Autumn colours at work.

Going out from the office on Friday I was welcomed by the best kind of Polish autumn: 23 degrees, sun and a firework of red, yellow and orange.

Lovely concrete

Photo from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Over the last 50 years concrete seems to be a material that the French embraced wholeheartedly. And steel. Some more impressions from a recent trip to France can be found here.

Signs of spring

With the vernal equinox spring came to Poland. We've had a couple of days with 18 °C now, and although it will be a little colder now, one can really feel spring in the air. The signs of spring are everywhere. Above, the most typical messenger of the Polish spring - the storks are back. We spent the weekend in the country side so I had some opportunity to take some springy photos.

The son is looking for frogs in the grass.

There are plenty of frogs now.

The farmers have busy times. The son if fascinated by all the tractors driving about. The neighbour let Max sit in his old Ursus. Although this is the newest of his three tractors.

A bonus stork picture. I'm a bit annoyed that I left my longer lens at home. This is cropped almost at 100% taken at 105mm with the EF 24-105 L-lens.

Jupiter above the crowd

There was a light festival at Wilanów Royal Palace this weekend. Tons of people visited to see the palace illuminated by a fine light show to music. I wonder how many noticed Jupiter watching just above the show?

Weeping gold

Now that autumn firmly is here and the leaves are beautifully colourful I can't resist to add a photo of the famous "golden Polish autumn". This is in a small park not far from home where plenty of weeping willows stand in a row and form a golden curtain in the fall.

Music evening

In the evening people gathered at the square in the old town to listen to an orchestra playing. Some more of my images from Mexico can be found here.

Welcome to the dentist

I love this long narrow path to the dental lab in the end. The cross on the wall is a bit foreboding...
I happened to come across this place when just walking randomly around in the old town. Just this random walking is one of my favourite ways of exploring new places. You never know what you will get to see.

Mexican colours

Was in Santiago de Querétaro for a conference earlier this fall so there will be some photos from there posted here.
We were there just before Mexico celebrates independece day on Sept 16. For the whole week before the city was completely draped in the national colours, with flags, banners, dresses, hats and trinkets all in green, white and red.

Westbahnhof

The U-Bahn station Westbahnhof in Vienna. The walls are bright orange, and quite ugly. As an experiment I decided to strip the image to the bare essentials - only black and white. No grey-scales.
A few more of my photos of Vienna can be found in this gallery.

Electrodes

A couple of years worth of carbon nanotube modified ITO electrodes that I've used in my research. I am not allowed to throw them away, but since they are not reusable there is not really any need to store them in a space wasting sorted manner. Thus, a carton full of electrodes.

Twin towers

A photo of two spectroscopy cuvettes filled with aqueous electrolyte. The cuvettes were used as cells in an electrochromism experiment. I used time-lapse photography to record the process. This photo was taken during the setup of the experiment, but I like the clean style of the photo in its own right.

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.