Photos – Page 8 – Something Odd!

The moon will be blood red tonight

A lunar eclipse is expected tonight at 10:44pm here in Ireland, all over Europe, Africa and elsewhere. I’ll be outside with my Canon 20D and 75-300 zoom so hopefully I’ll get a shot or two I can post here later. NASA has a great page on the eclipse which is where I got these two images.

I checked Astronomy Ireland too but unfortunately their site is basic and at a glance isn’t very informative. They definitely need a blog to update their events and provide more information. If one were cynical, you might think they want you to ring their premium rate numbers…

Never fear, the blogosphere came to the rescue. Daragh’s post on the subject has the times of the eclipse and how long it’ll last. I’m subbed to his blog, read that post this morning, and only thought seriously about the eclipse this evening, long after forgetting where I had come across it.. Thank you Darragh! Hope you enjoy the Blog Awards tonight!

Edit: I wrote a short post, how to photograph a lunar eclipse which might be useful to you if you’re out on this cold night. It’s getting foggy here in Blarney but I hope if clears up in the next hour!

9:46pm – a shadow can be seen at the bottom of the moon.

Matt has some excellent shots of the eclipse:

(Matt – get off the phone! Jacinta just rang and the line is busy!)

More photos of the eclipse:

Find new stuff with the image wall

While everyone seems to be running to the new kid on the block, Google Reader, I stuck with Bloglines because I prefer the old-style interface and the sorting options over the new fangled web 2.0ish Google upstart.

At the same time, I’ve lusted after some of the new features of Google Reader but Bloglines have been busy with a new feature I quite like called the Image Wall. The wall is basically a collection of images grabbed from the latest posts that Bloglines sees. The wall refreshes continuously bringing in new content as you’re watching. Clicking on an image leads to the Bloglines preview of that post where you can then click through to the actual post.

It’s not perfect. The images don’t always fade in correctly, sometimes stuttering or suddenly appearing or changing for some reason. That’s only a minor problem compared to the big one. When you hover an image, a popup appears with a large verson of that image, and allows you to mark offensive images. Unfortunately to get to an image in the middle of the wall you have to move your cursor over other images, thus suffering more popups. If you haven’t tried it, image what it would be like to mouse over a Snap Preview powered page full of closely formatted links. Ugh.

Besides that problem I really like the idea. I found a blog with an hour’s worth of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody remakes yesterday because they included a screen grab from that song’s video. Unfortunately my browser crashed shortly afterwards so I can’t share it with you. I can see you’re disappointed.

Just in case you’re worried about such things, you have to click through the following disclaimer each time you activate the wall.

The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content.

You do read the small print don’t you? Don’t go complaining that you weren’t warned!

Edit: Looks like Bloglines have listened to the complaints and have responded.

Effective today, Bloglines will move the Image Wall to its own, new domain at http://www.bloglinesimagewall.com. Now, any school, library, parent/guardian or third party filtering service can add this full domain to their list of restricted domains to be blocked.

News overload again

You go away for a few days and come back to a news aggregator that’s just brimming with posts and articles and teasing you with nuggets of information that you really don’t have time to read. 10 posts there, 20 here, 200 in boingboing. Time to be selective, I really should prune the number of blogs I’ve subscribed to. How many do you read? I have 190 feeds, plus about 10 feeds related to me, wordpress and Automattic. *phew*

It was worth it however. We were in Dingle for an extended weekend. Despite the warnings of a hurricane it only rained on us once on Saturday morning. For the rest of the time we could have been somewhere exotic under blue skies and fluffy white clouds. The number of tourists from the US and Canada was great to see. The price of the US Dollar in Euros certainly makes it expensive to visit here for Americans and the Canadian Dollar isn’t doing too well either. I can’t wait to get cracking on the photos I took. Check out my photoblog, In Photos.org, over the next week for those!

Will the real hair please stand up?

Pictures of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and their baby Suri Cruise appear in this month’s Vanity Fair. Is that the heir’s real hair? Katie’s pose isn’t the most flattering either, that neck goes on and on. Click the link to see a larger version of the photo.

Cute Kittens

Who could resist cute kitten pictures? Well, Tom could of course 😉

Photos From Space

APOD had two interesting photos over the last few days:

APOD: 2005 November 14 – Everest Panorama from Mars – click on the image for a *huge* panorama!
Lunation – animation of the moon over the course of a month.

Jintle has a lot more space photos too!

Me on Today is My Gift To You!

Today is My Gift To You today features one of the photos I submitted to Today FM! Thanks James! I took the picture just outside my home after I heard that Mairead on the show liked pictures of flowers.
I must put the rest of the Us photos online soon. Stay tuned!

RUKOS

Defy Gravity

Defy Gravity

This is my first time searching Google Video and I came across this cool Skateboarders In Cork video while searching for “Ireland”. I recognise some of the lads, and it was shot on location in Emmet Square (photo above was shot there), UCC, CIT (I think), South Mall, over near the Victoria Hospital and elsewhere. Very nice work.

Us.. more images

Us Images
Following on from yesterday’s post, here’s the final Installment.

Ray D’Arcy announced earlier that the closing date for digital photos by email is now Wednesday night, not next weekend as previously reported. Good thing I had most of these finished last night!

Now it’s up to the judges.