So, how was your weekend?

I got to go driving up to Noosa to measure some noise. On a Saturday evening.

Ah, well. It could have been one of those "must be measured between 1 and 4am on a Sunday morning" type jobbies, so 8-9pm on a Saturday isn't so bad.

But we stayed at Anf's mum's place Saturday night. After the noise measurements, I took some photos.

This is Jupiter, and three of it's moons. I have no idea which ones. A check of any decent ephemeris would tell you (or one of those funky diagrams that have sinusoidal lines that will tell you the relative positions of the moons on any given night). It's pretty over-exposed, so you can't see the cloud bands on ol' Jove, sorry.

I had hoped to take a bunch, and stack them to give a better view, but that requires taking underexposed images for each frame. Could be worse, it could have turned out like my pic of Omega Centauri (i.e. a big blurry mess). Maybe I should try that one when there isn't a first-quarter moon in the sky? :D (hint: moonlight washes out dim astronomical objects, such as the aforementioned Omega Centauri, which, as the name suggests, is the 24th-brightest object in the constellation Centaurus).

I'm sure you can figure out what this one is.



And here are some of the local birdlife, taken the next morning.

Starting with a plover & it's four chicks:



And a rainbow lorikeet perched in a gum tree, after it finished getting stuck into the grevillea flowers:



So, that was my weekend. Mostly.

Ah, well. At least I was able to measure the noise I went there to measure. Nothing more annoying than giving up your night/weekend/both to measure something, to have it pour rain, or the neighbours are having a rave, or both. In this instance, I was able to demonstrate that we reduced noise levels by close to 25dB for a noisy refrigeration compressor. That's a lot, in acoustic-speak. Normally, we're happy with a 10dB reduction, so to get 25 is very good.