Here are some pictures taken from the Ridgeway, one of the most ancient travel routes in England. We were on Bury Down looking north across the plain to Oxford. It's a very physics-y landscape now. On the left is the Diamond synchrotron, where they accelerate electrons around a ring to generate high intensity X-rays with the aim of discovering the structure of molecules. It is part of the Harwell site, where a lot of research into civil nuclear power was done. On the right is Didcot power station.
I used the fact that the quantum efficiency of the charge coupled device (CCD) on the back of a digital camera (at 70%) is much higher than that of old-fashioned film (at 4%). I was able to take the following photographs through my binoculars. You wouldn't be able to do this with an old-fashioned camera because the optics of the binoculars reduce the intensity of the light. Only 4% of photons entering the camera are recorded anyway, so 4% of fewer photons makes for no picture. As you can see, 70% of fewer photons produces a decent image.
