Last week I had my birthday, turning 35.. I don’t feel older at the moment. I still call myself low-mid 30’s
I’m feeling fit and strong, which is a good thing as I continue preparing for my black belt grading in June! I’m still doing the regular 5km run at Adcock Park, followed by 100 squat kicks, 100 pushups and 100 situps. To push myself, I’m then doing another lap, and then another 100 pushups. It’s feeling good – I’m feeling ready. I’m only doing it once a week at the moment but will be trying to increase it to twice a week in the next month or so. Finding time is the hard part!
The official “prep cycle” for the black belt grading starts in about a month – right after the Sydney All Styles tournament which is on March 7th. I’m really looking forward to getting the prep cycle underway. I’ve been training hard, and the prep cycle is going to be even harder. Bring it on!
From an Astronomy point of view, well, I haven’t really done much. I’ve been trying to motivate myself to get back out there with the Mars image a few weeks ago. Unfortunately it’s been cloudy since then, which really hasn’t helped. The 2010 CWAS “David Malin Awards” have just been announced, and hopefully trying to capture an image for that competition will inspire me to get out there more. I certainly don’t have anything worthy of submitting right now – I haven’t taken a single decent image in 6 months!
I’m motivated for IceInSpace though. With the IceInSpace Community Survey 2010 finishing up the other week, I’ve been busy analysing all the data and making plans for changes to IceInSpace to take us forward for the next 5 years. I have many lofty ideas! Pages and pages of them! I just hope I can get hold of enough of Terry’s time to implement my ideas
On the family front, it’s been very busy! Jacob started at a new school for year 5 – in an Opportunity Class at Gosford Primary School. So far it’s going really well and he’s enjoying it heaps. Abbey also started kindergarten this year! Our baby is now at school! Eliza started year 3 and got the teacher she wanted and the classmates she wanted! So far so good!
Jacob, Abbey and Eliza starting school in 2010
I guess that’s enough for today.. I’ve committed to try and update my blog more regularly this year, but finding the time is proving much more difficult than I imagined.
I’ll keep trying though and hopefully have more updates over the coming weeks.
No, this is not a joke. This is not april fools day!
I setup my telescope last night, first time in 4 months, and I actually used it! I took some video data of Mars at around 12:30am-1:00am, and got up again this morning to image Saturn at 4:30am.
Wow it had been a while.. I didn’t forget anything but everything just took a little bit longer and felt a bit more clunky. The seeing wasn’t horrible, which was nice for a change. But it wasn’t good either.
Unfortunately fog this morning prevented any useful Saturn data – it was really dim even at 7.5fps, so I just captured 1 dim red channel and packed up. I couldn’t believe how high Saturn is already! I was looking for it lower on the horizon but it turned out to be just a star
Anyway I’ll process the Mars data later and see what comes of it.
Once I got into it, I was enjoying it enough – but it didn’t start out that way. At the start, I had the usual thoughts… “please be cloudy”, “please be horrible seeing” – anything to turn around and crawl back into bed.
But I fought through those feelings, and this morning I have that tired, gritty-eyes feeling that I remember.. LOL.
I was thankfully sent an email by someone this morning who recognised a photo on someone’s flickr stream as a crop of my Smiley Face Conjunction photo. The photo on flickr is called Clouds, and you can clearly see it’s a crop of my image.
I posted a comment demanding that the photo be removed, but the user deleted my comment and blocked me from posting further comments. I also sent them an email demanding it be removed. I have reported the copyright infringement to the Yahoo Copyright Infringement people, and hopefully they will do something about it.
I’m very disappointed and angered that someone would do this. I wonder what other photos on this users stream are stolen!?
Have you ever had this done to you? What other action can you take?
If you’re a member on flickr and you’re as outraged as me, perhaps consider leaving a negative comment. It will probably get deleted but it might help all the same.
While imaging Jupiter on the morning of the 2nd May 2009, you can imagine my shock and surprise when a massive bug, at least 3 times the size of the Earth, invaded and started attacking Jupiter!
Click the image below to watch the shocking event unfold!
Continue reading for my expert analysis, and for the final chapter on this dramatic story. Did the bug wipe out Jupiter, or did the Jovians repel the 6-legged invader?
The new version of Registax (Registax 5) has been officially released!
While still considered beta right now, it’s undergone a fairly extensive and lengthy pre-beta programme with a number of beta-testers, which I have been a part of.
There’s a huge number of improvements and enhancements in Registax 5. It’s much faster, which is great for lunar avi’s with a large number of alignment points. Make sure you check out the full manual and some processing workflow tips on the Registax site: http://www.astronomie.be/registax/
In the coming months, I’ll start documenting my own tutorials and workflow hints and tips for using Registax 5 to process planetary and lunar images.
Well done to Cor for a fantastic product, still free after all these years. His contribution to the amateur astrophotography community can not be measured!
Well so far today hasn’t gotten off to the best start.
The Titan Transit occurred this morning – a very rare event which I was planning and hoping to capture, but after days of clear and hot skies, the southerly change came literally about 1 hour before the transit begun. So it was completely obscured by clouds. I haven’t seen any other reports or images yet but I’ll post here when I do.
Nevermind, can’t control the weather. I’ll try again at the next opportunity on February 24th.
Also this morning I attempted to upgrade my version of WordPress to 2.7 (the latest version), which has some cool new features such as threaded comments and a new admin interface – but unfortunately the upgrade failed. I started debugging through several files but gave up when the files became too large and too complex.
So I had to roll back and restore from the backups. The only positive news there, is that the backup/restore process has been tested and works fine! (phew!)
I’ll attempt another upgrade using a different process maybe tomorrow morning.. wish me luck!
One thing that didn’t fail was on Saturday – the Wedding Shoot! All went to plan, we had a great day. I’ll post more news about that and some pictures in the next few days or weeks. I took about 650 shots and have whittled them down to about 300 now, and will need to go through another round of culling before I attempt to process them!
I hope my luck for the rest of the day improves! Thanks for reading.
Well today (5th February) is my birthday, and I’ve turned 34 years old. I guess getting close to mid-30’s should feel pretty old, but actually I’m feeling pretty good about it. So far I haven’t really felt bad about getting older. That’s not to say I haven’t noticed changes. My metabolism changed when I hit 30 and I just couldn’t eat whatever I wanted and still stay thin like I used to be able to do. I had to actually work at it and watch what I ate a bit more (I do love my food).
However since starting Karate at Black Belt Martial Arts about 2 years ago, the training alone has definitely helped keep me fit and keep me thin. I haven’t really had to do any extra exercise except the karate classes to maintain my weight. My wife Kate has been a great help and inspiration though too. She started doing some serious exercise (mainly on the treadmill at home) last year and lost a lot of weight in the year. Along with that we’re both eating better, eating healthier and staying off the junk food (well, mostly!).
Please continue reading as I ramble some more and talk about some upcoming Karate tournaments I plan to enter.
I’ve never really done much people photography. The odd family photo here and there but my main interest and passion has been landscape photography and of course astrophotography.
So you can imagine it came as quite a shock to me when a few weeks ago, Tanya (a friend and ex-work colleague at Ericsson Managed Services) asked me to photograph their upcoming wedding! My first reaction was a combination of shock, fright, nervousness, denial, interest and excitement.
Sydney Harbour Wedding Practise
But pictured here you can see a practise shot of the location! You may be saying “You’re crazy man! Leave it to the professionals!”. And you’d be 100% right. So what influenced my decision?
Continue reading to see how I got myself into this, how I’m preparing for the event, and to see some more of the practise shots.
Does anyone set themselves New Years Resolutions? It’s always about this time of the new year where the New Years Resolutions get set, or maybe, the plans you’d set have been broken already.
I’ve never been a big fan of setting New Years Resolutions and hadn’t set myself any for 2009. However last night while at Karate, Kyoshi Mahler (Master Instructor) mentioned how she had set her 2009 goals during the day – and how the goals need to balance in your life, and how you can use them to achieve what you want in the various aspects of your life.
Categorising your goals, as Kyoshi Mahler did, seems a good way of breaking them up and hopefully making them achievable. Setting goals for the year, as opposed to a New Years Resolution, made more sense to me so I sat down last night and worked on mine.
With Christmas holidays and a week or more break just a day or two away, I figured it’s a good time to reflect on the past 2 months since mikesalway.com.au was launched. I guess being a niche hobby to start with, and simply a personal blog/gallery site, I wasn’t really sure what to expect long-term.
It’s been a pretty good 2 months – I’ve had a lot of great feedback, I was featured on APOD (which brought a LOT of traffic here), I’ve sold a number of prints through RedBubble, and the list of ideas I want to write about is growing. Read the rest of this entry »
My name is Mike Salway and I'm an amateur astronomer and photographer. I'm the co-founder of IceInSpace, and this is my personal blog site and image gallery. Read more about me.
I just hope I can get hold of enough of Terry’s time to implement my ideas 
My name is Mike Salway and I'm an amateur astronomer and photographer. I'm the co-founder of 
