Troy's Home Page : Home

My brother and wife brought Ella Rose into the world today! My first niece. Isn't she cute. She's only about 5 hours old at time of writing this.

Another new moon on the weekend and clear skies, so went to another dark site near Boonah. Met some other astrophotographers and had a great night. Still learning little bits and pieces, but am getting there.

NGC3372 Eta Carinae Nebula

M20 Trifid Nebula and M8 Lagoon Nebula

On the weekend we went out to my first "dark site" at Leyburn to do some astrophotography. I have been absolutely jumping out of my skin for an opportunity like that. Since getting my telescope the weather has been cloudy most of the time, or full moon and light pollution from the city ruining the darkness for imaging.

Had been checking the weather reports all week and was supposed to be clear skies. Moon was near new. Everything fell into place. Awesome.

So here are some images I took.

M42 Orion Nebula

M83 Southern Pinwheel Galaxy

Comet Lulin

Been looking around for weather and cloud forecast websites for planning my astrophotography sessions. Came across some pretty cool ones today.

APanel is a graphical forecast updated 4 times a day. It works for any location. You can either put in city names or latitude and longitude.

Astroforecast shows just the night-time cloud forecast. Bit more concise.

With Valentine's Day coming up, thought I'd do some reading about where it all started. Many times I have told Kristy that I thought it was all invented by the whole greeting card, chocolate, gift and florist businesses to generate sales. Here's what I gleaned from Wikipedia's Valentine's Day page:

• The holiday we celebrate today on 14 February is named after 2 early Christian martyrs named Valentine. By the time the holiday was associated with romantic love in the 14th Century, the distinction between the 2 saints was lost.
• The tradition of exchanging romantic notes gave way to greeting cards in the 19th Century and from there Valentine's Day has been reinvented. These days it is the second largest card-sending holiday of the year after Christmas.
• It was only in the second half of the 20th Century that exchanging greeting cards was extended to all manner of gifts such as roses and chocolates.

So. I was right. It's a gyp.

On the weekend I found out that a friend of mine, Lee "Blinky the Shark" Rizor, passed away last week due to complications from the flu. We had exchanged emails just the day before, and he had mentioned that he'd been ill with the flu but felt he was getting better.

The sudden passing took me quite by surprise and I was more than a little upset at the news. He was a larger than life character with a very strong personality. Hard to believe that something like the flu can take away someone that full of life.

Blinky was very prolific in several newsgroups I frequented, mostly to do with computer and photography related topics. I recall when I first started using linux he helped me on many occasions and on many more since.

In the last year we discovered our mutual interest in photography and exchanged many emails about equipment, macro photography methods, sharing photos and critiquing each other's work. He was a retired TV cameraman who worked and lived near Hollywood.

His USENET alias of Blinky the Shark arose when he read somewhere that some sharks can't/don't blink. Many people on USENET don't use their real name for privacy reasons. I have know him for years as Blinky, and only recently learned his real name.

It sounds strange that you can meet someone through USENET, never know their real name and never meet them face to face, yet still be so affected with news of their passing.

Farewell Blinky. We'll miss you.

Well, I'm pretty happy with how things are going.

The basics are starting to take shape. I've written a MySQL backend now for all blog entries and even wrote my own little php editor to upload blogs remotely straight into the MySQL database without having to type in the code. Clever, hey? :)

Next step will be uploading images I think.

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Over the Christmas period my server died and it has taken what little spare time I've had to get it up and running to this stage. I'm taking this opportunity to completely rewrite my homepage to give it a facelift. I like a challenge.

Please bear with me. You'll notice weird colours, layouts, images etc while I'm playing with things.

This may take a while...