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!
We have adopted “Mini”, a 3 year old female silver tabby cat, from the RSPCA. She’s lovely.. 🙂
According to Panorama from the BBC in the UK it appears Sky TV in the UK had a subsidiary involved with people cracking On Digital’s smartcards and also with people running a website to share the keys from those smartcards.
Of course News Corporation is a multinational, so it wouldn’t surprise you to know that there are now allegations that they were involved in similar antics here in Australia:
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?
Work (and having a tree fall on our house) has kept me busy recently, so for now here’s a few more recent photos taken with my Galaxy Nexus at one of our favourite places for walking, Cardinia Reservoir Park. All of these are taken on or from the walk on the wall of the reservoir dam.
The photos of Donna and myself are taken with the front facing camera, which has a lower resolution. The rainbow one is my favourite I think!
Thanks to the encouragement of my wonderful wife I’ve started transforming some photos I’ve got into black and white and learning that a lack of colour can be quite magical. So much so that I’ve started a “Black and White” category in my RedBubble gallery. There are six there so far, of which you can see two examples below.
Hope you like them!
Donna and I were out walking yesterday evening whilst waiting for our dinner to cook at home, and took a walk at Sherbrooke Falls on Mount Dandenong. The cloud was low on the mountain and it was beautiful to have the place to ourselves with just the birds and the occasional wallaby.
The last week has been fabulous with my normal walk to the station to go to work gently warmed by the spring sun coming up over Mount Dandenong. It really is feeling (for the moment at least) that spring is finally here!
