We make the invisible visible

Cheers to my mate (David Brodrick) for getting a ticket into the opening of the MaxIV x-ray, particle accelerator, electron zoomer thingy-a-ma-jig…
Now, these guys and gals that design and make these kinda places are pretty cluey I think, makes what we do with planes look a bit agricultural 🙂
Have a look at that section of beamline, its that big chunk of steel that sits on a bigass chunk of concrete wrapped up in a electro-magnet with a little pipe in the middle (straight pipe btw) where the little electrons get zoomed on down.. there are a whole bunch of these straight sections aligned in a big circle that is the x-ray collimator – now these individual beamline bits are alittle bit precise when it comes to positioning and aligning, about 3 decimal places (metric that is) to be exact.. thats pretty cool i reckon. I guess if these are not aligned correctly then the electrons probably go bouncing down the tubes making all kind of a ruckus (thats kinda bad I think) rather than heading straight down the middle and spitting out at each of the instrument stations, which are basically a hole in teh wall with a whole bunch of expensive equipment to try and utilise these x-rays.
I am sure all you scientist types are cringing at my bogan description.. but hey 🙂
Also check out the thickness of the wall and the door plug, i wonder if thats to stop stray x-rays if things go pear shaped 🙂 the way they move the doors is pretty neat, basically looks like a air cushion which moves them around…
‪#‎maxiv‬
‪#‎sweden‬
‪#‎xrays‬

In Album 2016-08-01

The southern perspective. These should give a bit of a idea of the drive out of Geiranger, one of the most popular spots in Norway
The one without the cruise ships was at sunset, 11 pm 🙂 with tickles fast asleep in the back of the car 🙂 and was in fact only 100 metres from where we were staying, however our airbnb spot (the worst we had for the whole trip) did not have any views

In Album 2016-08-01

All over Norway you see houses/cottages perched in the strangest places, for example driving along one side of a fjord you will often notice a building on the other side, my first thought, and kinda never got answered, was how the hell do they get there (to build it or even visit it), there is no road and often its way out in the middle of nowhere. I did see one place on the otherside of a river which had a cool zip-line( flying fox for you aussies 😉 ) with a big bucket across it.
So, here is one of these places, there was one road on this side of the fjord and I pretty sure there was not on the other, definitely no zipline across here either, this one was pretty neat since it was nicely position with the mountains, you can also see a little kummune way over the lake and of course, that rather large flow of ice down a hill, sometimes referred to as a glacier.

#‎landscapephotography
‪#‎norway

3 shot panorama, each shot was bracketed
D750 coupled with Nikkor 70-200 mm f2.8 @ 70mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 1/1.6s (normal) 1/13s (underexposed for teh sky) 5s (over exposed for the shadows)
ISO: 100
out front: just another Norwegian fjord.

yeah, too cool for school, note the unwavering carriage and deployment of the sultanas

After our first night in Norway, the morning called for one thing after we had fresh eggs from the chooks in the backyard, a icecream picnic whilst mum and dad packed the car for the next leg of the trip.
ya can't get more cliche than this for a typical scene from norway, electric green grass fields dotted with 'icecubes' (haybales wrapped in white plastic, interestingly the Scots use black plastic whilst the Norwegians white…) and a mountain peak drizzled in snow in the background.
btw, here is tickles getting the hang of the thumbs up, almost there

Big hills and big skies

so i bought this drone…. 😉

The second day in Norway had us saying 'wow' at just about every corner of the road and by this stage the kids were pretty much over mountains, luckily in Norway there are plenty of other things to captivate their attention, like cool ferries and huge fjords and when all else fails, it's.. 'hey look is that Elsa's (Frozen Movie for those under a rock 🙂 ) castle on that mountain?'
The scale of the mountains in Norway is just something I could not get my head around, it makes our snowny mountains look like peanuts.. the boat in the middle is a bit smaller than one of the many car ferries that operate over there..

ya gotta zoom in on this one, the detail is pretty crazy…all 14000 pixels across..

Norway deserves to be viewed large so zoom on in 🙂

Need directions ? well its not the one in the image here, you need to head down the valley and take a left after the second mountain on the left 🙂
So, its advertised as the largest Glacier in mainland Europe, one which you can (correction) used to be able to walk up onto. Irrespective of what you think of climate change, clearly there is something going on here, if you look at images of this glacier from 2002 and compare it to now, its pretty well all but disappeared, not to mention the 45 minute walk up to the glacier is somewhat less rewarding when all you can see is a chunk of ice 1/3rd the way up the hill 🙁
This image is from the drive into where the glacier is, still a very popular spot with all the tourists, mainly held up by the fact that the cruise ships bus their pax up so you get a complete flood of people at certain times of the day, the highlight of the walk up to the glacier pond was seeing a few ponies in a field, which the kids loved 🙂
‪#‎norway‬
‪#‎briksdalglacier‬