Winter in 2010

It's now later in the year - after the Southern Winter Solstice - and while the Sun creeps back into our hemisphere, paradoxically, it just gets colder here in Eastern Australia. It's not Northern Hemisphere cold with snow, ice and blizzards. In fact the temperature in most places barely gets below 10°C which would be a summer's day in many places. Here, we do not dress for cool weather. We wear shorts and thongs all year round and as a sop to winter weather, we wear a woolly jumper. The houses are built to survive the scorching summers and winter is an afterthought. Cool winds may come and go as they please through houses where any sort of sealing is an accident. I have swum in tidal pools all through Sydney winters (hardly cooler than ours) but a couple of seasons in the North and I feel the cool weather as much as any local.

This time of year is often good for astronomical viewing and I have bought myself a pair of Fujinon 10x50 FMTR-SX binoculars. They are superb and I am in the process of building a set of parallelogram arms to hold them still. Keeping binoculars still is the best way I know of extending their view. My interests now extend to tracking down those Messier objects that left early astronomers scratching their heads when they were looking for comets. The Messier catalogue is an eighteenth century list of those faint smears in the sky that might be comets - but were not. Messier decided to catalogue them so that he did not waste time watching them from night to night. They are everywhere in the sky and often objects of interest in themselves - but they are not comets. The view through the Fujinon binoculars is stunning and cries out for a decent mount.

I'll be looking for some decent places with a dark sky for observation once I have a decent mount. It seems to be my experience that counter-weighted systems are much easier to use than friction locks - this is opposite to my experience with cameras. I am not really interested in any particular style of astronomy just yet - I'm more interesting in learning how to find my way around in the night sky. Not unsurprisingly, the 6X binoculars are extremely useful for this objective as they are steady in the hand and take in a full 8° real field of view - their apparent field of view is not great at 48° but seeing how I started with an AFOV of 45° and was happy, it's not something that bothers me. I'm glad I opted for the 10x50s as I can no longer see any change in apparent brightness with 7x50s - old eyes! 5mm aperture eyes is what I've got and 5mm is what I'll use. I'm looking forward to my first astronomy club meeting this weekend.

Sailing weather is intermittent but when the Southerly Wind blows it's good but cool sailing. Bert, the skipper of our rescue boat, is unhappy with me at the moment but Bert is often unhappy with people for no apparent reason, so I'll let time go past on that one and see what develops. Dolphins (not Mahi Mahi) are chasing schools of pilchards around the Broadwater and there seems to be plenty of both dolphins and pilchards. Life is good. Carolyn (and for a time Lizzie) is buzzing around Italy with Rachel and Hugo and sending occasional blogs and emails back which I am saving and backing up for safe-keeping. The second disc drive is good and it is much faster to copy files to than to the USB drives.

My back has healed and, although I am moving around like an old man, I expect to get full mobility back soon. Not working on the rescue boat is good for my sore ribs. And I really need to do lots more cycling. Bye for now ~ Christopher