One of the attractive features of the annual Tata Steel tournament is that it is not only about the top tournament. One is an event takes place in the hotel Zeeduin, a few minutes’ walk away from the tournament venue. Five years ago, study composer and enthusiast Yochanan Afek proposed having a study solving event at Wijk aan Zee on the final Saturday of the tournament. The idea was taken up, some modest prizes offered and since then the event has been repeated almost every year.
The opening of the Studies Solving Competition, with Jan Timman and his wife standing behind board one solver John Nunn. Jan contributed some very nice endgame compositions – he has a great passion for studies – but was playing in the Tata Steel tournament and could not compete in the Studies Solving.
I was on good form at Wijk, and won the event with 43 points out of the maximum of
45, the highest score achieved in all four years, using 2¼ out of the given three hours.
Nine studies of varying difficulty were provided and the solvers were given three hours to find all the solutions. In my previous report I gave a selection of three studies from the competition for readers to solve. To duplicate the conditions of the event you were to give yourself one hour to solve all three. Here now are the solutions.
Before the prize giving, Oleg Pervakov presents one of his latest studies...
...with which he won second place in the international composing tourney
Sudies expert Harold van der Heijden presenting one of his beautiful studies
Photos by WGM Alina L'Ami
Readers may wonder why John Nunn hasn't written any new chess books recently. The answer is that for the past year he has working with the programmers of the German company Morgenrot-Wolf to create an app which will enable books by Gambit Publications to be read on iPad and Android devices, allowing users to play over all the moves.
The Gambit Reader app is nearing completion – the above is a screenshot of a working prototype
And now for the obligatory astronomy images. The night sky is full of billions of galaxies, from the nearby Andromeda Galaxy to those 13 billion light-years away, which we see as they were not long after the Big Bang. However, one particular galaxy has always been my favourite – M101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. It lies some 21 million light-years away from us and so is not one of the closest galaxies, but its great size makes it an impressive spectacle.
Click to download a full 1920 x 1200 image for your desktop
M101 contains roughly a trillion stars, ten times as many as our own Milky Way, spread out across a disc 170,000 light-years across. The spiral structure of M101 is especially clear as we see it almost face-on, but although it occupies an area of night sky roughly equal to that of the full Moon, it is a very difficult object to view visually. The average brightness of the galaxy is quite low, so that normally all one can see is the relatively bright core. However, long-exposure photography reveals the intricate detail of M101. I made this picture by combining two sets of images, one taken in January 2011 and the other last week. In both cases, I used the T11 telescope of iTelescope.net, and the total exposure time of 110 minutes allowed me to obtain greater detail in the image.
Click to download a full 1920 x 1200 image for your desktop
This galaxy is M104, also known as the Sombrero Galaxy. It lies about 29 million light-years away, and despite appearances, it is, in reality, a spiral galaxy. The fact that we are looking at it almost edge-on makes it hard to see the spiral structure, but it does allow us to appreciate the unusual dust lane, which is actually part of a ring which encircles the galaxy. M104 is unusual not only for its dust lane and large central bulge but also because it has a huge central black hole which weighs in at a billion solar masses.
