossible to study from Earth, water and carbon dioxide, because of the foreground emission from our own atmosphere. Deep surveys with the Herschel far infrared cameras show thousands of galaxies, especially those that are either very cool, or very distant and strongly redshifted. We also think we are finding galaxies at the very moment they have switched on a huge burst of star formation.

The results presented at Noordwijk were an impressive first look at the first data from Herschel. But it’s early days: the new data are pouring in and we have not really had time to digest them. As Chou-en-Lai remarked when asked about the historical significance of the French Revolution: it’s too soon to tell.

A slide-show of the new images from Herschel, with a commentary by your columnist, can be seen on the BBC News web-page at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8688781.stm.

Herschel image of a portion of the Milky Way in the constellation of Vulpecula, the Little Fox.

Stars’n Tides now has an e-mail address for you to send comments and queries: starsntides@southwoldorgan.com.

Past Stars’n Tides articles can be found at http://astro.ic.ac.uk/~mrr/starsntides/.

© Michael Rowan-Robinson 2010

It's the Wine Talking
by Leslie J Brinton of 'In the Pink' 01986 872579

Anticipating in this column last month the prospect of a seafront hotel in Southwold so many years after the Grand was demolished, I am reminded of the excellent choice of such establishments down the coast in Aldeburgh.

As a major refit of the airy and bright Brudenell was completed in April, I am looking forward to my first 2010 trip to that hostelry, the scene of numerous vinous treats in past years when the Aldeburgh Festival Club would meet there and have extensive tutored tastings followed by a congenial supper.

Now the hotel’s owner has assembled an intriguing wine list to accompany their food (rather good the last time I went) and moreover for the adventurous (not the penurious) has released a few bottles from his personal collection: a Riesling from Alsace caught my eye, which we have on our own list, but he has trumped ours with an older vintage, the 1989 no less. £80.

But you can get away with much less than that, which is what I shall be doing when I next visit. Should you yourself visit this month, watch out for famous musicians who will be appearing at the Aldeburgh Festival. . .

Leslie J Brinton