Grandad's photos

Here's a nice Singapore Airlines 747, and a stretched A340-600 from Thai Airways. Compare with the standard A340 below. Pictures taken at Auckland Airport today.

Took some pics today with the $200 'snapper' camera at Auckland Airport, these three are Airbus A320, A330, and A340. They are not likely to make airliners.net as you can't see the rivets.

Then
Emily & Tasha in the vintage pedal-car.

The monarchs are busy on the swan plant. Photoshop still won't crop the way I want it to.



This meeting of 18th December looks like it was Datsta's last race as the motor has died and the car is for sale. I took a few shots of the sports cars, Gus in the yellow Stryker, and John Ward in his own CR2 development.


Pushing the limits of the 'snapper' camera.

I have just found out that NASA already did the moon pictures, you can download their World Wind software (similar to Google Earth) at http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.html ( 53 Mbytes and requires a minimum 1.4G processor!) and it links to about 1.8 million photos of craters and craters within craters taken by NASA's Clementine spacecraft.

This is NASA's shot of the centre of the big crater Tycho. Here's my best effort.

Sigh.

Here's Venus on 12th December 2005. If you have good eyes you can see the crescent without binoculars in the very early evening, in the West, best just about sunset.

This is a long job and might take years! Some parts are getting complete. Trouble is the moon wobbles in its orbit and what is on the edge today is not the same as what is there next month in the same phase, so it gets difficult to fit in the pictures, especially around the edges. The whole thing prints out on 12 A4 pages. The idea is to take all parts of the moon with the sun at a good angle to show the craters in relief.

Just back from the movies where we saw Bert Munro do 201mph, this is a shot of one of his bikes that was at Big Boys Toys. Enjoyable movie!

There are lots of other interesting parts of pictures in the 71 that I took that day.

Look at this guy - Hey Joe! Carry that stuff out there will you?

Wayne brought us a nice snapper, then the rest of the gang arrived:

Took this shot of Mars last night, Registax processed over 600 frames to resolve this disappointing amount of detail but I could convince myself that there is a polar icecap there on the right. Mars has moved fairly high in the evening sky now, in the North East, opposite Venus. It is moving away from Earth now, and will be about 18 years before it is back this close. Taken with an Eden Optics 6" 'scope with Logitech Quickcam which has had the lens removed so the telecope focusses directly on the CCD chip.