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Author Archives: Ross
Website Fixup
A friend had a website developed for their business, unfortunately it was tuned exclusively for Internet Explorer 6, it displayed with various degrees of dis-function on other browsers. With the passage of time this increasingly became an issue. Another issue was that the site was not catching traffic from google very well because the page titles and keywords were too general.
After obtaining access to the website host I was able to fix the layout glitch across all the common browsers, and customise each page’s title and keywords to reflect its content. As a bonus I connected the website to a web traffic analysis package so that now the proprietor can see which pages his clients are viewing and what search phrases they employ.
Titan causes a Solar Eclipse on Saturn
On the evening of 12th March Saturn’s Moon Titan passed between the Sun and Saturn, from Sydney we could see Titan casting a shadow onto Saturn. The effect is subtle but you can see a darker splash on the left hand edge of the planet. 
The photographic technique was very simple, I put the camera up to the eyepiece, it is surprising that it worked as well as it did.
A more comprehensive story is on the Blog of Sydney Observatory under THIS LINK.
Full Moon
The December meeting and Xmas party of Sydney City Skywatchers coincided with the full moon. This hand held photo was taken with my Panasonic FZ20
This image was used on the Blog of Sydney Observatory in THIS ARTICLE.
Four planets rising in the Eastern sky
During May (2011) we saw the unusual spectacle of four bright planets rising in the East before dawn.
I assisted at the special pre-dawn viewing session at Sydney Observatory on the 13th, here are some photos:
A few days later at McMahons Point I setup my Canon 1000d and took a frame every 20 seconds, I created an animation of these at a rate of 12.5 per second and added a title frame. A Power-Point slide sequence of the procedure is https://rossmitchell.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/FourPlanets.ppt. The resulting movie can be seen:
.
on vimeo https://vimeo.com/album/4487885/video/209342261
or youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm5dqqwdArU