Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Eclipse 2012 - clouds and wine

Lowe winery tasting

After leaving Sydney we drove to the Blue Mountains, stayed at a great, old timer hotel and drove on into gold and wine country around Mudgee. Although the weather has been nice and warm it has also been partially cloudy and I haven’t had a chance to set up the telescopes and practice polar alignment. Due to jet lag during the first days here I usually wake up around 4 AM. Later on I have made a habit out of this since these quiet, early morning hours are great for working on the various remaining tasks for eclipse day.

I did manage to get the bulb exposure mode on the Nikon D300 working under PC control. I’m not quite sure what did the trick but now it works anyway. This is important because the bulb cable should enable a larger number of images to be taken during the all-to-brief moments of totality. I must remember to re-check that this continues to work in the coming days.

It will remain cloudy for the next few days and during this time I better get finished with the Eclipse Orchestrator script and the eclipse presentation I'm going to be giving to the guests on this trip. It really is too bad with the clouds! Tomorrow we will be going to Coonabarabran and the famous Siding Spring Observatory. This will be great, but with all the clouds I doubt that we'll get any night time observing done. Grr. Still, you can't have everything and as long as we don't get clouded out on Nov. 14th I'm not complaining!!!

1 comment:

  1. That day must be full of excitement and fun. I do love drinking wines so much and collecting it too from different countries. God bless you. Thanks.


    Regards,
    Accommodation Bright

    ReplyDelete