The RMS Queen Mary 2 is to date the largest ocean liner ever built (but no longer the world’s largest passenger ship, a record she held until 2006).She arrived in Durban harbour this morning around 07h30 SAT to much fanfare and local excitement, these photographs are from colleagues who watched the arrival from the harbour area (she was also easily visible from the Derivco building).

RMS Queen Mary II’s current status (added bonus – a webcam on the bridge, even if it’s low quality)
Twitter coverage from @MarcForrest and @tequiladiva

Also see Marc Forrest’s Flickr set.

Kulula‘s paint work for their new Boeing 737-86N (January 2010).

Another image – a great closeup of the detail on the left tail section.

Not your average boring airline.

All images matching a search for Kulula on jetphotos.net.

Posted from Ewan’s posterous

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Ewan’s posterous

We only saw 56% coverage in Durban (65% in Capetown) – thankfully the clouds were patchy so we had plenty of time for some great views.

Today also marked South Africa’s first formal day of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. I doesn’t matter how many eclipses I see, they are still awe-inspiring and somehow mystical events. I’ve seen two full eclipses before (one in Tshipise in Musina and the other from Lusaka, Zambia) and I plan to follow any others I can get to :-)

From Wikipedia: HDR(I) is “a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.”

But put simply the photographer uses software to combine multiple photographs of the same scene, each taken with different exposures. The result is a photo with a wider range of light and dark tones than would otherwise be possible with one exposure – in theory photos which are closer to the way a human eye would see a scene (although the range can be wildly exaggerated for artistic / bizarre effect).

These are a few of my favourite examples – nice to see some astrophotography uses and my favourite obsession bridge :-)

Links:

• Astrophotography pool on Flickr
• Wikipedia HDRI topic (some great images here too)
• More of my favourites – Positano and The Grotto (youtube video, another Flickr photoset, view in Google Earth… I’ll stop now).

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

– Carl Sagan, May 11, 1996

Resources:
APOD for Oct 16th 2006 “In the Shadow of Saturn” (a newer perhaps better “blue dot” image)
NASA / JPL detail on the above image

My love, read the Wikipedia article – and note phrases like “The climb to Uhuru Peak is considered to be a relatively straightforward endeavour” and ”
Annually, approximately 15,000 people attempt to climb the mountain“. goafrica also says “The exciting thing about this mountain is that anyone who is fit and determined can make it up. No special climbing equipment or expertise is needed.“. I’ll be on babysitting duty for a whole year :-)

Saturn’s moon Mimas is seen against the cool, blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn’s northern hemisphere, in this image from the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.

Full story here at ESA.

A mosaic of nine processed images recently acquired during Cassini’s first very close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan on Oct. 26, 2004, constitutes the most detailed full-disc view of the mysterious moon.

(NASA).