Transit of Venus

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In a week of portentious astronomical events, we watched the Transit of Venus this morning.

It’s a rate occurence – it won’t happen again for over a century.

It’s also of historical significance because in 1769, James Cook sailed to the South Pacific to observe and measure the Transit of Venus so that scientists could get a better estimate of our distance from the Sun. The idea was that if you could calculate the exact time you observe the transit in one part of the world, and compared the differece with observations another part of the world, you could use that difference and the distance between observation points to work out how far away we were from the Sun.

I was impressed at the quality of the equipment that was available at our kids school. I think it’s wonderful that they are able to get a chance to watch such a special event.



An image of the sun was projected from the eye piece of a telescope onto a screen, and we were able to watch what was going on by looking at the screen – and therefore not putting our eyesight in danger.

I took photos of the screen with my mobile phone. Because I was standing at an angle to the screen, the disc of the sun looked egg-shaped. To fix this, I “stretched” the photos on my computer using a program called “Gimp” to make the sun look round again.



The quality of the image was really good….



If you look closely you can see a few sunspots in the middle of the disc of the sun, and the planet Venus just starting to appear at the “6 o’clock” position at the bottom of the disc.

The next series of photos shows Venus slowly crossing the lower edge of the disc of the sun as the transit begins….









22:33:59 UTC

In the photo above, notice the “Black Drop” effect – the disc of Venus appears to distend towards edge of the solar disc as if it is being stretched.

Lunar Eclipse

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We had a partial eclipse of the moon last night.

I took a few photos with our Canon EOS 400D. Unfortunately the zoom wasn’t very powerful, so I finished by taking a few photos with Liz’s Canon Powershot. I was surprized that the Powershot took much clearer photos than the DSLR. I was also surpsied how little exposure I needed. With the DSLR I used ISO 100, F/5.6 and speeds between 1/200 and 1/800 sec. With the EOS, I used ISO-800, F/8 and 1/2500 sec.

I enjoyed the experiment. This one was much easier to photograph than the Transit of Venus which happens tomorrow. I might leave that one to more experienced photographers

Border Ranges – The Movie

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Here’s Tony’s video of our ride through the Border Ranges yesterday, including my wimpy attempt at crossing Horseshoe Creek.

Thanks Tony!

Border Ranges and Horseshoe Creek

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A few weeks ago some friends and I had to cut short our ride through the Border Ranges National Park because of our late start and slow progress.

Today Eric, Darb and I gave it another try.

We arrived at the starting point at about 8:30am after a two and a half hour drive from Brisbane, and immediately started the long climb up into the National Park.

Normally, this ride has some amazing views. Rising over 1,100 meters, some of the lookouts are perched atop shear drops, and let you see forever in every direction. The clouds, mist and rain made that impossible today, but it was still a wonderful experience riding through the lush rainforest.

The rain also made it impossible to take photos. My camera is out of action, so all I had was my mobile phone which doesn’t handle moisture too well. Thankfully, Darb was able to capture the high points of the ride on his Contour video camera. I’ll post that video here when I get it.

The challenging thing about this route is that apart from three fast descents, we were climbing for almost 35km, which took us about three and a half hours. All the while, it was raining, and the temperature was hovering around 11C. So it was hard work.

Eric and Darb are strong hill climbers. I found it impossible to keep up with them on the long ascents, and was thankful they stopped several times to help me catch up.

The fast descents were exhillarating though. Shooting down a dirt track at about 40 km/h with fogged up mud-covered glasses, and chill breezes cutting through rain-soaked clothes really makes you feel alive – and cold I was glad I added a couple of Snickers Bars to my normal stash of food – they helped to warm me up again.

The final descent out of the National Park is awesome.  We dropped 1,000 metres of altitude in just over 10km.  That’s the longest descent I’ve ever done.

Normally on a run like this my brakes would overheat, and I’d end up losing them.  This time my local bike shop had installed an 8″ brake rotor on the front, and a 7″ rotor on the back.  They handled the descent with ease.  My brakes didn’t fade at all.  Thank you, Sam from Strathpine Bicycle Centre!

Once we left the park, we took a detour through some private property.  I had been in touch with a local land owner who said he didn’t mind us riding down through his property to Horseshoe Creek.  This was another fun descent down a steep boggy 4wd track with a couple of dozen water bars.

(Picture – Dean Dwyer)

At the bottom of the boggy track, with the bikes covered in mud, we had to cross a flooded Horseshoe Creek. Eric just lifted his bike above his head and waded across in the knee-deep water. I pussy-footed around trying to hop across the rocks and keep my feet dry. In the end, Eric took pity on me, waded back into the water and grabbed my bike, while I finished crossing the creek. My efforts were to no avail – my feet were soaked despite wearing plastic feezer bags over my socks.

The creek was a good spot to wash the mud off the bikes and start the second half of the trip through the much flatter farmland in the valley below the ranges.

(© State of New South Wales through the Department of Education and Training)

In order to fit the ride into one day, we decided to leave out riding into the small town of Kyogle. This saved us about 45 minutes, but it also meant that there wasn’t any place we could stock up on water if we needed it. In the preceding week I got in touch with the teacher at Collins Creek Public School who kindly agreed to let us pop into the school grounds and fill up on water if we needed it. It was a beautiful little school surrounded by farmland, and it in just the right spot for us.

For me, the toughest part of the ride was the final two kilometers. With the end of the day seamingly in sight, and 80 tough kilometers on our legs, the road became suddenly steeper, and we had to grind our way up the hill back to the car.

We did a total of 2,000m of vertical ascent on this ride. It took us seven and a half hours to ride 81.5 km (including an hour in breaks). I burned about 8,000 kcal.

Doing this ride in cold wet weather and having to drive two and a half hours each way to get there definitely rates this one 10 out of 10 on the tough-o-meter.

Peachester Forest

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(Many thanks to Ron Perske for taking the pictures today. My camera has broken from over-use, so Ron very kindly agreed to be our photographer)

The late Autumn weather in South East Queensland has been amazing, which inspired me to do some more exploration around the Glasshouse Mountains and Peachester. The only problem was that once I’d committed with a couple of friends to do the ride, it started raining So it ended up being a bit muddier than we had anticipated.

(Photo by Ron Perske)

Eric, Ron and I started our ride from Matthew Flinders park at Beerburrum, under the brooding watch of Tibrogargan. The park is named after Matthew Flinders who camped there in 1799 – the first european to visit the area. He intended to climb Tibro, but it proved too steep for him, so he decided to have a go at the much easier Mount Beerburrum instead.



(Photo by Ron Perske)

We headed west through the forest towards the lookout. Rain from the night before had soaked some of the trails, so within a quarter of an hour we and our bikes were quite muddy.



After completing the steep climb through the bush up to the lookout, we took a break to enjoy the view and try and get some of the mud out of the bike chains. I brought an old rag, and a bottle of wet-weather chain lube. I discovered that drowning the chain in lube kept most of the mud at bay.



(Photo by Ron Perske)

As we headed into Peachester Forest, we just followed whatever trails looked interesting. We had a basic plan of where we wanted to go, but whenever we came across a winding trail heading off to the side, we checked it out. Sometimes that turned out well. Sometimes we ended up to our axels in muddy water



(Photo by Ron Perske)

…sometimes we got our feet wet.

Eventually we ended up at Peachester for a bit to eat and a drink, followed by a quick descent down Old Peachester Road, then back to the cars along Old Gympie Road.

The fun thing about today was that we didn’t have a fixed agenda / schedule. The flexibility meant we could follow a whim and see where some trails ended up. The knowledge we gained will be really useful in planning future group rides through the area.

This ride was about 50km, and took about 4 and a half hours. I burned about 2,700kcal and climbed about 900m in vertical ascent. I’d rate this ride about 7 out of 10 on the tough-o-meter. There are one or two short difficult pinch-climbs, and the mud made it a bit more of a challenge. It’s not really a ride to do in wet weather so leave it for the dryer winter months.