An Audience with Neil Armstrong

CPA Australia presents An Audience with Neil Armstrong:

7 Minutes of Terror

5th August Guys ... Curiosity touches down on Mars ... if it can get through this:


Thanks BoingBoing

WooHoo! They did it!

He Guards the Sky

Best Stargazing in the World!

Well done Tekapo! You guys finally made it! Also well done to the awesome people at Earth and Sky Tekapo for that part you played in this.  You can expect a visit from at least SOME of the 1200mm crew later this year :)

Bill ... looking at you dude, wanna go?

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1200 is investigaing this Pintrest thing ... well Val is anyways, let see if it works, or increases traffic shall we?

20 plus 40 is 60 ...

Took the new Camera out for a blatt tonight, to the satellite farm just out of WW.  Liking it so far, have to keep away from the stupidly High ISOs tho ...

More on this as it develops .. meanwhile, 2 shots up on teh Flickr

Calamity, Cameras and Transit

May you live in interesting times, goes the Chinese curse.  And boy have I been appreciating that curse recently.  First there was the break in and loss of the 20D ... I've already told that story here, so you might know of it already.  So .. the 60D arrived!  We'd had it for four days, then I fell 4 meters off a cliff.  Carrying it.  I and the camera got a dunking in freezing cold water.

The good news is that 48 hours in the hot water cupboard with some dessicant revived the camera.  And it seems to be as good as new.  What a relief!  The weather and other environmental factors (scumbag moon) have prohibited me from starting up the star shots since the weekend, but I hope you will follow me on this journey of exploration.

Anyways ... on to today.  Today being of course, the sixth of the sixth, transit of Venus time!  We had clear skies this morning, for a little while, then clouds came rolling in to obscure 1st contact on the transit, with patchy clouds we got a small viewing around 11:30 this morning, we saw Venus halo'd against the star, and then it rained.

And rained.

Hopes were dashed, until around 4pm, the sky cleared right up and we got some beautiful stuff then!  Just as Venus was approaching egress, we finally started seeing some awesome stuff!

This is shot with the new camera and the awesome solar observing rig we hand built for the occasion.  Venus is the dark circle at the bottom and the other blotches that look like dirt on the ccd are actually sunspots :D  Added bonus there!

Hopefully gfkBill will post the shots he managed to get as well, but all in all, a good day :D

And here's that solar observing rig :D