I'm blue all right. Yesterday was the photo-marathon. The themes were "My World", "Island Life" and "Singapore Idol" given out at 4-hourly intervals. My performance was a total dismal. I was unable to come up with any good ideas for the themes. Should have slept earlier the night before.

Leon, Gu and I joined forces. We went in Gu's car from Ang Mo Kio to Jurong to Orchard to Sentosa to Little India to Geylang and Hougang over the 12 hour span. A real island-wide chase. This was as close to Amazing Race as you can get! On hindside, perhaps we should not have spent so much time on the road.

Some of the photos submitted by the participants were interesting. Although the winning entries were generally well-taken, I couldn't see the relevance of some of them to the themes. In fact I thought some of the "Merit" shots were actually better than the categories' "Winner" shots. Oh well, photography is really very subjective and I'm not the judge.

This year's judge(s) seemed to have preference for shots with people in it. And I really suck at Street Photography. I believe this is the first time I actually approached so many strangers to ask to shoot them. It was quite an experience for me.

These were what I submitted. Pretty lame, especially the 2nd and 3rd themes' entries.



I took these during the competition and I kind of like them. We were only allowed to submit 1 photo per theme.


Will have a go at the competition again next year!

I joined in last night's observation (2nd Oct 04). It was a mad rush for me 'cos my equipment is still rather foreign to me and I haven't sorted out the logistic part. Weixing, the organiser of the regular observation sessions at Tampines, was interested to see my LXD55 setup. So I had to transport more than 20kg of equipment + accessories to the site. But I'm glad I did because the guys were a great help! At least now I know how to go about using the LXD55 autostar in my next obs.

The session lasted till 3.45am this morning. The sky was ok with the clouds coming and going. We spent the 1st few hours trying to figure out how to use the GOTO mount and Autostar. Finally we had to call up another friend Richard for help. He came after 12midnight.

Even though we managed to carry out the 2-Star alignment procedure, there seemed to be some problems still. I tried to slew to Orion Nebula (M42), but it's a bit off. When I tried to slew to Saturn, it was way off. Perhaps we didn't do the polar north alignment part properly because we didn't have a compass. (Must go buy one soon!)

I took a few shots through the Skywatcher 127MCT with the EOS20D + T-ring. Settings of ISO800 to 3200 were used with various shutter speeds between 6" to 20". The ISO800+20" shot is shown here.


The 4 stars in the trapezium are nicely resolved. At least I know the mount is tracking well cos there was no star trails though exposure was 20". I took some shots thru Weixing's 6" Newtonian without the tracking. Star trails could be seen for shutter speed of 25".

The moon was really very bright, adding to the overall light-pollution.

There were 6 of us there - Weixing, Elton, Richard, Clemens & Carloqambino. Here are the photos taken by Richard of us playing with our toys. Overall it's been a very a fun session for me. I went to bed at 5am this morning, tired but very happy!

The universe awaits..........