Thursday, January 15, 2009

Odds and Ends

Not much time for getting any scopes out recently. I did, however, get my Milburn wedge repaired this evening. Thanks to Ken Milburn himself (the chap who designed and still builds them to order), I got hold of the spare part I needed to repair it, and installed it quite easily. Now I am ready to get back into some scope-based astrophotography! I am planning a trip this weekend, weather-permitting, to a dark sky site to try another Sword of Orion image now that it is getting quite high up in the sky at a decent hour. I am pursuing that one nice, sharp, clear shot of it...

Otherwise, I have been messing around with long exposure star trail imaging. I won't post anything just yet, but I am making good progress with it and the results are nifty. Will post an image once I take something really fancy-schmancy!!!

In other news:

a. This blog was recognized as one of the top 100 Astronomy and Space blogs by the website listed below -

http://www.find-schools-online.com/blog/2008/top-100-space-and-astronomy-blogs/

I track visitors to the blog and noticed that recently a ton of folks have been coming to visit from lands far and wide. It's nice to get some recognition and I wanted to take the opportunity here to thank people for dropping in. If you need coverage of a specific topic you can't find in the blog, let me know - leave a comment!

b. Speaking of recognition, an image I took of an Australian Kookaburra during my last visit to Melbourne was selected to appear in a Melbourne travel guide!! I know it's not an astro image, but I am chuffed nonetheless. It was one of those rare moments where the subject was perfectly positioned and I had my sh*t together with a camera :-) One day I will hopefully make Astronomy Picture Of the Day, but in the meantime this will do nicely! The picture is below, just for fun!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that a gum tree?

Phil said...

No, it's a large fern tree. This was taken in some mountain ranges East of Melbourne, about 30 minutes drive from my parent's home. The mountains are covered in these and big old gum trees.

Anonymous said...

Hey awesome stuff! How did they find your image? Did you have to post it somewhere?

Cheers, Jase

Phil said...

Jase,

I just had it up ion Flickr for the parents to see (as well as other US family). That's where it was picked up. This guys also wanted to use one of my photos of Luna Park but they thought it was the SYD location. After I corrected them they decided to hold the photo for the next Melbourne edition.

Cheers,
Phil

Anonymous said...

Ah ok - cool. I'm hosting my photos on smugmug - it doesn't seem to attract those looking for photos for pubs as much - which is a good and bad thing depending on the situation of course :)

Congrats though - it always feels pretty good when someone else likes your photos :)

Cheers, Jase