Posts Made By: Phillip Ostroff

Very nice!!!

Woah! I have a little one of those in a decent-sized tank/aquarium that my wife brought home from her school. Do they really get that big??? If so, I need to stop feeding it by hand as if it does get that big it is likely to take my finger clean off!

Awesome photo!! Alpha Crux looks very interesting in this.

Reprocessed using 2X drizzle in Deep Sky Stacker...

Awesome shot, Ivan! Would love to capture Jupiter like that one day!

And attached to this post is the DSS processed image without modification.

Cheers,
Phil

Same, watched it a few times and have given up. It just doesn't have too much substance. I fear even Doctor Who is going the same way, the last series was just okay. Torchwood rocks!!!

I say, bring back Red Dwarf!!!

Gee, that's a gorgeous image, Joe! I am hoping to shoot something like that over the coming nights and you have just set the standard, at least for me! Well done!

Cheers,
Phil

Here's an image I took this evening. Quite a nice moon to observe but I just had to take a photo. This was taken with a Nikon D40 attached to a William Optics 66mm Petzval. 1/320 second exposure @ ISO 400. Cropped and mild curve adjustment in Photoshop to bring out a bit more detail.

I know I probably should have taken a wide-angle shot at moonrise to give it some scale as opposed to the close-up, but I was busy with the kiddoes.

Cheers,
Phil

Cool question! When I was about 14, my mum came home from a trash and treasure sale with an old Realistic radio that she just wanted to use for the AM bands. She bought it for $25 or so. She had it for a while and then I decided that it was more than just an AM radio... The dial had several bands on it, there were tons of cool knobs and I just thought it had to be something better! As it turned out, ti was a Realistic DX-160 Shortwave!

I bought it off mum using my part-time job stacking the local corner shop's milk fridge, then saved a few weeks more for a copper wire antenna. I then spent one Saturday on my summer holiday moving the radio into my room, running the cooper wire antenna about 60 feet around the house and up an old gum tree (!) (was living in Australia at the time). Then the magic of turning it on with the antenna attached for the first time...ah, fond memories! Could pick up SO many Asian broadcasts, and the BBC boomed through the speaker as though the studio was just down the road. I spent many nights awake that summer tuning into and logging different broadcasts. Mum and Dad joined me from time to time, and eventually my mates would come over and listen in.

A few years later, mum had that big gum tree chopped down due to a safety issue, and there went my antenna! I know now it wasn't the safest way to erect such a thing but boy, it really collected some sound waves!

These days I either use my Icom IC-R10 or tune into world broadcasts via their web feeds, but I miss the nostalgia of dialing in remote, unknown and mysterious stations from amongst the static background noise. I'd love to get a DX-160 again one day, just for grins.