Monthly Archives: October 2004

Photographing a Lunar Eclipse

It’s very difficult to photograph the moon, not least of which because it’s so far away! Your eyes deceive you when you look at it – sure, it might look as big as the street light but wih distance there’s a lot less light getting to you. This article on photographing the moon is very good and explains the phenomenon well.
Here’s a picture I took on Monday evening in Monkstown. The moon was rising, and after it re-appeared from behind some black clouds I snapped this photo. Originally, the photo had a lot of noise, but by blurring, and “burning” two layers in the GIMP I think I got a nice background and noise free image! Of course, reducing it in size helps a lot to hide that sort of thing!
Enjoy the picture, it’s all we’ll see in Ireland with the storm building outside!

  • APOD has a diagram showing where and when the eclipse will be visible.
  • Here’s another article on moon photography. Nice, if fake looking photos.
  • Mr Eclipse “The Ultimate Resource For Eclipse Photography”

Major Storm Heading Our Way!

Scary notice up on the MET EIREANN website! *gulp* I’m now glad that Blarney is inland!

Severe Weather Warning
A MAJOR STORM WILL AFFECT ALL PARTS OF IRELAND DURING WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY. SOME STRUCTURAL DAMAGE AND FLOODING CAN BE EXPECTED. Winds, initially mainly between Northeast and Southeast in direction, will reach mean speeds of 45 to 55 miles per hour, with gusts of 70 to 80 miles per hour. Winds will may veer southerly on the South coast later. Structural damage such as fallen trees, etc. can be expected. Rainfall totals in excess of 50mm over a wide area will lead to some severe flooding, due to the already saturated ground. Some parts of Munster and south Leinster could see totals of up to 80 mm of rain. High Seas and high tides, will lead to coastal flooding, particularly in the South and East of the country.

Here’s a global wave height map of the Atlantic. Looks like Wexford’s going to be pounded! (Warning – trying to access that image crashed my copy of Moz FF, but wget worked fine.)

Inline WordPress Comments

I’m experimenting with inline WordPress comments. If you leave a comment on this or other posts the comment will display on the blog, under the post. I need to make it optional however and smarten up it a bit!
You’ll probably notice a few changes here over the next few hours as I play with it. It wasn’t too hard to do, but I decided to create a new template and not overload the original comments template file.

The Power of Nightmares

Justin linked to The Power of Nightmares and I’m watching it now. Excellent and thought provoking look at the US neo-conservatives and al-Qaeda. Frightening too.
Pity some people think it’s all so simple. At least others are concerned for the safety of Margaret Hassan. God Help Her.
Later… As Keith removed my comment from his post, here’s what I’d like him to know..

Damn, but you’re one sick individual.

Much much later.. You can watch all three episodes online now. According to Metafilter they’re on Google Video and archive.org! Thanks Damien.

WPMU Nightly Downloads

I finally got around to creating a release script so I can quickly bang out WPMU tarballs and zip files.
Releases won’t come every day but when I make major changes to the system I’ll upload a new version and announce it here.
Here’s the download page.
Note: I haven’t as yet tested this version. It was created in a completely different way to past releases so it may not work quite as planned!
2004-10-22 Changes:

  • Enclosures created by scanning blog posts.
  • Lots of WordPress Core changes.
  • Photoblog plugin displays links to posts where they exist.
  • More than one enclosure now handled.
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