On Sunday, 28th June 2009, I competed in the National All Styles tournament at Ryde, NSW. It was Round 3 in their event calendar, and my second NAS event for the year after I competed in Round 1 back in March.

I was a little nervous and a little excited to be competing again, and was keen to see if I could improve on my previous showings – not so much my placing, but my technique, my form, my confidence to “go” and attack.

I competed in the Open Continuous Sparring, the Advanced Intermediate Forms (Kata) (3rd Kyu – 1st Kyu), and the Advanced Intermediate Point Sparring (3rd Kyu – 1st Kyu). I’m currently a 3rd Kyu, so was up against black belts in the continuous sparring and people around my level for the other 2 events.

After the Continuous Sparring

In general I was pretty happy with how I went, placing 3rd (out of 6) in the Continuous Sparring, 2nd (out of 2 :)) in the Kata and 2nd (out of 4) in the Point Sparring.

Please read on to see more images and video of my events.

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Captured on the 23rd June (local time), this animation represents 3 hours of rotation on Jupiter, as the Great Red Spot (quite a bit paler this year) transits across the face of the gas giant. Also visible, down lower on the NEB, is the new “NEB Upheaval” – a series of new spots and disturbances that are likely to change the look of the NEB for the remainder of the season.

Click the image to see the full 17-frame animation which covers 3 hours of rotation. It’s a 2.4mb gif file and will open in a new window.

Jupiter, GRS and NEB Upheaval Animation. Click to Play.

The Galilean Moon, Io, pops out from behind Jupiter in the last frame of the animation. The red colour is because it hadn’t yet made much of an appearance in the blue and green channels (which were captured before the red channel). Io really moves fast!

Below is one of the 17 frames of the animation as a still image, from near the middle of the session.

Jupiter, GRS and NEB Outbreak

Continue reading to see 2 other images and more information about the capture and processing.

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This image of Venus in Ultra Violet light was captured on the morning of the 23rd June – the same morning that I captured my first Mars of 2009 and Jupiter with the NEB Upheaval. It was a busy morning!

The colours reveal some albedo differences in the cloud tops on Venus, and come from a combination of using a Schuler UV filter for capturing the luminance (detail) data, and processing the image as a false-colour composite using colour data from the RGB channels as well as the UV channel.

The seeing was only average, and Venus was at a respectable 30° altitude – shining brilliantly at mag -4.18.

Continue reading for more information about the capture and processing.

I captured the image with my 12″ Newt on the EQ6, with the DMK21AU04 and 5x powermate at about 6:30am local time. The UV data was captured at 15fps for approx 2 minutes giving me about 2000 frames. RGB data was captured at 60fps with a shutter speed of about 1/1000s and gain at about 800 (approx 80%) for about 60 seconds in each channel, giving me 3000 frames in each channel.

The separate channels were processed independantly in Registax 5, and the LRGB composite was made in Photoshop, where the UV channel made up the luminance data (giving the contrast) with the colour coming from the combination of R, G+UV/2 and UV making up the RGB.

I’m still waiting for a morning of great seeing to capture an excellent image of the cloud tops on Venus – but with the Sun not rising until 7am (well after the time I’ve had to go to work), it limits my opportunities at this time of year. Venus is on its way back towards the Sun over the next 5 months, heading for inferior conjunction in December, so hopefully I’ll get a few more chances before Venus dips too low.

Thanks for looking.

On Tuesday morning, 23rd June 2009 I captured my first image of Mars for 2009. It’s still very early in the season, with Mars still 288 million kilometres away, subtending a tiny diameter of a 4.9″ on the sky.

Mars doesn’t reach opposition until late January, 2010 when it will be 14 arcseconds in diameter – a lot smaller than it was at its closest in 2003, when it grew to 25″ in diameter.

A Tiny Mars, 23rd June 2009

And no, Mars will not be as big as the full moon in August! It’s a hoax

Continue reading for more information about the capture and processing of the image.

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Hi all

Finally – the first clear night in weeks and my first imaging opportunity since May 25!

I’ve got loads of data to process, but I wanted to quickly process this one and get it out there because a) I won’t get much time to process many more images in the next day or two, and b) it’s an image showing the GRS and the new spots and NEB outbreak in high resolution, thanks (finally!) to some good seeing conditions.

Jupiter, GRS and NEB spots and outbreak

This is just the first of many from the session, so check back for more in the next few days.

Thanks for looking.

My wife will tell you – I don’t get into hobbies lightly. I become engrossed in them, obsessed It becomes a passion, not just a hobby.

And so it was when in June 2004, I decided that I was going to start pursuing my interest in Astronomy and take it up as a hobby. Now, 5 years later – wow, what a journey it has been!

Rainbow of Comet McNaught. One of the major highlights of my time in Astronomy.

Writing this article has been quite a trip down memory lane.

Continue reading to find out how it all began, the ups and downs along the way, and my plans for the future.

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Just a quick FYI for anyone interested…

I’ve just moved mikesalway.com.au to a new hosting provider. I did have my site hosted on the IceInSpace colo box in the US, but have now transferred it to a local host, here in Australia.

So the site is now much faster for my Australian friends, and will be a bit slower for my US and overseas friends (sorry!).

At the same time, I’ve upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress, version 2.8. A pretty smooth and trouble-free upgrade. You won’t really notice any difference from your side of the fence, but there’s a few nice improvements from an administration point of view.

If you notice any broken images, downloads or other content, please let me know.

On the 28th June, the National All Styles round 3 tournament is being held at Ryde, NSW.

National All Styles

I competed in Round 1 of the NAS tournament back in February, which was a lot of fun and an excellent learning experience – but I haven’t competed since then. There’s been a few other tournaments that have come and gone that I wasn’t able to enter due to conflicts on my social calendar!

So I’m really looking forward to this one, and plan on competing in the Continuous Sparring, Point Sparring and Kata. It will be made more interesting by the fact that this time I have to compete in the higher grades (3rd Kyu – 1st Kyu), instead of the Intermediate grade (as I’m now 3rd Kyu).

Hopefully I can get a few pictures and videos of my events, and you can be sure I’ll post the results afterwards.

A short update on my Journey to Black Belt training – on Saturday morning I went to Adcock Park to do the run, followed by the pushups, situps and squat kicks. Adcock Park is the venue where the actual black belt grading takes place (the fitness component, that is).

It’s 3 laps around the track that goes around the outside of the park, which apparently totals 5.4km. I ran it in 23:40!! So I took 2 minutes off my previous best time, on a track that’s longer than what i’ve been running at home. I put it down to 2 things:

1. A flatter track at Adcock Park (there’s a few big hills where I run at home)
2. Focus and Motivation

I did push myself harder, so I’m really happy with the time.

Apparently during the black belt grading, you don’t get any recovery time before having to jump straight into the pushups/situps/squat kicks – so I need to start working on that and eliminate the 1-2 minute rest I’m taking after my run. One strategy a few people use is to run the first 2 laps fast and coast the 3rd lap, so you can recover during that last lap (even walking for half the last lap). I’ll have to try that.

Thanks for reading.

This image of the Full Moon (well, almost full – it was 99% illuminated) was taken on the 8th May 2009, using my Canon 20D attached to my ED80.

I took 136 photos @ ISO100, 1/125s exposure. All photos were stacked in Registax. The image was processed in Photoshop to reveal the different compositions of the geological formations on the Moon.

Saturated Colour Full Moon. Click for desktop resolution.

Continue reading for more information about the capture and processing of the image.

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I finally got around to finishing some more pictures from our Birubi Beach christmas holidays! (Yes, it’s been that long!)

In this set, I feature some beautiful sunset photos taken on December 30th, 2008. Living on the East coast, I never get to see the Sun setting over the ocean. But due to the curving around of the headland, at Birubi Beach in summer it is possible!

Jacob and I went down to the beach to watch and photograph the Sunset – him with my old Sony Cybershot, and me with my Canon 350D. It was great spending the time together, wandering the coastline and climbing over the rocks, looking for the perfect shot.

Birubi Beach Sunset Panorama

The photo above is a 4-image panorama, and each image is a 3-frame HDR. 

Please continue reading to see more beautiful sunset images from Birubi Beach.

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