Long time no see!

I finally get round to updating my blog, nothing exciting perhaps, but I have been busy, hense the long time between updates. Although I havent been able to get out star gazing. Truth be told, I havent been very well. Recently we have moved, the doctors put enough pressure on the council to get me a ground floor flat, with a garden! Still in the "tail-end" part of the move. You know the one, still got a few odds and ends in boxes and nothings "quite" how you want it just yet, this of course, I mean the whole move thing has been quite stressful, but the flat is great. Lovely garden and fantastic neighbours.

Between now and last time I 'blogged' I turned 32, my partner turned 29 our daughter turned 5 and we had our 9th anniversary, all in the last two weeks of August.

On the star gazing front, the new garden is great, I no longer need to travel now to be able to use the scope, Wayne did pop round where we had a proper Jupiter session, which is my own personnal favorite. I did take alot of shots using his camera and lappy, but im still waiting for the sod to email them over. However I have been using a service called Slooh (http://www.slooh.com/) basically you buy minutes and control a large telescope via an online telescope, heres a collection of pics ive taken using Slooh.

Of course, not as good as the real thing, but Slooh has enabled to me to enjoy my hobby when I get out or simply not well enough. In the meantime I have been trying to look for a Globe of Jupiter, I found Moon and Mars globes, but not one of Jupiter :( the Mars one looks fantastic, and the Moon one I found was offical NASA and looked the business. Jessica has been taking more of an intrest in what I do, again, major boost for me, to have my own daughter intrested in science. Her now old school did a whole host of space type stuff over the Apollo 11 40th Aniversary, and the teachers asked the pupils to get some photos of the moon or other space related things from home. Of course, being Jessica's Daddy, I had to go one better and gave her proper photos that we have taken, but I took the time to type up a desription on the back of each photo, including all the major Apollo landing sites aswell as other places of intrest, trying to write in such a way that a child could understand, so I wrote it as if I was the teacher/speaker talking to the class. Was chuffed to hear my photos were used in most of the classes taking part and used in lessions. I know to some this may seem a small thing, but lighting the fires of intrest in these young people was fantastic. But im sure most will forget where the Tycho Brahe crater is lol.

Next time I hope not to leave too long before I post again.