This is the end result of our trip to WA. The story of the emu in the sky, with some of the Aboriginal constellations. Pete Morse did the amazing cinema. This is now showing on a small fulldome screen in the Aboriginal cultural heritage centre in Carnarvon.
(click on the title to see the video).
This is what the trip was all about. A fulldome 20 minute movie on a 4m dome at the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Centre in Carnarvon Western Australia.
An amazing presentation, developed by Dr Peter Morse partly on the iVEC supercomputer at University of Western Australia, shows the Jangurna story of the people in the stars, plus timelapse photography of some significant sites in the area.
Photographs courtesy of Paul Bourke, Research Associate Professor and Director: iVEC University of Western Australia
http://paulbourke.net/ www.petermorse.com
and see also the story of the Hurley Dolly, used for the timelapse at: www.hurleydolly.wordpress.com
Taken with GBtimelapse and a Canon 550D
Here’s a sample of what we’re doing. This was taken at the Murchison River. It is round because the camera lens is a 180 degree fisheye. So it is designed for projection on a half-dome like a planetarium with the audience sitting in the middle. They would see the images at the bottom of the circle in front of them, and the rest stretching back over their head, with the top of the circle behind them.
Unfortunately the way WordPress and Youtube handle the clip, this movie doesn’t show the scene in its full glory. What you don’t see here is the sky full of stars and the lovely reflections on the water. Still, you get the idea.
We caught the night flight across to Hobart from Perth. Bloody awful flight, Jetstar standard, not much sleep. And arrived grumpy and tired in the early morning.
After a serious bit of snoozing it was back to home life. Nice, but then it’s nice to be on the road too.
We saw and did a lot, travellled about 5,000 km in Petes excellent vehicle. No reason to use the axe in the back (on each other) surprisingly enough. We got 246 GB of pictures in all, enough to make an excellent movie for the Aboriginal Culural Heritage Centre in Carnarvon.
Good trip.
Next………
We owned this yacht for 10 years. Bydand (‘steadfast’ in gaelic).
A ferrocement yacht, 45ft sloop, designed by the renowned Wilf O’Kell who has built around 800 ferro boats.
We sailed around the top end from Mooloolaba, and lived for months in Shark Bay with the kids when they were little. It was a great boat, big, roomy and very safe. Sad to sell it really, but a boat like that takes a lot of time and when we moved to Tasmania we decided not to take it with us.
We saw Bydand again in Fremantle Yacht Club. Looking rather neglected, people obviously living aboard, but not looking after it much. Pity.
Just for the record this is what she looked like when we lived aboard – somewhat better!
Pete’s brother in law Guy was kind enough to take us all out on his yacht for the afternoon. We sailed across to Garden Island where we had a quick swim and returned. Nice to be on the sea again.
So after all that heat dust’n’flies we treated ourselves to a night in a select B&B called Fothergills in Fremantle. Run by one of the surgeons at Fremantle Hospital, it really was a pleasant place to spend the night. Everything was tastefully done, nothing tacky and nothing like on of the hotels. Bliss.
So far we have camped well away from anyone else. Apart from keeping close to the valuable cameras and laptops, we were deliberately avoiding lights – you cant photograph the stars when there is light around. We have become pretty used to the open spaces.
So it was with some trepidation we dropped anchor at Horrocks (funny name that) just north of Geraldton, and took the last caravan for the night. Far to close to the rest of humanity.
Actually it was OK.
On the way to Perth we were diverted inland because the main highway was closed by a bushfire. We passed through New Norica en route.
Impressive place, with a lovely chapel and monastery garden.
That afternoon as we were thinking about going the weather cracked up with looming clouds, lightning and rain. Clearly we weren’t going to get much more in the way of starry nights.
Time to head south.
When we were doctors up here we spent a lot of time in the air in light aircraft, and loved it. But this goes one better – Tim, Quobba station owner’s gyrocopter. He dragged it out of its container and flew off to check on the fire this morning, only took him an hour or so. Nifty little gadget, flying along like the birds.
I want one….
The guys at Dynamic Perception have made a 6ft dolly controlled by a small computer. Nice piece of work, more easily transported than my dolly but not so simple and rugged. Mine is also twice as long, which gives a more compelling sense of movement with landscape shots.
Here the MX Dolly is being used for a timelapse of the midden and dune Pete wraps the camera in gladwrap to keep out the ever-present dust.
Next day we went back for a final run on the cliff edge. This time using the camera on a tripod moving back and forth. The dolly was close enough to a big drop to be scarey (not for Sally, presumably). Interestingly when we were working here in the darl with head torches it wasn’t at all worrying – which was worrying. There was just a black bit, and it took some effort to remember not to wander the other side of the dolly.
The overhead and off-the-cliff shots were taken using a pole-camera. Nice effect.
I managed to creep up on an eagle perched in the bushes near our camp. Finally it saw me and took off, first expressing its displeasure.
The approaching cyclone makes spectacular skyscapes. Here we photograph a panorama of the sunset, including vertical up and down, then add a video of the waves. This allows Pete to make a full-immersion bubble on the computer which you can propel yourself into and look around. Meanwhile the waves appear to be breaking on the rocks below.
Back to the cliffs at Quobba, and staying back in the midden area. One of the lovely things about doing this sort of trip is that you get to interact with the enviromnent. So, rather than being just a tourist passing through, the landscape means something to us.
A developing cyclone and an extensive bushfire put paid to our hopes of going inland to photograph the Kennedy Ranges and other spots – pity because they looked good.
So we went back to Quobba Station. Cyclone Iggy was just forming off the coast, and it looked like Exmouth wasn’t the place to be (actually it fizzled out and headed off south later on).
So we went back to Quobba station and our nice little donga, kindly hosted by Tim and Sarah the station owners. Much appreciated showers, and comfortable beds – though to be honest I like living in the bush, getting close to natural things suits me down to the ground (literally).
Exmouth wasn’t a nice place to live – it seemed to exist mainly for the tourist, and we didn’t like the pervading sense of entitlement. The underlying feeling that the town was owed something by someone. Nice place, beautiful coral, lovely beaches, amazing cliffs etc etc. But somehow they all wanted to be richer – too many tourists I’d say. You get the same feeling in places like Brighton, Blackpool, Surfer’s Paradise, and the California Coast. These places lose their humanity in pursuit of the dollar. I grew up in one, so I know it well.
And now, 15 years later, we see these developments being rolled out. Canal estates, with an architecture and a feel just like every other canal estate. Could be right out of the pages of one of those glossy magazines couldn’t it? It implies a lifestyle and a culture which is both superficial and un-human: the junction where reality blurs and people live the lifestyle of the soapies they watch on their TVs. Ugh.
And it’s not going away either, the mining boom will see to that – for all the miners in the Pilbara on big salaries, Exmouth is the perfect seaside resort. And the canal development is seen as the zenith of seaside living.
Years ago when I lived here we went to the visitors centre at Milyering. I noticed that the walls were being eroded by blown sand at their bases. This time I see that they had put a sloping concrete plinth around the bottom to protect the rammed earth.
So now you know what to do.
On the way out from the caves we stopped off to do what all the tourists do – swim in the azure sea with beautiful coral and reef fish under us. Lovely.
The filming generates vast amounts of data – every picture is 3-7 MB, and there are thousands of them taken each day. All this needs backing up – on to a computer, then onto an external hard drive, then copied again onto another hard drive. Takes hours, often overnight or while driving.
This stuff is so important we can’t afford to lose it, so backups are a constant feature of our life. By the end of the trip it was all copied to 4 separate places.
And we had 232 GB of data.
We got permission from the parks guys to film in the ningaloo park. The ranger said we could take a road closed sign to stop people driving down the road and spoiling the shoot with their headlights. As it happened this was a good thing – someone did stop when they saw the lights in the cave, but were turned back by the sign. They would have seriously messed up all our efforts if they came snooping.
But just having the ability to close a road is very exciting. that feeling of power and control – we’ve never experienced that before – Pete shows how good it is.
This time it’s the rear door handle that snapped off. So out come the tools and a bit of string, and soon there’s a new handle – of sorts.
For those of you who think Pete isn’t all that good at tidying things up (like me for instance), here’s evidence to the contrary.
Pete sweeps the dust with a sprig of vegetation to remove our boot marks from the pictures.
Impressed? I am.
[In the interests of strict honesty I have to say that tidiness is not my forte either]
In aeons past I daresay blokes would have sat in this very cave discussing things. Just like us. The technology has changed though, from stone tools to computers. Here we’re waiting for the dolly run to finish.
In case you think this is easy work, it isn’t. It’s very hot and very sweaty and very tiring. We get up early and trudge out to the caves, then set up the gear. Meanwhile drinking litres of water and not feeling like eating much. Then we wait around for an hour or so for each run.
Another little bonus is the ants – the place is teeming with them. Weeny little ones zooming around everywhere. If you sit down for any time they find a way to bite you. If you leave a bit of grub on the rocks it gets covered in no time at all.
Waiting here in the dark for the night time run I got bitten by on the foot by what seemed a monstrous insect with huge pinchers and a big bite. Made me hop and swear for a while, I can tell you. In reality it was probably a weeny ant.
Then along came the mozzies buzzing and the bats squeaking. Finally, when it was all over, we trudged back in the pitch black trying to find the car.
The best thing was Sally had a nice meal waiting back at the camp. Aaah.
This is what Pete’s really like – hot, sweaty and tired. So are the rest of us. The heat, flies, dust, ants, mosquitos, sharp rocks make life a bit difficult.
While the filming was going on in the cave, we set up second EOS 5DII camera on the roof to get a fulldome panorama of the thunderheads building up and the sun going down.
It’s so hot that I made an insulating shield from the cars’ sun protectors. Note big rocks holding the tripod down in case one of the thunderheads turns into a storm – the wind gusts ahead of the rain squalls can be quite fierce.
Here’s the sunset from the beach.
Pete wanted to get a spectacular shot from the cave, so we set up the dolly on the floor pointing outwards. We did a run in the morning, then toward evening did another run with the camera moving out of the mouth of the cave as the sun set. Two LED torches lit up the back of the cave as the sun went down over the reef in front. Should make an amazing sequence.
The ground in front of the caves was littered with artifacts, here is a hammer stone – curved, hand sized and chipped on one end. The stone is clearly not of the local rock and has been carried in from elsewhere.
Some areas were clearly used for making stone tools. The rock is different, harder quartz-type rock, with obvious pressure flaking.
This tree grows outside the caves, presumably planted deliberately, since they don’t grow in such close quarters on the plains. It’s the Kurrajong tree, which is an excellent food source. They produce 5-lobed pods containing seeds which, when ripe, look and taste a bit like peanuts. If you get them at the right time of year there’s a good feed in one pod.
One would hope the climate was a bit wetter when these caves were occupied, but all-in-all its a wonderful place to live. Fresh water at Mandu Mandu and Yardie creeks, the reef at your front door teeming with fish, crustaceans and shells, dugongs and turtles for the taking. And kangaroos, emus, snakes and lizards onland.
Must have been a paradise, one of the best waterfront property developments of the time.
Petes sister Kate Morse is a well known archaeologist who investigated the Cape Range in the late 80’s. She published a paper on finding a set of beads – one of the oldest known stone necklaces – in the mouth of one of the caves. She told us how to find the cave, and, after a day struggling through the rocks in the heat (looking for the wrong cave as it turned out) we found the cave on the face of an escarpement.
The Cape Range is a Karst formation, which means it is full of caves. We used to live here 15 years ago – we were half of the two doctors at the hospital for 5 years. I was the doctor for the SES, and used to practise cave rescues with the other guys in the service.
There are over 700 caves in the Ranges, some of them very deep and spectacular. I have abseiled into 100 ft domes like a cathedral, squeezed through underground passages, descended 60ft to an underground river, and visited amazing galleries of variegated rock crystals. The ranges, dry and harsh on the outside, contain a myriad of beautiful caverns.
Another wonder of these ranges are the Aboriginal caves which are everywhere, plus middens and tool-making sites. When we arrived here from the Kimberly we looked for evidence of habitation and found the caves. But we were disappointed not to find rock art, which had been our particular interest for some years – the rock is too friable to preserve art here, unlike the King Leopold sandstone of the Kimberly which provides huge smooth hard canvasses for the artists.
Behind Mandu Mandu is a series of 3 escarpements containing caves. The lowest is of particular significance since it contains Kate’s cave. [Shell beads and social behaviour, Balme and Morse, Antiquity 80 (2006) 799-811.]
We planned to film a sequence in one of the caves, and eventually found it after some looking (very hot, very grumpy).
The water station for tourists is just a tap in the bush. But the emus have figured out out that if they hang around and scoot in quick enough, they can get a drink out of the puddles on the ground when a water container has been filled up. Smart cookies.
Pete had to go off and phone up his sister about the location of the cave we were hunting, so he left us at the camp site (which was officially closed but we’re guerilla campers). All was going well until a big thunderhead formed on the cape range behind us, and it soon became obvious it was going to turn on some serious rain. So we moved a lot of important stuff into the toilet, where the ever-resourceful Sally set up a kitchen and made us some nice sandwiches while the rain and wind battered us and impressive lightning lit up the sky – one bolt struck closeby and started a fire. Close enough.
Finally pete came back and we sat in the car for while before pitching the tent in the rain and lying sweating and sleepless for a few hours. Dawn was all sunny and nice as if nothing had happened at all.
Up north in the Kimberly they call these clouds Wandjina-fella. And they are reputedly somewhat grumpy types. Well, they were having a right old ding dong that night, I can tell you.
If you think I’m obsessed by eating bacon and eggs in nice places, you’re right.
But observe the picture closely – lovely wife, me mate Pete, computer, amazing place … bacon and eggs. Doesn’t get any better.
Even a dunny in the background. How good is that?
Exmouth canyons are pretty spectacular, they cut into the cape range in two main places – Charles Knife and Shothole canyon. We went up the latter to get sky photos with dramatic rock edges, successfully. It was very hot overnight.
Next morning we used the tall tripods to suspend the dolly above the vegetation and get a timelapse of the cliffs in the morning sun.
These termite mounds are a feature of the plains leading up to Cape Range at Exmouth. They appear suddenly and stop equally suddenly. Who knows why?
Pete was pretty taken with them. He reckons they might be all connected together as one huge sentient colony (as in alien intelligence).
Might be right, you never know.
Here’s a pretty exciting place in Exmouth – the solar observatory. It measures the output of gamma rays from the sun, specifically looking for solar flares. When there is a flare they tell NASA who tell the astronauts in Spacelab to hide under the table until it’s passed (lest they be irradiated).
The station runs sheep for mutton. These guys are a breed from Namibia, who have spend thousands of years eating sprigs of practically nothing on the desert sand dunes of the African coast.
They reckon it’s pretty good tucker here.
Inverter takes a turn for the worse.
The inverter, which gives us our 240v power, took rather a turn for the worse today. It was a very hot day, and the inverter lives on top of the battery in the battery box at the back of the car buried under all the rest of the stuff. Not perhaps the best place for something needing a fair bit of cooling. So when we opened the back of the ute there was one of those smells. Fried output transistors – you know the one.
The inverter is supposed to have a high temperature cut out to stop this happening, but it was probably faulty. In any case it was kaput. Which limits our ability to operate the computers – I brought a smaller inverter just in case, and this will charge the camera batteries and the portable computer batteries, but won’t run the big laptops.
This is a bit of a setback on a trip like this since we depend heavily on computer power, and we thought we were scuppered – you can’t get a new inverter freighted up here in the time we have available. However, what we didn’t reckon is that Carnarvon has a Jaycar with not one, but many inverters to choose from. So for the minimal effort of handing over a bankcard, a new inverter was obtained.
The new inverter is 1000W, and has long leads and the freedom to roam all over the back of the car, preferably near the open window. Still gets hot, but seems happy.
Thanks, Jaycar.
There are middens all along this coast, signs of occupation by people in the far distant past. We hardly saw anyone else here which allowed us to sense the previous inhabitants – nothing supernatural nor similar fruitloopery, just a feeling of connection.
This area was sheltered among the dunes on the cliff, with many shells and shaped rock. Nice.
So we stopped the car to have a look at the view and noticed a hole in the rock. Seemed to contain a view. So we got out the polecam and gopro and sent it down the hole. To discover a rather large overhang under our feet. Eek.
The dolly takes an hour at least to do its stuff. Overnight runs take several hours. Here we wait in a nice cool cave out of the camera’s field of view.
The lens Pete’s using is a 180 degree fisheye. This means it can see everything around it, and it can’t have any light – headtorches and so on – anywhere near it. This means a lot of attention to detail about where we can walk and what we can do while the camera is running.
It’s day 14 and the team is on edge. As the MX dolly is set up on a rock platform, Pete is caught on camera at the moment he decides to hit Chris with the dolly runner. Pete thinks better of it. The moment passes and all is quiet again.
The cause of the tension is rumoured to be little boxes.
Pete takes the view that if he puts everything into one box, it will be in there somewhere next time he needs it (car manufacturers have done this successfully for years with gears). He would have a (somewhat tenuous) point if it was the same ‘one box’. Which unfortunately it isn’t – it’s the one box which happens to be nearest. And he has a lot of boxes.
Having sat next to him in Antarctica for 8 weeks, I can assure you this method doesn’t work – I’m the kind of guy who can locate a bolt of the right length, width and thread gauge anywhere, anytime. At Cape Denison I found it necessary to stick a length of masking tape on the bench between us, and every now and then push the detritus back onto his side. Like those big machines at the rubbish dump.
We are making progress however by buying him a lot of little clear plastic boxes. Pete has now put them all in one case, and started filling them with stuff.
Imagine his surprise the other day when he opened the case and everything he wanted was there before his eyes, all in little boxes.
A moment to treasure.
Turtles crawl up onto the sand at this time of year and lay their eggs in a big pit they dig with their front flippers. The little turtlets hatch at the next full moon and head off toward it. On the way they fall into the sea, which is where they are supposed to be anyway.
Sitting waiting for this to happen is a load of tourists with cameras, hungry fish, eagles, seagulls and crabs. All with teeth, beak and claws. About 200 eggs are laid and hatched. About 2 turtlets make it.
Not an easy start to life, being a turtle.
You can sit and watch the blowhole on the rocks. And it can watch you. Magic spot, and so convenient.
Nice to be back in Big Mango country. $1 each, all you can eat. Yum.
Afficionados of Footrot Flats will instantly recognise this as a bitches box.
The gopro often goes on a pole to take a timelapse of the dolly setup procedure. Meanwhile Sally, as official Papparazzi, wanders along and snaps a few photos with one of the other cameras.
Quobba station stretches along the coast north of Carnarvon, with spectacular cliffs and beaches fringing much of the property. We stayed in a shearers cottage for a night before heading off to a clifftop photography site further up the coast.
This is where the 4m dome is going to be placed. With seating inside for about 6 people it will be at a height of 2.4m and allow the audience to experience a half sphere of the sky.
This is what this trip is all about. This nice building is an Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Centre. Built about 10 years ago to celebrate and display the culture of the 5 language groups around Carnarvon, it stood empty because of internal disagreements between the parties. Finally it has been resurrected and is being developed as it originally was intended.
One of the displays is a fulldome panorama of the sky, demonstrating Aboriginal legends of the stars, much like our astrology. The display is being made by Pete and Paul Bourke at the supercomputer centre at UWA. It involves simulated astronomy, plus real pictures of the night sky. The latter is what we are doing now – taking pictures of the night sky at various locations in the Gascoyne, each relevant to one of the language groups.
The star display is designed to run for about 3 minutes only, so there is opportunity to show other images as well – we are taking fulldome pictures of scenes other than stars. Pete will work at the supercomputer centre after this trip to put it all together.
Pete chats to crabs
Pete spent a while like this. We wondered about it. He reckons he was recording the little splishy conversations of the crabs and the gentle lapping of the waves on the seashore. Goes with the video he’s making.
We reckoned he looked a bit bonkers.
On the Peron Peninsula in Shark Bay was a beautiful beach, empty except for a fishing camp at the other end. Great spot to camp, beautiful sunrise moonrise and dawn.
We were glad of the crystal clear water and a delightful swim after all the driving.
The amazing shelley beach
This huge beach is made only of small shells. They compact together, allowing the townsfolk of Denham to cut out blocks of this and build with it.
Despite what this looks like…..
It’s fluid flowing in this time.
The road to the Peron Peninsula is soft sand, but with low pressure tyres (20 psi) the vehicle had no trouble at all.
Sally has been fantastic on this trip, and its great to have her along. Not only has she shared in what we are doing, and of course has considerable knowledge of the area and of aboriginal culture, but she has looked after the camp every day.
Doing astrophotography is not easy. The distances are large, and we typically drive for 7 hours or so, then as soon as we arrive start setting up the photographic equipment. This takes a couple of hours and is usually finished by 7-10 oclock. Meanwhile Sally has put up the tent, unloaded the car and set up a kitchen, and cooked a delicious meal. She doesn’t chivvy us when supper is ready – it’s ready when we are, and very grateful we are for it. Then in the morning we are given breakfast, we take down the equipment and transfer the photos from the camera to the computer (a long job which goes on during the next day’s drive) and look at the results.
Sally has made all this possible because we don’t have to think about the camp, just the photography. Without her I suspect Pete and I would be eating only now and then and be fairly uncomfortable. Thanks, Sally.
Director Pete powers on, while the Chief Technical Officer Chris has a snooze in the back. Sally, behind the camera, is Best Girl, looking after the lads and saving them from Chris’ cooking.
On to Shark Bay and the Peron Peninsula. Shark Bay is a huge body of water on the WA coast, very protected, somewhat saline, and largely empty. We lived there on our yacht with the kids for some months on the way South from Exmouth, and have wonderful memories of isolated anchorages, living with the sea and the sky and animals. We lived very close to nature at the time, often seeing nobody for days. Amazing area, teeming with life – including some of the oldest lifeforms on earth, the stromatolites at Hamelin Pool.
After some slight dramas about the filming permit for the area (ie getting one – they were very nice about us not having applied way in advance) we headed north up the Peron Peninsula . Its all soft sand, so we had to let the tyre pressures down to 18psi. Happily they provide compressed air, saves sitting around for hours while our little pumps re-filled the tyres.
I took enough gear to fix everything on the equipment, and a bit more besides. Including a portable oscilloscope (which didn’t get used, not surprisingly). Most often it was needed to make up new cables – nothing much went wrong with the gear.
this is one of the images from the overnight run – dawn with the moon still in the sky. It is a circular shape because the image will be projected onto a hemispherical panorama screen, so the sky will stretch above the observers head.
This was interesting – the moon came up around 10 and we wanted the reflections on the river. We parked the dolly at an angle on the bank and ran the timelapse over night, getting some very impressive results. Pete had to get up at 4am to change the camera batteries, then we got a beautiful dawn.
The other timelapse was of the night sky on its own, with GBTimelapse controlling the shutter speed and aperture. Worked well.
After a long days drive out of Perth we stopped at a camp next to the Murchison River. Amazing to see how much Perth has spread in the 10 years since we were there. Clearly the mining boom is having a big effect – house prices are high and accommodation is at a premium. New suburbs have sprung up on the outskirts of Perth.
The Murchison river camp was well used, but empty. The sunset was nice and the evening spent doing timelapses of the stars on three different cameras. Trucks grinding their way past during the night provided a noisy and very bright backdrop to our photography.
Here, for those who care, is how we get our power. Obviously we have laptops to run, and many camera batteries to charge, so we need mobile 240v.
This comes from a 160AH deep cycle battery in the back of the car, charged by an isolator from the car generator. Various leads then come off the battery for 12V power, and an 800W inverter which does the laptops. Pretty robust and reliable, goes everywhere with us.
This was our house. It was a nice old house on a big corner block in Nedlands with a swimming pool, garden and a big shed. We put a lot of work into making it nice, polished floorboards and all.
All gone now, three blocky modern townhouses instead. Plus someone with a bucket full of money no doubt.
Its an odd feeling looking at this, I know we sold the house and moved on, but somehow it seems like it should be permanent because it was our life and we have happy memories of the bringing up the kids in the house.
A couple of nights rest in Ged and Vesty’s house in Fremantle. Over the years this has been a welcome oasis of peace and quiet. Often we stayed here en route from the north, when we were working as remote area doctors in the Kimberly. I recuperated after an operation in their flat in the garden some years ago.
Once again it was a relief to stop for a couple of days after all that driving. We heard from Katie, who is in Cambodia, which was good for anxious parents.
The days were spent calibrating Petes variable ND filter on his camera, and running around trying to buy cables for my kite camera. Plus seeing the supercomputer centre at UWA.
We went to visit Prof Paul Bourke, a colleague of Pete’s who manages the supercomputer center in UWA. They have worked together on various high intensity data/graphics projects, including the virtual mummy rendering at Mona in Hobart. The supercomputer will be used for some of the astrophotography presentations for the present project.
As we arrived a new $2.5 million computer was being installed. It will do 3 petaflops (floating point operations per second), which is 3 thousand trillion floating point operations per second. It has 1000 cores. Calculators do about 10 flops.
Very cool, for those who care.
And so on to Norseman and Lake Cowan, a large salt lake north of the town where we camped in the flat edges and took a dawn sunrise timelapse.
Sally wanted me to photograph her driving the longest straight bit of road in Australia – 146.6 km without a bend. Not the longest in the world, which is in UAE and is 260km long.
There it is folks….
And a few hundred metres down the road they breathalysed Pete – at 9am for goodness sake – and checked his licence against known criminals.
We were glad to know they haven’t caught up with him yet.
Owing to a slight misunderstanding and an inordinate fondness for vegetables we got sprung at the quarantine station and had to hand over lots of them. The bloke said he didn’t eat them, but I’m not sure about that. There’s potential for a veggie stall a few hundred metres back. Sell the prisoners to the eastbound travellers. Make a fortune.
Thought you’d like to see it too.
All in line. Mateship.
The Nullarbor is a Karst formation. On the way out from the cliff area we came across this large sinkhole. And wondered what was down at the bottom of it. When we lived in Exmouth we did a lot of caving in this type of rock, and got into some amazing underground places.
The cyclone – Heidi – up in the gascoyne – has left a trail of clouds all the way across Australia to Victoria. Including us, which excludes us from star photography of course.
It rained last night all through the night – enough to be a nuisance. It was cold and windy too. The view along the cliffs was devoid of contrast, no good for photography. So we packed up and left.
But kite photography was not all we did. The kite with its valuable camera rig, had flown steadily for about 40 minutes, when it collapsed and crashed, dropping the rig over the edge of the cliff. It caught behind a rock about 20 ft down a steep slope which ended in a sheer drop hundreds of metres to the sea.
Sally, who is a very brave lady indeed, volunteered to go and get it. So we made up a couple of belays from the towrope and tied-together nylon luggage straps, and Pete and I put in two belays – each of us behind a couple of mounds of vegetation with a separate belay to our old yacht safety belt around Sally’s waste. Sally crept over the edge and, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts with a long pole, went climbing down the teetering rocks and retrieved the pieces of the wreckage.
No photos here folks, it was way too hairy and we weren’t thinking of photography. But take another look at the vertical picture below. This is where Sally climbed down.
This is one of the best kite photographs I’ve done, and most probably the only one in the universe of this particular view.
I flew the kite above the edge of the cliffs, and get this view along the cliffs and vertically down the front of the cliff to the sea. Long way down.
The fence hereabouts could tell a tale. The fence posts are twisty gnarled things, no trees here so they are probably roots of the bushes. Drilled with 5 holes in each in a very neat way. Heck of a lot of work doing that job I’d say – living out here and putting in posts and wire every 30 ft. Not a job I’d like.
Right at the bottom end stands a lone post on the edge of the cliff.
The last post.
I went over and had a little chat with it – you’ll be glad to know it’s still happy where it is, enjoying the view.
This whole placee is made of limestone, so the rock is sharp and hard, and the dust – which gets everywhere – is quite abrasive. Bad for cameras and computers.
And of course the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight are huge. Australia is tipping up, this bit is rising and the Top End is sinking, so these cliffs are getting bigger right now.
They are very friable, the tops are falling off all the time, and the edges are dangerous. In some places the land looks solid, but seen from the side there is only a few inches of rock sticking over the void.
Access to the cliffs is via a dirt road which skirts their tops for about 40 km till it joins the main road again. There aren’t a lot of good viewing places though, becuase the cliffs run in a straight line and you need re-entrants to appreciate them properly. The best viewing place is near the Nullabor Roadhouse (50km away east). Not much in the way of facilities (none actually), but a magic view.
We chose a place to camp on a slope looking along the cliffs: spectacular.
I must admit that I’m not altogether comfortable with standing on the edge of a drop of a few hundred feet into seething rock-strewn water. Especially when the edge of the cliff looks OK, but when looked at sideways is sometimes just a thin crust. And is clearly all falling off.
Except me.
I hope.
Looks a bit daft I know, bloke standing there gazing into a wooden box. However, what’s in the box is a teeny video screen and a radio receiver which picks up the pictures from a spy camera on the kite rig. I can see exactly what pictures are being taken, and get the ones I want by steering the camera using radio-controlled servos.
Works a treat, and has made kite photography much better – I used to put the camera up in the sky and try to figure out which way it’s pointing, and leave it up there for a while. Out of the 600 or so photographs there would be a few good ones. Now most of them are good ones, and I can put the kite up for a short time and capture 20 or so goof photos of each view, then pull it down.
The kite servos are also gyro stabilised, so the inevitable sway is counteracted. I can correct a picture remotely to make the horizon level if necessary.
Good stuff – it’s come a long way since Antartica.
The kite is pretty easy to fly, and this is a new parachute type. Pretty stable when the wind is right.
Mainly raptors, kites and hawks. And the ever present eagles, cruising along checking us out.
The vegetation is quite delicate in this arid place, small and very hardy plants exist on practically no water. They are tough, and the plants clump together in a low creeping bush. From the air they dot the landscape like lichen.
Pete stands at the edge of the cliffs to catch the morning sun.
Another magnificent sight on the track – Sally peeping her head around the edge of the tent in the morning.
A magnificent sunrise – the sun slowly coming out of the sea to the east. Then later the sunbeams filtering through the morning clouds.
we did some star photography that night, with three cameras clicking away. this photo was taken with a 60 second exposure in the moonlight. Note the Southern Cross above the tents.