December

December 29th

The slide night is well and truly behind me and my university projects finished for the year - and I seem to have less time than I've had for weeks. I've passed my 40th birthday. My Europe photos were finally posted. I somehow managed to pass my galactic dynamics unit in spite of the fact that I spent more time writing poetry than researching astronomy. I've had bronchitis again. I'm tired...

I've tried every day for over a week to write something intelligible for this page, and I've failed every time.

Boxing day was spent floating down the Wollangambe river on a lilo (photos here), but I piked on Claustral the next day. There was a combination of factors in operation there - a darkening sky and a forecast of storms, a late start (and my needing to pick the children up that evening), and just plain bad vibes: "I don't feel comfortable with this." In the end I obviously didn't want the canyon enough to put up with being cold, rained on and miserable (and oh, didn't that bring back memories of my last trip through Claustral). I'd had a fix of freedom with the trip through the Wollangambe the day before, so while the decision to pull out was actually bloody hard to make, I knew it was the right call.

I had a nice bushwalk in and out of Claustral Brook, anyway.

Here are some quick reviews of:

Circus Infinitus #1
Berserk #298, #299 and #300

October

October 14th

My Europe photos are going to take a few more days - not only the eclipse photos, but the whole trip, which is why it is taking s0 long. And I've been a bit distracted by a few issues that are beyond my power to resolve for the moment.

Instead, I have the photos from a 200m abseil from last Saturday.

The universe has been stretched to the edge of perception and I've been reading too much of the dead (or doesn't background radiation count? How does a photon maintain an identity across 13 billion years?). Quasars, galaxies, long-gone stars and over 300 known worlds; people, dreamers, poets. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes... "There is no better way to know us, than as two wolves come seperately to a wood..." by the gods, I almost texted that in reply to someone in Europe, without realising (at the time) what it might come to mean. Everything - and nothing at the same time. And if you think I'm being cryptic, those aren't my words...

Somehow I managed to salvage 18/20 for an SAO essay on the standard cosmological model that was written up on the day it was due in, with less than 40 minutes sleep the night before. My children once again guessed I had a deadline and contracted some gastric/vomiting thing (which lasted a whole week), and I'm still exhausted from the bronchitis I picked up (again) when I got home. I submitted the essay and then couldn't remember if I had finished some of the sentences or not. Honestly, I can't help wondering if my lecturer has read the right file... Still, it's a relief to know my brain is still working somewhere in the background, even if I'm not aware of it!

I have booked another eclipse tour for next year, details here.

The next OzCanyons Slide Night will be held on the night of November 29th 2008, at the Mt Wilson Village Hall - more on that soon.

My friend Paul was married on the Monday of the October long weekend, in a beautiful ceremony at Berambing, in the NSW Blue Mountains. I have the usual assortment of badly-framed wedding snapshots from the reception, but since I rarely have the chance to see these guys in suits (or otherwise have the chance to embarrass them), here are a few photos:

Back in a few days with the Europe photos... I hope.

But if my silence made you leave, then that would be my worst mistake -
So I will share this room with you - and you can have this heart to break...

'And So It Goes' by Billy Joel, Stormfront, 1989

September 2008

September 4th

Well, I'm back in Australia - even if smashing headlong into the reality of returning has hit me a lot harder than I thought it would. Or perhaps that's just jetlag (I'm so tired - it's like being drunk without any of the good bits).

My last nights in Europe were spent walking through the simmering, glittering streets of Paris with the warm August wind in my hair... then it occurred to me that while I might have missed Lucy Jordan's sports car by a couple of years, I did get a trip across Italy in a mondeo, and I wouldn't exchange that for anything.

My plans for reporting things as I went along were screwed somewhere along with my operating system (thank you sudo synaptic :-P ). I also have 3500 photos to go through, and an essay on cosmology to write. Therefore, updates to follow... eventually.

27th July 2008 - Red Square in Moscow (C.A.L.)

July 2008

July 23rd

The departure date for the Sydney Observatory's Eclipse Tour edges closer. Much closer... as in, this Friday. Apart from the tour, I now have accomodation booked for all but 1 week between Ringgenberg and Vercors in mid-late August. I must say that as well as photographing the Aug 1 solar eclipse, I'm also looking forward to photographing Paris by night. It feels weird... Over 12 months in the planning, always over the horizon - and horizons are things I have always felt are best kept out of reach. So I'm not quite sure how to respond to crossing this one.

A couple of left-field things have recently tripped me up in some amazing, peculiar ways, and as a consequence life seems strangely more brilliant than ever. More bitter too, but that goes with the territory, I guess. It's like a drug, and very odd. But riding on a precarious balance of possibilities is just where I like to be, and it really doesn't get much better than this.

A while back I bought an EeePC that I'll be field-testing in Europe. A bit last minute, but I've been short of time and after some initial problems (the most major being a battery that was reluctant to charge itself, the most minor a keyboard set-up problem), the thing seems ready to go. At least all the SD cards I've thrown into it seem to work so far. I have a short presentation on Australian canyoning to give at the canyoning rendezvous in Vercors (almost done), and an article I want to write on the Bullet Cluster of galaxies (IE 0657-56) and how it doesn't prove the existence of dark matter (at the research stage). And if I'm lucky, I might get the rare chance to work on a short story or two - which is one of the reasons I've decided to park myself on the shore of Switzerland's Lake Brienz for a whole week. Though the temptation of being near one of the canyoning capitals of the world might be a little hard to ignore...

June 2008

June 18th 2008

I hate winter. Even given that winter in Australia is mild by world standards... the cold (and the wet and the windy, I might add) inspires introversion, and I dislike being stuck inside at the best of times (and dislike even more being stuck inside myself). Then there are the colds and sniffles and coughing, and so on. This year is nowhere near as bad as last year, but still...I'm sick of it already. The children are ill and I'm tired. I can't think straight, I'm making more stupid mistakes than usual, my lungs are choked with gunge and I can't breathe.

So I'm whinging again. I must be starting to sound like a broken record, but creatively speaking that's about all I'm good for at the moment.

However I spent a nice weekend at Ilford last new moon, attempting to get the autoguider working for my astrophotography rig. That was cold and... really, really nice. I felt at home, sharing a peaceful silence with a kindred spirit and a glittering night sky. It's a shame I probably won't have a chance to go back until after I return from Europe.

Moments. We live for moments. There are never enough of them, and we never get to keep the ones we have...

Notes for Berserk #296 and #297.

4th June 2008

I've felt a little like I've been walking in a vacuum this week, after a weekend that was slightly on the stressful side. My daughter took ill last Friday with what was initially thought to be appendicitis. Two trips to the hospital eventually led the doctors away from appendicitis and toward the conclusion that she had intestinal inflammation as a result of a recent cold. While all this was going on I had four assignments due, and though I had only about three hours work left to do on them, the prospect of waiting around in the hospital was quickly eroding the buffer I had put before the deadline. The result was mild panic...

However it all ended well (for my daughter, most importantly), and though Elswyth has been too sick to go to school this week, at least she seems to be getting better.

The scanlation for Berserk #296 was released a little while ago, but I need to find a spare half an hour to sit down an review it. Soon, I hope.

May 2008

25th May 2008

No matter how careful I am when playing with Araldite, the Goddess of Glue, I always manage to get the stuff all over my fingers. Then there's another problem: the glue has set on the mixing tray, the stick I mixed it with, and my fingers - why the hell hasn't it set on the thing I'm gluing together and have been holding in this awkward position for the last fifteen minutes? The object in question (a butterfly windchime for my daughter) is asymmetrically loaded anyway and is likely to break again the moment I pick it up (no matter how much glue I pour on it), so I'm not sure why I'm actually bothering with this...

When I mentioned music in my last post (over a month ago... feels like five seconds), I didn't explain that for almost 12 months after Ben died I had trouble listening to any music at all. It has only been these last months that I have been able to tolerate music for any other purpose than blocking out the sound of the children's television, or their voices... However - a couple of days ago I pulled Ben's iPod out of his drawer and recharged it. I had bought it for him for Father's Day, a few months before he died, and I hadn't been able to bring myself to use it before now. Actually, most of his things I haven't touched, except to clean some of them and put them back exactly where they were. He would probably have expected me to use the thing... it's just been really, really hard.

But the music doesn't help that much. Nothing does, to tell the truth. I pat the pet demons on my shoulder, drink another glass of absinthe and hope the world goes away for a while. A long, long while. Honestly, I still need to smack myself about the head a few times and pull myself together... I am a great deal saner than I was this time last year, but that's not saying very much.

Review for Jaeger #30 here.

April 2008

20th April 2008

Stars and more stars...

The 16th ASNSW SPSP has come and gone. Over the weekend period of the 4th/5th/6th of April I spent two glorious nights (freezing, admittedly) under the most amazingly clear dark skies I have ever experienced. I spent more time chatting with people than taking photos, but that was good too. It's nice to spend time with people who have similar interests and who don't need to run off to bed when the clock starts heading past midnight. Though the observing field certainly thinned out around 1 am, I think it was mostly the cold driving people indoors. When I finally went for some sleep around 3am on the Sunday morning, it was simply because, in spite of my thermal layers and a hot water bottle, I was worn out from shivering.

Creds to the Astronomical Society of NSW for a great Star Party - I was impressed.

Sunday morning, 6th April 2008, from Wiruna, NSW.
Looking south toward the Milky Way in the region of the Southern Cross and Eta Carinae.
7 minute exposure, Canon EOS 400D, 55mm lens, piggybacked on a Skywatcher ED80, Celestron CG-5 mount.

The weather has been crap ever since.

Now that my internet connection is decent again, I have at last given way to buying albums online. I used to like having the CD in my hand, but logistics have intervened - I'm running out of room to store them. Now I'm running out of room on my hard drive instead. But I am finally getting some more Tristania and H.I.M (His Infernal Majesty) albums, and all is good. I must remember to keep the volume down, especially in the early hours of Monday morning...

Reviews for the latest chapters of Berserk and Jaeger are up, all long overdue.

March 2008

30th March

Every now and again the stars align (or rather my telescope does):

M42 in Orion, Celestron 6" SGT, Canon EOS 400D, prime focus 40 seconds at ISO800.
27th March 2008

On a different note, a few days ago I heard something I found to be more than a little disturbing. I caught the tail end of someone else's conversation, in which one person was asking the other, "Do you believe in global warming?"

It was the choice of words which intrigued me here. Since when did the environment become a matter of faith? Well, it has been for a while now, apparently. Seems we desperately need something to feel guilty about... Never mind that the planet has been dramatically modifying its own landscape, atmosphere, sea levels and temperature for around 4.5 billion years now - no, we have to conserve it, nurture it, save it. From what? And from which arbitrary point should we conserve it? Why, the beautiful days before the advent of evil industrialisation, I suppose. Better still would be the days before the first organisms started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere in the first place.

Just for kicks, I went through some environmental articles in New Scientist magazine and replaced most instances of the phrase "climate change" with "god" or "the wrath of god", and "the environment" or "climate" with "your soul." Funny how much it reads like a religious tract when you do that: "Those who would deny god..." and "we must all work together to save your soul," being among the typical phrases that kept cropping up. Wonder how long it will be before we start persecuting as heretics people who hold dissenting views? Whooops... we already are.

Four hundred years ago most people believed that earthquakes and tidal waves were inflicted upon the world because we had sinned. Damn, for a moment there I actually thought we'd moved on a bit.

In protest, come Earth Hour and all the lights in the house went ON. Plus the patio lights, a couple of portable lanterns and a 4-figure wattage mercury vapour lamp. I don't like bandwagons, and I don't like being told to get on them. They all crash into something eventually.

I have read both Berserk #293 and #294 and will post the reviews in the next couple of days, along with a quick review of Jaeger #29. Before I do that however, no doubt the translation to Berserk #295 will appear. The raws are already out.

February 2008

February 11th

No time to breathe, or so it seems. Too much to do... So far the school routine has been merely a minor irritation, though I am missing an extra hour of sleep... which isn't doing much for my temper.

February 7th treated SE Australia to a partial solar eclipse... at about the same time that La Nina decided to treat SE Australia to a generous amount of rain. So - after weeks of fine weather and blue skies (when I would have given anything for a decent storm) - come the week of the eclipse and the thunder rolls in (of course - this is Murphy's law of astronomical observation, after all). And even if I had been free to travel, it was raining for a couple of hundred kilometres in every direction.

I pick up my new 300mm IS lens and doubler for the Canon 400D less than two hours before the start of the eclipse, during a rare glimpse of broken sunshine but with stormclouds already blacking out the western horizon. Get home... and it's coming down by the bucketful.

Still, I need something to attach my 90mm diameter solar filter to the 58mm Canon lens - just in case. While I'm building this something from cardboard and masking tape, my son pulls apart the tracks of his trainset at five minute intervals and keeps wailing for me to fix them up again. Eventually I take to the tracks with the masking tape and he starts wailing about something else. I pick my daughter up from school in a downpour and the clouds must be at least five kilometres thick by this stage.

I finish my carboard filter adaptor.

Then, at around 4.30pm, one storm passes and the next one lags just enough to create a gap. Not much of a gap, really more of a thinning of the cloud. But nonetheless, it was the chance I needed to test the camera...

That was the last I saw of the sun for the next three days.

January 2008

January 27th

From crazy moments on New Years Eve spent crying on the grass in my backyard while fireworks from down the road were tearing open the sky above me, to days of brilliant sunshine and too few storms... I have been attempting to bring some chaos to my order and to ensure that these coming months do nothing to settle this. I'm one of those irritating people who craves disorder - comfortable routines simply crush me flat.

But in a few days my eldest child is starting kindergarten. She will need to be in the same place for five days a week at the unholy hour of 8.30am (put it this way, it's 2.15am as I write this, and I'm still wide awake. I won't be wide awake at 8.30am tomorrow. I'll be walking around and cleaning up the children's breakfast, but I won't actually be awake). My daughter will be wearing the same thing everyday, and seeing the same people everyday. She is annoyingly cheerful about it. While I will welcome the silence of her absence to some extent (she would talk for 24 hours a day if she had the chance), I am dreading the repetitive nature of the whole exercise.

Borderlands issue #9 is out, and my story "Fate of Words" is in it. I can't fairly comment on my own story, but there is some good fiction in this issue (my favourite by a whisker being Gary Kemble's "Fortunate Lives"). Go ahead and order a copy - regardless of the fact that SF and fantasy publishing needs financial support in a country where the market for it can dance on the head of a pin with room to spare, you should really enjoy reading it.

The 16th Annual South Pacific Star Party, hosted by the Astronomical Society of NSW, is scheduled for 4th-6th April 2008 and registrations are open now. In spite of being a member of the ASNSW for 20 years, this will be my first attendance. Ben and I had planned on going to last year's SPSP, but didn't, obviously - and I couldn't bring myself to go without him. This year I'm going for him.

I have no idea when Berserk #293 is due out, and neither does anyone else, apparently.