January 2011 – The Buttons of My Mind

New Astrogallery

OK, I’m happy to release my new Astro Images gallery now. I’m using Flickr to store images, sharing, comments etc. I’ve written a WordPress plugin which uses the JSON feed from Flickr to display the images here.

I’ve not moved all the images across to Flickr yet but I’m also having a bit of a cull as some of my earlier images, especially of Messier objects, don’t really look that good anymore. I’m planning to take better images of the objects this year. I’ve also reorganised the images into (I think) better categories.

So, over the next few weeks I’ll be putting up old, reprocessed and new images onto Flickr and they will appear in the Astro Images gallery on here.

Of course you can skip all of this and just go straight to my Flickr gallery if you want!

Plugin Writer

Fed up of the available gallery WordPress plugins for Flickr. They are either rubbish, crippled or needed so much rewriting that I might as well have written them myself. So I have. And it’s rather spiffing. It takes the JSON feed from Flickr and does some jQuery jiggery pokery to show a rather nice gallery. Look out for it soon.

Behind the Scenes

OK, I know it looks like I’ve done nothing here for aaaaages. I’ve been busy doing some backend stuff. I’ve decided to move from Picasa to Flickr so I have a whole new set of gallery pages ready to be launched. Expect to see them very soon.

I need to keep my astrodiary up to date .

Partial Eclipse

We had some fun trying to spot the partial eclipse. The forecast was absolutely awful so I didn’t hold out much hope of seeing it, despite this I gathered together all the equipment we were going to need for the morning.

I was somewhat surprised when the alarm woke me to find that the skies were pretty clear, I could see Venus through some thin mist and several stars. Looked good for the eclipse. So I raised the family (some were more reluctant than others) and packed my solar scope, binoculars, camera, tripod etc. into the car.

The plan was to drive to Wittenham Clumps to watch the sunrise. However, about 0.5mile north of home we drove into thick fog. Undeterred we continued in fog right to the car park at the clumps. Hopeless. So we drove all the way home again and back into partly clear skies! We parked and ran up the footpath nearby into the field behind our estate and setup with just a couple of minutes to spare.

The Sun rose, partly obscured by thin cloud but I could get some photos, everyone had a look using the telescope and solar specs. Even a couple of passing dog walkers had a look! Shortly afterwards the Sun moved into thicker cloud and was lost from view.

Very pleased to have seen the eclipse, it was worth the panic! I’ve only missed one of the last six eclipses visible from home now which is a remarkable record for the UK!