A WEEKEND FULL OF FUN - int. guests: Jerry Bonnell & Babak Tafreshi 10.-12. August 2012

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Aug 13

2012

by Johannes Stübler

The Austrian Astronomy&Space-Club ORION, who is running an German written APOD-mirror since about 5 Years invited for a special event in an old castle in Lower Austria.

Jerry Bonnell and Babak Tafreshi followed this invitation and they gave some great lectures.

This was a very familar and sociable meeting to talk, to discuss, to relax and to observe. Luckily we had the possibility to observe some Perseids during the last night. We had enough holes in the clouds :-) Of course Babak took as usual some nice TWAN-images we hopefully can see next time.

In the meantime following a actual Perseides-image of a member of our club - Enjoy it !

Above: During 4 hours he shot 735 guided images a 15 sec (ASA 12800) using a 17mm f/4 lens and he composed all meteors to one picture.

Following some photographic impressions of our meeting:

During a visit of the famous Melk Abbey we had the opportunity to gain a close insight to some old famous writings, for example this which was already published on APOD in the IYA2009 - see following link:  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090417.html

Paul Beck, a young Austrian professional astronomer, who was involved in the great exhibition during 2009 and who is a graduate of the school at this famous Abbey, made all this happen for us.

The Orion-team took care for us during our stay .... we lacked for nothing :-)

The programm was a good mix of lectures and activities. And we had enough time for our own talks and exchange of experiences.

We had a lot of fun to explore the old castle and to take part in 3D-photographic experiments. One of our participants - Bernhard Dewath -  shared his longtime experiences in making 3D-pictures to us. Beside usual images he shot already some 3D-TWAN-pictures during our stay. Hopefully we can show them soon on TWAN website in a special section.

Jerry and his wife, Babak and his wife and many others enjoyed these pictures too.

Many thanks to the team of ORION for making all this happen and specially thanks to Maria Pflug-Hofmayr, who was the main effort behind this and who translates every day Astronomy Picture of the Day into German.

For me it was really a pleasure to meet Jerry and Babak again here in Austria. Of course I had the opportunity to make some advertising for "AWB-Austria /TWAN-Austria" too. Many thanks for this too.

Best regards

Joe