Brass buskers

This band has an unusual style of busking. Instead of sitting and playing in a place with lots of people they walk around in residential areas and ask for money from people looking out the windows. They play some sort of Balkan Brass Band music, seemingly inspired by Bregovic and the like. They are actually quite good, but with an annoyingly small repertoire.

Horses in my dreams...

A few days ago I took a long walk in the lovely autumn weather. I ended up in one of those places I love in Warsaw that I like to call the Warsaw countryside. It's close to the centre, the landmark PKiN is clearly visible, but still has a nice feeling of serenity.

Mouldy cup

Last week I was at a conference. When I came back to work I found my coffee mug looking like the image above. Obviously something needed to be done. The first thing was of course to extract some mould and put it under the microscope. 

In an optical microscope a network of fibres can be seen. To have a closer look one can but a piece of the mould into the SEM. Then we see this.

Lots of tiny cells clinging to some long fibre like structures. A closer view can look like this.

or like this

Yeah, yeah... the colouring of that last image is a bit hopeless... I was tired. 

I really like these flower-like ends of the fibres.

Apparently mould is really beautiful close up. Another reason not to be too fast with washing your coffee-mug.

Tree stump

This tree is likely to be frequently photographed. It lies just next to the path in one of the more popular valleys in the Polish Tatras, where hundreds of people pass every day during high season. This was the first and last time I was there during the peak of the season. It's really hard to be able to enjoy the nature when you have to stand in line even to get in to the national park.

Typical Poland

A picture showing a very typical Polish landscape. Flat, with plently of small fields of grain. The village can be seen in the distance, and even that symbol of the Polish country-side, a stork, is seen a black smudge over the tree-line.

Hugging crystals

We have a new scanning electron microscope at work. This is an image of two interleaved crystals of hopeite on a zinc surface.

Jazz na Starówce

One of the good things about Warsaw in summer is all the jazz. There is the Warsaw Summer Jazz Days, where Herbie Hancock is playing next week, and Jazz na Starówce, a series of free open-air concerts in the old town. The photo is from the first concert this year and shows Toni Pujol, basist in the Spanish Xavier Dotras Trio.

Stars?

I took the picture above a few days ago. I thought it was very similar to an image I had seen at the Bad Astronomer of a globular star cluster (see below). Somewhat fewer stars, but definetly similar. However, the difference in scale is about 21 orders of magnitude. My image shows silver particles electrodeposited by a colleague on an ITO electrode. The width of the "cluster" is roughly 100 µm. It's a dark field microscope image which is why the particles appear as diamonds, or stars, on a dark background.

M9 by Hubble.

Spring in Warsaw

Finally winter gave away to spring. The last weekend we had some 17 degrees here in Warsaw and the plants are jumping into action. We, and thousands of other Warsovians, took a trip to Powsin to enjoy a walk in the nice sun.

Moon and smoke

Had a walk today in the evening and stopped like frozen (could have been literary seeing that it was almost -15°C) to watch how the smoke from the coal powerplant Siekierki was beautifully backlit by the full moon. Unfortunately I did not have my camera, and the phone picture above does not to it justice.