Old Musings - August 2001

A nice quiet week for a change. Had a good game of soccer on Monday night - and did even better on Wednesday during the Uni comps, scoring two goals. (see photo).

On Wednesday, I went and saw the movie that was on at Uni - 'Shrek'. Unlike 'Planet of the Apes', this is a definite two thumbs up deal. . The DVD version gets release early November, and I will ensure that a copy ends up in my DVD collection. Speaking of which, I was a naughty boy yesterday. I found a store that was having a bit of a sale of, and I ended up buying 5 new titles. I'm sure that Jeff and Angela are loathing the day that I purchase my played, cos they just keep on getting roped into DVD nights every time I splurge!

On Friday the camera enthusiasts at work decided to go on another expedition during lunch - this time it was decided to head to the sea, so we ended up at the habour. (And hey!, I've just discovered that I am famous! - There are photos of me all over the web. Well, here at least. )

Web Update
Big changes to the website today!
Although I haven't been updating the site very often I have been hard at work. I have completely revamped the way the photos are managed. All the pages are now automatically generated - and this should make my life a bit easier in the future when adding new stuff. I have added a number of new photos, so feel to go browsing - and don't forget to let me know if you find anything broken (I'm still ironing out the last of the wrinkles).

I am also moving over to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I will slowly be converting all the old pages across. Again, let me know if you see something out of the ordinary

Only a short update for now - and probably the first one that doesn't have some new photos for you to ogle at.

I am busy updating my website behind the scenes - I am hoping to revamp the photos section to make it a bit easier to navigate. This will also make it a lot easier for me to add more photos in the future. At the moment, a decent sized update of the site takes me anywhere from 2 to 4 hours because I do everything manually. With any luck I can get this down to half an hour or so!

Quick and dirty summary :

Weather : Crisp. Gale force (110+kph) winds  over the weekend - but a bit quieter now.
Soccer : Uni-comps are on again. Last week we lost to the winners from the last round 3-0. We had a good kick-about last night - it went on for about an hour and a half under the flood-lights.
Squash : Everybody that I want to play seems to come down with something before I get to play them. For that reason, I am #1 again - but I'm sure that won't last too long.
Bike : Just got my bike back from the shop. A big overhaul this time. Pretty much everything attached to the chain needed to be replaced. Cost me a pretty penny, but it feels like riding a new bike again

Bonus update!

I got another great shot of the moon last night.
Added a translation dictionary - for those that can't understand my Australian gibberish these days.
Added another new wallpaper.

*** It has come to my attention that some people that have subscribed to the webupdate mailing list aren't actually receiving my mails when I update the site. Can you please let me know if you are having this problem?

Another busy week. We have been having nice clear skies lately - which has meant that I have been able to play with my new telescope quite a bit. Unfortunately, the mirrors aren't aligned correctly, which means that the images are a bit blurry - but fear not - I will tinker with it until I get everything just right <g>.

On the other hand, my cheapo monocular / tripod set up is producing the goods. I've just figured out a couple of new tricks to stabilize the tripod even more, and the photos are now a lot more consistent (in a good way). With the terminator now becoming visible, I am starting to get some great shots (see here and here)

On Friday the camera enthusiasts from work decided to go on a photography field trip. No-one could decide on an appropriate location, so we decided to head into the Wollongong Botanical Gardens during lunchtime - which is a convenient 5 minutes stroll away.

The goal - to have fun, learn from others and to get to know what all those extra buttons on your camera actually do. I have already seen some results (someone else had just purchased a digital camera and merrily clicked away - he was the first to post all his results), and I must say they looked impressive.

I've got to admit, that I tried a whole bunch of new stuff. With all the moon-gazing that I have been doing, I have been getting used to cranking the exposure right back and setting the focus to infinity. It made a refreshing difference to use the macro mode to zoom in on a small subject for a change.

Of course, as usual, some of my shots are more, errr.., 'Artistic' than most.

On Tuesday, I became an official Australian statistic - literally. They have just held their 5-yearly census. I stood up and got myself counted.

2 Cents Movie Review : Planet of the Apes. Saw this last night. Pretty special effects, interesting acting by the monkeys - err, I mean apes - Jane Goodall would approve, but in the end it was let down by a plot that was too coincidental and a finish which was somewhat implausible. The movie leaves the audience with more questions than answers. The last 5 minutes felt tacked-on, and it would have been a better finish if they had just left it out. All-in-all I give it a rating of 'Average' - .

Web Update
New Wallpaper ('Once in a Green Moon') added to 'Fun Stuff'
New Rainbow show added to the Wollongong photos
Added photos for photography field trip to the Work section
More photos added to the Astronomy section
Added another Dumb Ozzies photo

It is the start of a new month, so it is time to start off with a fresh page again. I have moved the last one here.

Right, first of all, I haven't updated these pages for a while for two reasons :

a) The week following my last update, it rained. That's it. That is the summary of absolutely everything that happened that week in every last gory detail. It rained. I kid you not. That was all. Well, that and the fact that there was a power outage. But I swear, that was all. Rain and a power cut. Yep that was the week in a nutshell.
b) Luckily, this week was a real beaut. Not a cloud in the sky. It is for this reason that I was far too busy to update my page. I will expand on this in more detail later...

This morning, I finally discovered why the tiles in my dining area were constantly getting sticky - this had been puzzling me for a while now. I just could not figure out why the tiles kept on getting sticky, even though I washed them over and over. I had a look at my plant (an Alexandra palm) that was standing nearby, and finally discovered the cause - the poor thing had been infected with long-tailed mealy bugs! These little critters cover themselves abundantly with wax, some of which was depositing on the floor, causing the stickiness. The plant itself does not seem too happy either. It has been ready to unfurl a new set of leaves for a while now, but I guess the little buggers have been irritating him! After figuring this out, I popped down to the shop to get a spray to get rid of the little blighters. Hopefully the plant will start feeling a bit better now - and my floor will keep a bit cleaner now.

There was another reason why my floor was a mess, but the reasons for this are a little bit more convoluted... bear with me and I will start at the start...

Last Monday our weekly soccer game had been cancelled due to the recent rains. Although the day had been reasonably dry, the pitch was still waterlogged. A bit disappointed, I headed off home a little earlier than usual. I thought that I would make good use of this time, and decided to make backups of all my photos to CD. I also thought it would be a cool idea to make an html thumbnail directory of all my photos, so that I could easily find anything I wanted reasonably quickly. Unfortunately, this is still a horribly manual process, as I can't find a program that does things just the way I wanted. I decided to do a quick search of the net to see if there was anything new out there that would do the task for me.

I always find it fascinating, how you start off looking for one thing on the net, but end up on a completely unrelated tangent. Damn those 'related links'! I ended up on this one page which discussed methods for improving the zoom on digital cameras. My eyes lit up, as I am stuck with a paltry 2x optical zoom. As I progressed through the site, I found that they were presenting the ridiculously simple idea of simply putting your camera in front of a pair of binoculars, monocular or telescope. As a kid, I had always played with the idea of extra magnification much with two magnifying glasses. At the time I never could get that to work, which probably explains why I had never thought of trying a telescope in front of my camera.

After reading the article, I dug into my boxes of treasured stuff and found a monocular that used to belong to my grandfather. Because it was already dark, I jumped out of the balcony and held my camera up to it. Low and behold - it worked! Of course, the quality of the photos weren't great - I was trying to hold the camera in the right position relative to the monocular, and at the same time pointing everything at the moon while keeping it steady. 

Hmmm. These are all things that I can work on. Time to hit the drawing board. I came with all sorts of elaborate methods, but after some brainstorming with some colleagues at work, I decided to start off simple. So, with that in mind I popped down to the local Hardware House (read Smiths City / Mitre 10), and purchased all the required raw materials.

Finally, we get the part of the story where I can mention the messy floor again - Once home, I got out my saw, electric drill, hammer and started construction. Within minutes, the floor is a long lost memory, now replaced with copious amounts of sawdust.

Two days later I finally finished my monstrosity. It features a compass and a spirit level for setting the correct azimuth and elevation, an adapter piece for hooking up to my camera, weighted so that the centre of gravity lies over the pivot point (important to stop the monocular from flipping upside down), and comes in a natural wood finish <g>.

One thing that I had noticed, was the fact that there was some problems with the chromatic convergence around the edges of the moon when you use the monocular. I am pretty sure that this would impact on the sharpness of the photo, so I also went and bought some coloured cellophane to filter out only one colour. This was going to be something for me to try out when I took everything for a test run. In theory this would also help the camera a bit. I noticed that my first photos from the other night were actually being over-exposed. Hopefully, changining some of the settings and using the extra filter would help balance things out.

The field trial

Luckily it was a reasonably clear night and I went about taking the photos. As expected, because it was starting to get towards full moon, exposure times on the camera needed to be reduced to their minimum settings. With this I managed to get some average results. I think that this was mainly due to some high altitude clouds though, which are more like sheets of ice. This meant that it was unlikely that I would get any decent shots off. Despite this, I went ahead and tested my green filter anyway. Although giving the moon a cool green colour, I don't think it helped much - what do you think?

The stand definitely helped keeping everything steady, put the compass and spirit level proved all but useless. Another modification that this trial has prompted, is the addition of a mirror behind the camera at 45°, so I can see its screen when everything is pointing straight up - otherwise there is no way to aim the thing!

Current Status

So far I have been impressed how well this scheme actually works. On a subsequent night, I took a shot with and without the monocular, to see what difference it made. By measuring the size of the moon in each photo, I found that the monocular gives me a magnification factor of 12.5x. I also found that I am absolutely hopeless when it comes to holding the camera steady for any length of time. Even when putting the camera on the railing on my balcony, the moon still ended up as a tiny little cylinder - which just goes to show how well my stand manages to compensate for my shaky hands.

Incidentally, the test shot has given me my best photo yet. It still suffers from over-exposure, but the image is nice and sharp. I will now wait until we get a bit further past full moon to take some more photos. From what I have read, the really interesting place to look is the terminator (dividing line between light and dark) and I will have to wait for it to appear again. 

All this experimenting has been very bad for me. I have always wanted to dabble in the black art of astronomy, and this has proved an interesting testing ground. Enough it seems to cause me to go and buy a bigger telescope. It is a dirt cheap model, but it should prove entertaining for a while anyway. Of course, I just have to figure out how to hook up a camera to it <g>. But this time, I am considering hooking up something like a cheap web cam to it instead. I have seen some people do this on the we and they have managed to get some truly amazing results, taking photos of Mars, Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. Of course, they were only 20 pixels square, but that is still pretty impressive in my books.

In just the last two nights (including tonight), I have seen the Moon (duh!), Mars (tiny little pin dot) and a couple of Messier Objects (M7 Open cluster and M8 Lagoon nebula (but there was too much light pollution to see the nebula). I might even organise a field trip further inland, perhaps make it a camping trip, and take the scope along just to see what difference the lack of light pollution makes. 

Anyway, in case you haven't figured out, I'm having a spot of fun at the moment, so updates might be a bit irregular at the moment.

I have archived all the photos mentioned above here

Web Update
moved July rambling to 'Old Stuff'
Added 'Astronomy' section to 'Photos'
Updated 'Link of the Week'
Added JavaScript to reload this page correctly inside frames - for people who manage to bookmark this (FrontPage.htm) page, rather than the index.html file.