We felt that our adult cat Mini needed a companion and a bit of research indicated that for an adult female a male kitten would give the best chance of a good match. So it was off down to the RSPCA to talk to them about what was possible, and we found they had 3 kittens of which one was male, and he had only just arrived after their internal quarantine and was lovely, so we picked him. Then we hit a hard question – we had to do the registration form for the council and that demanded a name! We were stuck, but then it occurred to us that given we had an adult called “Mini” the obvious choice was going to be “Maxi”.
So meet Maxi Samuel!
He’s remarkably well camouflaged in our house, though that’s not been a problem for him yet..
This morning was a partial solar eclipse in Melbourne. Back up where we saw the total solar eclipse last November they got an annular eclipse which would have been spectacular, but work is too frantic at the moment bringing up a new machine to even think about going up!
The first glimpse of it was from the train going into work with (of course) eclipse glasses (from Ice In Space) and by the time I got to Richmond I remembered I’d not taken a photo so had a go with my phone and the eclipse glasses and came up with this:
My plan though was to go to the playing fields at the University of Melbourne where I’d learnt before (via Twitter) that there would be some astro folks. There was a small group of people there with a telescope set up to project onto a screen at the rear who were having fun trying to keep it on target as it wouldn’t lock into place. The nice thing about projections like this is that you get a nice big image, like this:
I had a couple of left over eclipse glasses from the total eclipse so I passed them around and left them with them, they seemed to go down well!
Friday night I was at the Mount Burnett Observatory for the talk about the ASV’sNew Astronomers Group (NAG), but we took a break from the talk shortly after sunset to look for the two comets in the southern sky that night, C/2011 PANSTARRS and C/2012 F6 Lemmon. It was a lovely clear night, though very windy, and we managed to see both of them. I’d brought my camera and tripod along and got these photographs:
Comet C/2011 PANSTARRS as seen from Mount Burnett Observatory
Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon as seen from Mount Burnett Observatory
…and this time with a passing aircraft…
Then on Saturday night I got this photo of PANSTARRS from Upper Ferntree Gully, visible as a naked eye object.
Sadly PANSTARRS is heading off to the northern hemisphere so we may not get much more of it here in Australia.
My father was a sign writer and glass embosser by trade, working in the business started by his grandfather. He loved old mechanical things and one part of his work that gave him pride was hand painting museum acquisitions to their original standard. Here is a trailer for a steam road wagon originally operated by J.E. Thomas and Sons in Oswestry (and here’s a link to an advert for them, with a different livery).
One summer holiday (1988 I think) I helped him paint three coal railway trucks for the Maritime and Industrial Museum in Cardiff (part of the National Museum at the time), the museum is long gone but they now seem to have moved up to Big Pit museum at Blaenavon).
With just one sleep left to the annual celebration of Sir Isaac Newtons birth on the 25th December I’d like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy Newtonmas and may gravity not weigh you down too much in the coming new year.
This photo was taken this evening at Cardinia of the sun setting through grass, the choice of where the real horizontal lies is yours.
Donna and I travelled up to Trinity Beach, about 20 minutes north of Cairns, for a holiday with a total solar eclipse in the middle of it.
We were really lucky as firstly we nearly didn’t make it up there at all as Jetstar cancelled our flight up and couldn’t get us another seat until Wednesday which would mean missing the eclipse and losing the accomodation we’d booked. Fortunately we were able to get a flight up with Virgin instead on the same day as our cancelled one, but it cost more than the refund from Jetstar. Then there was the weather; we arrived on a nice sunny Sunday and it looked quite promising, but Monday and Tuesday were both pretty cloudy and wet at times, so it wasn’t looking good.
Wednesday morning rolled around and we were up early (with three different alarms, just in case) and it was clearer than the previous days, but still plenty of broken cloud around.
There were probably a few thousand people around on Trinity Beach…
…who watched the partial phases nervously, but with growing excitement, through the cloud.
We were getting close to totality, but a large cloud was looming, and we wondered if we might miss the total eclipse phase!
Our luck held though, and we managed to see totality through broken cloud.
Of course, after third contact and the end of totality the cloud started to clear and we had a good view for once.
The folks down in Cairns (including my friend Ian Grant from the Bureau of Meterology who lent me a 1976 solar eclipse filter) were not so lucky, they saw the partial phases but missed totality due to cloud. An American in front of him told him that was the third time in a row it had happened to him!
This is my attempt to capture the view of the total solar eclipse as seen from Trinity Beach in Queensland, Australia with my D90 DSLR, uploaded to YouTube with a CC-BY license.
Our tripod wasn’t usable unfortunately so this was taken resting on my knee and, as you’ll see, I got distracted by totality so it wandered off target a couple of times. I stopped filming so I could try and take a still photo as it looked like we were about to get clouded out, hence stopping short. We did manage to see the diamond ring just after though!
News Corporation is alleged to have used a security division known as Operational Security to encourage hackers to pirate the smart cards of rival pay TV operators including Austar and Optus, thereby draining them of revenue and devaluing the businesses.
Perhaps FACT, AFACT. MPAA, etc should adjust their “piracy funds terrorism” to warn that by supporting piracy you will be supporting Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation, Sky, Fox News, etc.. That would put a lot more people off..
A while ago I noticed this boarded up old building near some friends of ours in Rose Street, Brunswick. They say that it’s been boarded up for about 20 years now and they have no idea why. Just wondering if anyone knew why this great old place at 69, Rose Street, is abandoned?
