Australia Day

Friday, January 26, 2007

Today marks Australia's National Day which in turn means its a public holiday today! Long weekend ahead this week...nothing much happens today tho'...went to a couple of furniture shops to check out ideas for the new apartment, went to Ikea but found nothing to our fancy and besides the quality seems not as good as before...there will be fireworks along the Yarra River, lots of drinking and partying going on but for us, we probably just stay at home and watch the telly or DVDs...haha or videos online...recently my bro intro-ed us a new link to watch TV shows and we got hooked on Heroes, so funny and interesting. This show will be showing here end of the month but guess we can't wait that long...well can't wait to move to the new place so we can get our cable TV ready...- DSA

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ThE DonGSteRs at |11:53 PM|

Comet McNaught

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The appearance of the comet, visible to the naked eye in the evening sky since Jan 15, has been making news around Australia for the past week of so. Unfortunately the weather has been socked in since around that time (although it brought much needed rain here) so Monday night was the first time it was visible. I managed to catch it last night at the St Kilda beachfront. Here's one of the pics I got, taken at about 2145 in the evening. Don't let the sky in the photo deceive you, it was already quite dark at the time, the sky looks bright because of the long photo exposure time I used. (For those interested; camera is Canon 30D w/ Tamron 28-75mm lens, photo taken @ 30sec exposure, f5.6, ISO 400)

Some info about the comet from Wikipedia: (More info and pics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_McNaught ) Comet McNaught, also known as the Great Comet of 2007 and given the designation C/2006 P1, is a non-periodic comet discovered on August 7, 2006 by British-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught. It made perihelion on January 12, 2007, and became easily visible to the naked eye for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.

The comet remains visible to Southern Hemisphere observers in both the morning and evening sky, entering the constellation Microscopium on 18 January and is forecast to fade rapidly and drop below 6th magnitude by 9 February. As of 23 January the comet is clearly visible to southern observers in the western sky after sunset, near to the horizon, and left of Venus. It is so bright that its tail can be easily seen in twilight from city locations in the Southern Hemisphere. It may be possible to see portions of the tail from very dark locations in the Northern Hemisphere that are near the equator

PS. Sorry for the long absence, I plead guilty to a case of writers block... :P -DSM

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ThE DonGSteRs at |7:48 PM|

Victoria Market & Camberwell

Saturday, January 20, 2007

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ThE DonGSteRs at |6:15 PM|

Its been a while since we last did our updates...sorry about the delay, think we have to get in the groove of updating as often as we can...hope everyone had a good start to the new year, everyone is happy and healthy which are the more important qualities in life....finally after quite a hot summer we had rain here, you can't believe the relief we both had as the weather was scorching hot and we had to run to Myers to get a cooler!! Lucky thing it was on sale (January here seems to be THE SALE month), otherwise we will have to contend ourselves with our trusty old fan *lol*

Thank God our new apartment will have not 1 but 2 aircons! We are so happy as initially we are suppose to get 1, guess the developer managed to strike a good bargain with the supplier, we just hope that its a good quality one. We went to the lawyers yesterday to lodge our first home owners grant and looking at the way things are going, it looks like we can get our keys by end Jan!! yipee!! better start to pack some of our things now since we'll probably be able to move our stuff during the weekends...btw I just started doing some digital scrapbooking projects, a bit amateurish I know but hopefully I can improve my skills in time, these are taken at Victoria Market on one of our weekend marketing trips, the meat section is a dry market but when it comes to noon time or after that, thats where the prices will drop by 50%! haha, we usually go around that time, pretty noisy too with most stall owners shouting discounts so if you are a first timer there, it can be daunting...its also one of our favourite places to hang out with the flea market nearby...cheap and good stuff to buy from there...*hehe* - DSA

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ThE DonGSteRs at |4:58 PM|