Of Halleys comet - I saw nought, but this year - I saw McNaught!

It was sometime in 1986 that Halleys comet wasn't very visible in the sky, and it was not long afterwards when I bought that cheap red T-shirt I mentioned the other day ... I really must remember to go into the bedroom and dig it out (I still have it somewhere) sometime when DH is not actually asleep, so I can wear it ... (I an not as small as I was then, but the T-shirt was loose on me then, so it still fits me ... well enough to wear around home anyway ;-)
Fortunately Comet McNaught is a lot more visible - when the relevant part of the sky is not covered in clouds, that is ...

Last night was cloudy, but I took some photos the night before, and again tonight ... although the comet seems to be fading a bit now ... I also took photos of the moon, the stars, the sunset, clouds glowing orange in the city lights, the dog and cat following me around the yard while I was taking photos ... My husband (who buys and sets up/maintains any/all computers in this house) will probably complain that I am filling up the hard drive - I took 60 photos this evening! (and at least 20 of those were before it got dark enough to even see the comet!)
and I took 24 the evening before ... (and most of those were before it got dark enough to see the comet - about when it was getting dark enough, the clouds came and obscured the relevant part of the sky ... so I took a couple more photos of the clouds, and a couple photos of the stars in the other side of the sky, and came inside and wrote that long blog post about detached chain ;-)

hmmm ... I wonder how long this post editor thingy has had a spelling checker built in ... I am sure it didn't have it last night when I wrote all that stuff ... but it does now! I make enough typos that I would have noticed it while writing a short post, let alone a long one (there is a red line under the word "thingy" LOL ... and under LOL ... which means Laughing Out Loud, if you didn't know what it meant)

anyway ... before this post ends up as long as the last one ... time to find and upload a couple of photos:

but first ... it is raining ... I had better check that I didn't leave anything outside that really shouldn't be getting wet ... YAAAAAAY rain - hope it keeps raining all night - we need it!

ah good ... nothing much ... just a box of dried plant stuff (for basket making) that the bottom started to fall out when I picked it up ... it will dry out again tomorrow
but when I went out there I had something that wasn't in the rain that should have been:


... I took this photo on Christmas Eve, then I picked up all the buckets ... so I have just "re-created" it (and of course the rain has now stopped!) - the buckets catch the drips that run off the edge of the pergola - the pergola is large so it doesn't take a lot of rain to fill them up ... then a couple of days later, when the rain has long gone and the garden needs a drink ... the buckets get emptied onto some thirsty plants (except one or 2 that I leave for the dog to drink from ;-)

I guess we could put a gutter on the edge of the pergola ... but that costs money ... and the buckets didn't :-)

btw ... the rain has started again too ... we might even get enough to actually soak in to the ground ;-)
(how far into the ground is another matter)










Now ... where was I?

Photos ... well I guess that was a photo ... but not one of the ones I was originally planning to put here ...

ok ... first - one or 5 photos that I took the other night (Sunday)




I have not done anything to this photo - the sky was this colour!
(and if you look closely you can see a thing "toenail" moon somewhere near the middle - why a "toenail"? - that is what my kids used to call a very new moon - it kind of does look like a toe nail clipping ;-)

Here is another one taken a minute or 3 later:



but facing in almost the opposite direction ... that is our house in the side of the picture - and I did not play with this photo at all either - we get some good sunsets here!
(even more so at the moment, because of the smoke drifting up from the bushfires in Victoria)

Then I went for a short drive to a nearby spot where I could get hills on the horizon instead of some ugly roof or another behind us ...

btw, I have been getting lost in cyberspace at the same time as doing this ("this" being writing this blog entry at the same time as finding and fiddling with photos ... yaaaay for multitasking ;-)
I found something really weird looking and weird sounding ... seems sort of appropriate for looking at photos to do with comets and stars and stuff ... so ... if u are game - open another browser window/tab and listen to/look at this or for a bit more musical try this one or click on one of the other variations in the menu on the right ... I don't think I could even begin to understand the maths/etc involved, but it is rather interesting.

now - back to the photos ...

I can see the comet in this one ... can you?
(there is also a moon and more pink clouds ... which kind of go nicely with the grey ones)




No comet in this one, but a nice one with the moon, trees, and Venus:




More weirdo pink clouds - looking South, towards our house.




The comet (and the moon and pink clouds) over part of Dunlop ... the water in the distance (with the sky reflecting light from it making it shiny) is a settlement pond.




Here is the Comet, as the sky got even bit darker ...



And again - as the sky got even darker, and the comet started to vanish behind that line of clouds:




I also took some photos of the stars ...
This one might look like nothing much on here - but if you click on it (goes to a bigger version of the picture - like all of them do) you will see the Seven Sisters (Pleides or however u spell it) and some other constellation that, to me, looks like a mouse cursor! (my daughter says it is a Christmas tree!)




Here is Orion (I grew up calling it "The Big Dipper" or the "Saucepan" )



For those if you in the Northern Hemisphere this will probably look wrong - I think the constellations look the other way up from down here.


This is how I know I am in the Southern Hemisphere ;-)
... the Southern Cross and the pointers ...



They are what I (and a few thousand Boy Scouts/etc who know how to find South from the stars) use to tell which way is South - so that photo is sort of looking towards home ... which is where I eventually went ... at about 10pm!

The sun came up while I was still messing around with this post ... it took ages to move the photos the the right places on here when I uploaded them (this editor thingy seems to have gone back to doing something I thought they had fixed ... only gives me a narrow window, that I can't change the size of, to type in, and if I try to drag and drop an image it doesn't scroll down when I bump it against the bottom of the window, and when I upload the images they all go to the top - so I had to drag each photo down about 10 lines at a time through all my text and past all the other photos - if I had known it was going to go back to being like that I would have put all the photos on here first and then written about them!) So I saved it as a draft, logged out and went to bed!
(maybe I should have tried saving it and logging in and out sooner - I can drag the photos from the top, all the way down to the bottom, in one go again now ... but the spell checker isn't in here any more ..> maybe I should change over to the new one with google log in instead of using the old blogger ... then again - if the editing window I got last night was the new one - I don't want it - the odd spelling mistake I don't see is worth being able to drag photos around in here more easily!)

btw ... I will make the time/date on this post appear as the time I saved it and went to bed (rather than now) - seeing that is when I finished writing most of it.

I have not even had a good look at the photos I took last night ... I might stick one or 2 of those on here in the next few days, if any of them are any good ... but my next post will probably be more of those Tuesday stitches I have bee doing on felt/etc ... unless I have/think of something else I want to post about ...