Paul (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fremantlebiz) wrote,@ 2008-05-09 07:46:00 |
|
It's been a "sailors ahoy" week
This week has been a bit nautical at Fremantle with the visit of USS Tarawa and other things. Not long after after the Americans slipped away another spectacular ship tied up at the wharf to disgorge tourists and take on some new ones. The vessel was a luxury cruise liner called the Sun Princess. It will be a regular caller here for a few months. There are plenty of cashed up Western Australians who like nothing better than a tropical ocean cruise in winter.
The ship looked a pretty good place to spend a decadent few weeks. Here's a cheapskate's picture taken from the platform of Fremantle railway station. Sigh!
One of the last things all ship passengers see when they leave Fremantle are the lighthouses at the end of the North and South Moles. (Breakwaters.) These cast-iron structures were first switched on at the beginning of the twentieth century and have remained solidly in place doing their nautical duty ever since. The southern one is painted green and the northern one red. As every boat person should know, this is the world standard for channel marker colour schemes when heading upstream. Get them mixed up and you'll be in trouble.
From the decks of huge ships like Tarawa and Sun Princess the lighthouses look puny, and well they might be, but they're much easier to fit into the camera frame for closeups.
Here's a picture taken this week of the South Mole lighthouse. Our cocker spaniel pup Milly is posing in front of it. You can tell I clicked the shutter just in time. She decided enough posing was enough and wanted to check out what I was doing.
To end this interesting week, here's something pretty cool from NASA in the USA. They're getting ready to put a robot lander thingo on the Moon and anyone, even opinionated Australians, can enter their name on a data base which will be aboard the device when it lands or crashes. (NASA still seem to used metric measurements for some things and feet and inches for others.)
Over the past decade our family members' names have been somewhere on a variety of space probes via similar offers. It's sort of like doing space graffiti. Maybe one day some alien life form will discover them and we'll all become famous. Anyway the URL is http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/in
© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.
Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.
Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.
About the writer
Click here to see our backyard.
Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!
This week has been a bit nautical at Fremantle with the visit of USS Tarawa and other things. Not long after after the Americans slipped away another spectacular ship tied up at the wharf to disgorge tourists and take on some new ones. The vessel was a luxury cruise liner called the Sun Princess. It will be a regular caller here for a few months. There are plenty of cashed up Western Australians who like nothing better than a tropical ocean cruise in winter.
The ship looked a pretty good place to spend a decadent few weeks. Here's a cheapskate's picture taken from the platform of Fremantle railway station. Sigh!
One of the last things all ship passengers see when they leave Fremantle are the lighthouses at the end of the North and South Moles. (Breakwaters.) These cast-iron structures were first switched on at the beginning of the twentieth century and have remained solidly in place doing their nautical duty ever since. The southern one is painted green and the northern one red. As every boat person should know, this is the world standard for channel marker colour schemes when heading upstream. Get them mixed up and you'll be in trouble.
From the decks of huge ships like Tarawa and Sun Princess the lighthouses look puny, and well they might be, but they're much easier to fit into the camera frame for closeups.
Here's a picture taken this week of the South Mole lighthouse. Our cocker spaniel pup Milly is posing in front of it. You can tell I clicked the shutter just in time. She decided enough posing was enough and wanted to check out what I was doing.
To end this interesting week, here's something pretty cool from NASA in the USA. They're getting ready to put a robot lander thingo on the Moon and anyone, even opinionated Australians, can enter their name on a data base which will be aboard the device when it lands or crashes. (NASA still seem to used metric measurements for some things and feet and inches for others.)
Over the past decade our family members' names have been somewhere on a variety of space probes via similar offers. It's sort of like doing space graffiti. Maybe one day some alien life form will discover them and we'll all become famous. Anyway the URL is http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/in
© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.
Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.
Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.
About the writer
Click here to see our backyard.
Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!
