Face Booked

Man...since I got an account on facebook.com, I've been swamped by pokes, beer and God knows what else.

There's been very little happening these couple of days apart from the excitement of horizontal lightning, telescopes and earthquakes...

Okay, so it was a pretty big deal that we felt the tremors here as well but frankly speaking, it wasn't quite what I expected. After all, I've experienced tremors along the west coast of North America before and those were quite something else.

In any case, I won't be living anywhere close to a fault line anytime soon.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for clear skies tonight. Hopefully then I can photograph some nice Messier objects such as M31 or M42.

Polar alignment's still a headache for me though and I believe that M's big ass Celestron's gonna be hogged by his 350D. Still, one can always try.

One wonders what of the local trees that people have spotted with growths on the trunk that look like The Monkey God and the Elephant God. It's probably just a coincidence but since when should we start worshipping trees? It's a strange world that we live in I guess.

Big Ass Scope

M collected his big ass Telescope yesterday...and today he flew off to Manila.





At least he loaned me his C90 to mess around with along with the NexImage CCD. Haven't had a chance to try them out yet though.



Compare that with my own very old C90 side by side and you'd notice some differences; such as...

1) on mine, the darn focusing ring is on the tube itself...so whenever I try to focus, the whole scope would move...a big no-no if you're trying to spot Jupiter or Saturn...

2) I don't have the 90° dual-view thingy. which means that I have to rely on a star dianganol.

3) Mine's an 1000mm f/11 as compared to his 1200mm f/13 so it's a little bit brighter.

Anyway, he's coming back on the 14th so we're gonna go hang out somewhere n do some stargazing.

Storm on a Starry Night...

The raw power of nature...The picture above was taken at about 6.40pm and you can see the storm clouds brewing. Equally impressive is the super long shadow cast by the clouds from the setting sun. It was just a beautiful sight.



An aeroplane passing by the storm. Obviously the storm's quite a distance away. Probably hitting Johor Bahru and further north to perhaps Senai. In any case, the plane still looks puny!



Horizontal lightning was spotted from my front door and I decided to capture some images. This is what the storm front looks like when lit by the lightning from within...you can also see stars in the sky which made it an even more interesting experience.



This is a 100% crop of the above image...no resizing was done.

Truely a magnificent sight.