Month: July 2018

Weather has a sense of humour too

So, we’ve had an awesome lunar eclipse recently, right? Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllll…..

Guess what, I didn’t get to see it. We’ve had beautiful 99% clear skies for almost 2 weeks straight, all to get hit by half a week of storms starting on the 27th. So I did not get to see it, and neither do I have any photos to show.

So instead here’s an older photo, from July 23rd:

Even with my manual focus lens and shaky tripod the moon is super easy to focus on by eye, so i often use it to “calibrate” my setup before trying to get a picture of Saturn, etc.
The colours are not as awesome as during an eclipse, but still. 😀

Camera: Canon EOS 700D
ISO 6400, Exposure 1/1000
2018/07/23 23:54 UTC

SP#001.03 – Helmet Base & Joints

The Helmet, part 01 The helmet is always a key part of any suit, and is one of the elements that I would want to look the most convincing, since human eyes are often drawn to the head of a person first. I will be making the helmet mainly out of EVA foam due to […]

(Relatively) Quick Mir Sketch

I’m attempting to get back into drawing (not that I was ever particularly good at it, but I have gotten worse), although i don’t know if I can find the downtime to do some regular sketching, which is a must-do practice for me if I want to be able to draw anything properly. Here’s a […]

SP#001.02 – Printing Shenanigans

With the base materials for most parts decided upon, I’ve finally gone ahead and sent out some orders for EVA foam, aluminium, etc. I’ve also been since the first week of the project gradually printing some of the finer parts that I doubt I could really make any other way. This includes the 20cm engine […]

Saturn’s Ears

We’ve had some beautifully clear weather recently, with all naked-eye planets except Mercury visible at the same time!!
All other planets look like differently coloured blobs, except for Saturn, with even the gaps between planet and rings slightly visible in my crappy lens.

Photo’s been slightly retouched.
Original settings:
Camera: Cannon EOS 700D
ISO6400, Exposure: 1/400

Summer Project #001.01 – Modelling

Now that summer is in full swing, I find my hands aching to make something out of all this free time. I’ve had for a while now the idea of making some sort of sci-fi themed armour suit, with some rough designs in mind. Over about 2 weeks of (on and off) CAD-ing, sketching and measuring I’ve settled on a light suit with blazing engines type of design ^^. More on what this type of suit would be for and how the engines work in a later post ;).

For now here is a render of what I want it to ultimately look like. The render obviously doesn’t have the suit proper, as I have frankly no idea how to model fabrics, etc in Fusion. For now I wan to focus on the lie support/fuel pack and engine assemblies, then design the pressure suit to fit under all that.

While not the most ambitious project I’ve set out to do, this is going to be a lot of work. I fully expect this one to overrun into Autumn and maybe Winter.

Hello world!

Well, let’s start with something. Here’s a waxing crescent moon from 2018/07/15 – 21:29 UTC.

Camera: Cannon EOS 700D
ISO6400, Exposure 1/40

The lens is manual focus only, so setting it up is always a headache, but the photos are worth it.