Stitching software

I spent a while some time ago taking pictures for this sort of panorama, then not having much success stitching them together – eventually I found a useful bit of software which seem to produce good results – even better, it’s free! (Although only for Windows unfortunately).

It can be downloaded from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

Using it couldn’t be simpler, start the software and open the images you want stitched together and it does the rest.

I’ve had some pretty good results with it so far, although one or two where I didn’t have enough overlap between photos weren’t so good.

Andy

This is very sad news indeed. I regularly look at Joe’s site and would like to think that it will go on as a tribute to him.
Blue skies Joe.

Andy

Hi,

I help run the Museum-Explorer web site along with two other people and wanted to explain some of the reasons for the lack of recent updates to the site.

Basically it all comes down to free time; none of us have very much at the moment!

I now have a one year old daughter (who rightfully demands most of my attention!), a house that requires a lot of work and I relatively recently started a new job which I enjoy a lot more than the previous one, but that seems to be so busy I only occasionally get enough time at lunch to do anything productive on any of the sites I run/help with. Oh, and I also of course run http://www.mossie.org which also doesn’t get as many updates as it should…

Mike also got a new job relatively recently and now spends a lot more of his time travelling around the country, with a corresponding lack of time to do anything productive on the site.

Andrew also got a new job (more recently than either Mike or I) and has also rather mysteriously had a social life grafted on somehow, which means even less time for looking after the Museum-Explorer site!

We’ve thought several times of abandoning the site as we don’t get much time to do work on it, but it does still seem to be used by a small number of people and it provides a handy place to show all of those aircraft photos we’ve uploaded to it over the years 😉

We used to visit museums on a regular basis during the year (it wasn’t uncommon at one time for us to do at least one per month), but don’t currently manage anywhere near that frequency. Unfortunately this means that our information now relies a lot more on others to send updates to us.

A number of people seem to have indicated that they have sent updates and nothing has been done with the information. I know that this was true for one or two people at the time I changed jobs (the e-mail I sent detailing my change of e-mail address for such updates seems not to have arrived in a few cases and some updates went to my old e-mail address which I don’t look at as I can no longer access it and the people concerned didn’t seem keen to provide subsequent updates following this slight debacle), however as far as I know we’ve not received any recent updates from anyone.

If you have e-mailed updates to us and not had a reply, perhaps you could PM me to let me know (or send me an e-mail from my profile page; this goes to a different e-mail address) and we’ll contact everyone for the details.

If you have updates you’d like to send to us, we’d love you to do so. Details of how to contact us can be found on the ‘contact us’ page of the site at http://www.museum-explorer.org.uk/show.php?page=contact. We’ll double check that all of the e-mail addresses are working just in case anyone would like to pass details on… [Edit: Checked these and they are correct]

Mike has a week of holiday coming up, and certainly at the moment he’s planning to spend at least some of his time doing updates to the site. While we cannot guarantee regular updates to the site at the moment (and our rather more hectic lives isn’t much of an excuse…), we’ll certainly see if we can do better at keeping it at least a little more up to date!

Andy

A Blackburn Bluebird apparently! Not one I’d come across before… 😎

Hess Bf110

The IWM London has one engine and a rear fuselage section from the Hess Bf110. I last saw it in person in 2006; photos here: http://www.museum-explorer.org.uk/show.php?page=exhibit&c=15&m=10&y=27&q=&e=339&t=5. I also have photos of the sections at the IWM London in 2000 on the same page. I’ve not been back to the IWM London since 2006, but assume that it’s still there.

I visited the IWM north a couple of weekends ago and they now have a small section of the fuselage of the Hess Bf110 on display as well (marked up when we went as a new display). The restrictions on photography stopped me getting a photo of it however.

Andy

IWM London contents

We have a list of most of the contents of IWM London at http://www.museum-explorer.org.uk/show.php?page=museum_content&c=15&m=10&y=27, however we’ve not gone as far as listing panels from aircraft etc.

Andy

Barnes Wallis Collection

I don’t know where you live, but if you are anywhere near Elvington, you could have a look at the Barnes Wallis Collection housed there. Although fairly small, it contains all sorts of items relating to BW.

See http://www.yorkshireairmuseum.co.uk/collections/wallis/index.asp for further details.

I’m unfortunately somewhat behind with the updates for http://www.mossie.org at the moment, mainly due to the addition to the family least year of my daughter, Aeryn.

I’m slowly starting to get more time to do updates to the site and hope to have things more back to normal shortly!

Andy