Grandad's photos

Apart from a dousing from rain and hail just as the parade started, it was the usual fun. I had Dora the Explorer (Sky TV pre-school channel) with Lily as the helper fairy. There were some other fairies that were a bit ugly.

There is so much to see, every shot has its interesting parts.

There were about a dozen cars from the T-Car Club. Running boards are great. This is what it looks like from inside the parade.

We stayed Friday night in Tairua, and went for a walk at Pauanui this morning, where we could see Slipper Island (where David and I spent a couple of uncomfortable nights in 1988 on 'Juliet' sheltering from 50-60 knots).

Tairua has a boatyard, and various moorings, this dinghy obviously left by a landlubber who didn't know about 'shipshape' and 'stow the oars'. Maybe he likes rowing with one oar. The ferry 'Ngoiro' now surfs the sand as a restaurant.

Birdwise, we found a nice duck, and some godwits, fresh in from Siberia via Japan with birdflu.

The sunset view east from our motel showed up earth's shadow climbing in the sky.

We bought some 7 X 50 binoculars recently from Mitre 10 Mega 'you pay more, we pay less', for $20. They have this yellow coating that makes distant clouds invisible, and no doubt, also the comet's tails and faint nebulae that I bought them for. But if you were a Russian tank commander like Julie here, you would be just so impressed with the hammer & sickle, bullets and map of the world with Russian satellites. The right eyepiece has a non-illuminated graticule scaled 1 to 4 that allows you to see if one ship is taller than another, but the graticule rotates when you adjust for vision correction, so for me, only works on masts at 45 degrees. Julie has trouble using these binoculars because her face hurts with laughing. Especially at what David would think of them. They came with a camouflaged carry bag.

After 4 or 5 months of taking over 200 moon pictures with the telescope and the Quickcam 640x480 pixel webcam, processed by Registax, I can now put together a fairly complete Moon. It's an on-going project to fill in the gaps. There is a bigger version at www.binary.co.nz/astro.html

Finally some clear sky for a bit more moon mapping.

Went out today looking at what people have hiding in their sheds (and their projects).

Found a Lambo for David (a real one):


Found an XK120 for Russell:


Had lunch at the Glenbrook Steam Trains: Andrew Denton taking interest (!)

Guy Fawkes was executed for treason on 31 January 1605 but we still celebrate the event in NZ. Having banned bangers a few years ago the latest fireworks seem to bang louder than ever and the last two weeks of bangers going off day and night have kept the cat indoors and the fire brigade busy. These shots are of other people's money going up, taken from our back deck.