Eclipse

My brother Steve took these great shots of last nights eclipse by simply holding a Canon compact digital camera up to the eyepiece of his telescope.


I filmed, edited and published this video to Google Video, YouTube and this Astro Shorts site, which seems to have the best quality. It's played back at 4000% speed so its easy to watch. Hope you like it.

Lunar Eclipse

Tonight will be a treat for stargazers on the east coast of Australia (like me) and New-Zealand. We'll be able to watch a lunar eclipse as the Sun, Earth and Moon become perfectly aligned.

For a guide to viewing or photographing the eclipse, visit Ice in Space, the Australian Amature Astronomy site for viewing the southern skies. This is a time-table for those living on the east coast of Australia.

28th August, 2007, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST)

• Start at 17:54
  
• Partial Eclipse Begins 18:51
• Total Eclipse Begins 19:52
• Greatest Eclipse at 20:37
• Total Eclipse Ends 21:22
• Partial Eclipse Ends 22:24
• Ends 23:21

Good viewing!

Talisman

Something that happens once in a blue moon is people sitting around a table playing a board game. Talisman was the order of the night on Saturday. It was unfortunate that we didn't get to finish - it can be a long game sometimes - but it didn't look like I was going to win in any case.

Blogged.

...oh, and I've spruced the place up...

Once in a Blue Moon

I am a bit of a Google fan, you may have noticed, so it stands to reason that I would be trying out pretty much every Google gadget and doo-hickey that I can get my hands on. So I was checking my Google Calendar out the other day for which I installed a "Phases of the Moon" calendar. It shows little pictures of the moon in the top left corner of your calendar squares when you are in month view. If you hold your mouse over the little moon pictures it will tell you what phase of the moon that picture represents. When I pointed at the full moon on the 30th of June it didn't say Full Moon - it said Blue Moon!

Image lifted from http://www.hellomerry.com/sciencegrrl2/ archives

So if there was anything you reckoned you'd only do once in a blue moon, the end of this month is the time to do it!

Interest piqued, I check the faithful old Wikipedia. Seems there are about four definitions of Blue Moon and some of there are about when the Moon actually appeared to be blue. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883 the Moon appeared to be blue for about two years! The modern and widely accepted definition is the fairly rare occurrence of a second full moon in a calendar month and this is what's on my Google calendar. A full Moon on the 1st and a Blue Moon on the 30th of June.

So a Blue Moon is something that is rare, but inevitable.

There you go.

In other news...

Seems I have some regular readers outside people I know personally. I found a Windows Live Spaces person that actually listed D'gar HQ as one of her favourite things! How cool is that? I'm famous! So I went and checked her site out. Least I could do. Some of the photos look like Gladstone...

It's a shame to see another fall to lure of Microsoft though. Netizens need to be educated about web freedom and how to achieve it. Compare my site to any "Windows Live Spaces" site. I wonder if Mimi wants to advertise the "MSN Movies" site or the "Virgin Mobile" service or indeed even gives a toss about "British Gas" or thinks the "Nokia N76" is the mobile phone of choice for her readers. This isn't the users fault. Microsoft just doesn't give them any choice. You want to blog and share photos with friends? Microsoft is going to advertise on it.

Sure, my humble blog has some advertising on it, but apart from that thin strip across the top of this page that lets you perform a blog search, I've actually put all my ads there myself! That's right, the ads for OpenOffice and Google Toolbar and Firefox are there because I actually use OpenOffice and Firefox with Google Toolbar and believe that people would be better off using them over the Microsoft counterparts. Whats more, if someone clicks on those ads I get paid for it! It's been nearly a year since I started this blog and I've made a whopping $2.70... but that's beside the point! They're my ads and I decided to put them on my site not for the vast sums of money they generate, but because they are products that I believe in.

Nearly every Microsoft service advertises at you. There are ads in Hotmail, Spaces, MSN Explorer, Windows Messenger - and unless you pay them for premium versions, you are stuck with 'em. At least Gmail - Google's webmail service - doesn't close your account if you don't log into it for a month. Yep, that annoyed me. Losing a Hotmail account and all the e-mails in it because I was on holidays and offline for longer than a month certainly cured me. It doesn't take long to switch most of your programs to the alternatives - you just gotta do it.

Replace Internet Explorer with Firefox (and be more secure on the net)
Replace MSN Messenger with GoogleTalk (and chat without the advertising)
Replace Windows Search with Google Desktop (and search quickly with confidence)
Replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice (and save hundreds of dollars)
Replace Windows Media Player with VideoLAN Client (and stop looking for codecs)
Replace Hotmail with Gmail (and keep your e-mails forever) or...
Replace Outlook Express with Thunderbird (and discover e-mail security)

If only I can shake this Operating System...

Moonlighting

Something I have never been able to do to my satisfaction is take a photo of the moon. Sure, I've sat out in the yard and clicked off two or three hundred shots at the moon with my little Canon A85 and every now and then I'll get one or two that have a nice effect like this one over the trees near my place, but there is never any detail. The moon just turns into a big white solid. I'll have to ask a photographer about it one day.

I got my "Blue Card" yesterday evening after completing a Workplace Health and Safety 'Construction Safety Induction' at TAFE. It cost me $75 and about three-and-a-half hours. Basically, you are required to have one to be on any kind of construction site in Queensland and having one means you should know general safety procedures. A monkey on drugs could pass the course and I am sure a few already have. It is almost impossible to fail seeing as the test is multiple choice and if you get any wrong you get told to try those ones again, and again, and... well there is only 4 choices... The class was told that we are all expected to get 100% on the test. It is clear that everyone does.

It's actually like I bought a 'Blue Card' for $75 and the government has found yet another way to grab a quid out of us. Don't all the construction companies make you do their own safety induction anyway?