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I'm still battling with clouds!!! I have yet to take a single photo, without a cloud obscuring my vision!

Getting a handle on the webcam settings!

Best thing this far, is "prime focus". Which basically means - you have no secondary lens, only a primary. It seems to work rather well! Registax certainly likes it a lot more.

There is of course some minor touching up being done (unsharp mask, change to b&w - and dropping images down to 320x240 from 640x480)

I've been reading up on astrophotography a bit.

Modified my logitech webcam to have a bit of a nicer fit. Used framestacking with Registax
It also helped that it wasn't AS cloudy. But I'm still taking photos through clouds.

Not much to look at. But this is my first photo, taken with a webcam. With this, I now officially have become a webcam astrophotographer.

For the technically inclined, it was taken with a crappy 4" newtonian telescope, with the moon low on the horizon, and partially obscured by clouds. (It's been raining for weeks!) I still have to find the exact specs of the webcam...

I'm still waiting for my kick ass celestron to be delivered, so I got frustrated, and starting playing with toys that I can hook up to it.

A few years ago. Johannesburg, was a no go zone. Pasty white South Africans deserted it.

Even before handing it over to the "new regime". It was grim. Dirty. DANGEROUS. Hillbrow had been going backwards since the 60's. Finally turning into hell in the late 80's, early 90's. No-one cared. No-one realized.

Apartheid ended. And it was very convenient to blame decay on black people. The prevailing theory of pasty whites being, that black people were too stupid to live in a city. Black people were too busy celebrating the fact that they were no longer too stupid to live in cities. New South Africa gave EVERYONE the right to be stupid.

There were bananas everywhere. Bananas being the first industry to see promise in a New South Africa City. Don't ask me why. But in South Africa, a sure fire sign that a city is going to hell, is the amount of bananas you can buy on the sidewalk, and the amount of pawn shops, porn shops, and loan sharks.

Last week, we decided to see what the new regime had done about the banana problem.

All sorted. The crappy city left behind by pasty whites, has turned into a vibrant, lively, cleanish, safe city. (The parts we dared to enter at least - most of it is still a dangerous hell hole)

If you want a different perspective, follow this link to the blog of some racist asshole who blames all the misery in his life on black people, because he can't oppress them anymore.

Find a place to hike (Rooikrans) & go there with someone:

















Find a Smurf village & break an arm: