Starship Asterisk*

Hi all, A puzzle for those more experienced than me ... I was out last night in my backyard in the North-West of Brisbane, shooting 30 second sub-frames of Pluto in the dense star fields of Sagittarius. Normally, I would discard subs like these two, due to poor tracking accuracy, but can anyone iden...

The Tropical Zodiac (common to the Western world) is an idealisation of the Ecliptic, as it appeared ~2000 years ago -- a mere coordinate system if you will, dividing the Ecliptic circle into 12 equal angles . In modern times, the IAU has devised official boundaries for the 88 constellations, and th...

At the intersection or cross-over point shouldn't there be 2 close images of the sun, or did you capture the moment when the 2 images overlapped even though taken months apart? Amazing! It appears to me that the Sun at the intersection point in the photo is from the June-to-December portion of the ...

Our ancient forebears... like Jake LaMotta. He's still alive! :shock: Edit: I feel compelled, now, to point out that I used the "shocked" emoticon to express my surprise that neufer should call Jake LaMotta an ancient forebear, not that Mr LaMotta is still alive. All the best to you Mr La...

(Neufer, how is Jake LaMotta related to the scale on a sundial?) The statement " More men have walked on the moon than have successfully photographed the analemma ", is interesting to me. The shape of the analemma has been observed since ancient times, through the use of sundials. If one c...

Case, I don't know for sure, but I am going to make an educated guess that it is due to different atmospheric conditions. Different temperature, pressure and humidity, most likely. I'll stand to be corrected. Interesting question.

Me thinks Ivan is barber Ivan Yakovlevich, from Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Nose".

JohnD, I like your style.

Chris, I think I would be foolish to ignore your advice. You appear to have the experience to back you up. Thanks.

Thanks Anthony and geckzilla, but I think writing all this down has helped me to figure out what I really want. Whilst IR-range photography would be amazing for some things, unless it was a relatively simple switchover, I would say no. The Canon 60Da seems to be always sensitive to IR, which is not ...

To be honest, even if I did buy myself a nice new DSLR, I'd be reluctant to remove the IR filter, as it sounds like the process is irreversible, or practically so. I'd prefer it as a toggle at the push of a button, thanks very much. Am I being too demanding? (Based on neufer's post re seeing through...

JohnD, are you a fan of P.G. Wodehouse? From his short story "The Clicking of Cuthbert": Vladimir Brusiloff proceeded to sum up: "No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P.G. Wodehouse and Tol...

In Old Country, "В огоро́де бузина́, а в Ки́еве дя́дька." I love Russian proverbs. If Google Translate is any good, I'd say you were suggesting that angular degrees and degrees Fahrenheit are "apples and oranges". Am I close? Apologies to all short-armed, fat-thumbed and cold-bl...

Congratulations. Beautiful. Sublime. Makes me want to go out and get laser eye surgery, to see in infra red. (Radio waves might be cool too, when I'm in the mood.) I'd really love to remove the IR filter on the DSLR I use, but it belongs to my wife and she would kill me. She loves the visible spectr...

Beyond wrote:BTW, you have a 2 degree thumb. Mine is about 98.6 degrees.

Hey short-arms, I'll thank you not to make fun of my narrow thumb!

Thanks John. But now I'm a little confused. Is "Zarya" the phonetic spelling of the Russian "заря" in the English (Roman/Latin) alphabet? If so, at least backward, mono-lingual Antipodeans like me can get a hint on how to pronounce it. Perhaps I should re-label my little photo to...

Nice photo. Another HDR style image to mess with our brains. Hopefully the movie screen isn't 6.5 times its actual size in this scene. ;) It is possible that in the 1950s, drive-in movie screens were closer than they are today. That might explain why hardly anyone is attending the drive-in in this p...

Why is the ISS labled (Zarya) :?: Zarya (Russian for "Dawn" apparently [thank you Wikipedia]) was the name given to the first (main) module of the ISS to be launched. I originally labelled the image for the benefit of my own memory. One of the reasons I became interested in astronomy was ...

Well geckzilla, that was easier than I thought. This is the image to which I referred earlier:
Nitpicker.