To Infinity....and beyond!

What do you know, after a really quiet period we have some wicked exciting events happenning all at once.

Yesterday, Thursday started fairly ordinary, we spent the day cleaning the house and removing the oodles of spiders that seem to have taken refuge among our living space. In fact, just tonight we shared around 1.5 hours driving time with a huntsman spider. That's a big ugly hairy harmless spider to you guys.
So at around 3 in the afternoon David (I) was mowing the lawn when raindrops the size of your little fingernail started to slap on my head. So I ran to get the washing in, being the domestic god I am and ran into the house just as the heavens open and seemed to release some water reservoir in the sky on the farm. Thunder then came striking directly above the farm with deafening claps of thunder. We raced to shut off both pump sheds to prevent the electronics from being fried.

Today, we had an early morning taking a swim in our pool and returning to have some breakfast. Daryll arrived at around 11 and we played around with some organic fertilizer. Seaweed powder and fish protein liquid (Made in Canada). I nearly heaved and my hands still have a nasty gross fish odour. I'm sure the trees will love it. Later on we went to the farm next door and got some fencing equipment to build a bordering fence. While having our after work drink Daryll's wife Donna called, after a conversation he suddenly mentioned that we might like to head down to where she works at the Gin Gin Observatory. We of course jumped at the chance and raced down there for our evening with the stars.

Now this observatory is one of the most important places is the world for Astronomy. It houses the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere with has been built to look into gravity. Too complicated to explain here, but fabulously interesting. The Telescope is called the Zadko Telescope. Go Here for some more info. We had our own personal tour of the telescope and all the gizmos involved in making it work. It isn't open for public viewing but Donna hooked us up with a guy named Timo. This guy, who was very passionate and knowledgeable about his work, gave us a quick talk and demonstration of what this thing could do. He also showed us that in about 20 years there will be a big meteor (I think) that will come along the same line as the earth....heading straight for the India region. On April 13, 2029, which is a Friday. He says that they will hopefully find a way to solve that problem before it arises. If you click on the link ("Go here for some more info") you will find out more to what the big telescope can do with watching our galaxy and saving the earth from possible future harm.

Other than this amazing telescope we also had a presentation of the sky which Donna and her knowledgeable colleague Grant presented using the crazy green lasers we played with when we went over for supper at Daryll and Donna's a few weeks back. We looked through three different telescopes one was a refractor lens relying on mirrors and reflection, and the other two were GPS locators programmed to find anything in the night sky. We saw Jupiter (and you could even see the rings around it), the Silver Coin Galaxy in the east sky and a heap of star clusters to the south of us. A truly fascinating night which will remain with us for a long time. We can now tell the difference between orbiting satellites, whether they are spinning or simply orbiting the earth. And get this, shooting stars are not always what they seem. Apparently you can mistake a shooting star for a container full of space poo from the space station. It was a beautiful night....no moon so the stars were bright and it was a clear sky. What a beautiful thing. They also had a computer program that was like Google Earth...but it was the whole universe that we know of so far. We cannot even begin to comprehend HOW BIG this whole universe is. We are just a speck in our whole galaxy....that is just one of many galaxies...Ah, Amazing....

Well....what a fun night!! Unfortunately, the camera was left at home so we have no photos...We could of taken one with the massive million dollar telescope!!!!

tata for now...

Holly and David