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One trip EVERY month: June

This month, well, yesterday, I went to the Deep Space Communication Complex in Tidbinbilla, south-west of Canberra.  Relaxing with a coffee in the Moon Rock Café, I had a great view of the largest steerable antenna dish in the southern hemisphere, the DSS43 (Deep Space Station 43), which was staring off into the distance, at this angle:

DSS43, Tidbinbilla

After coffee, I went into the gallery to see the moon rock:

Beside the rock stood an astronaut that some tourists were touching despite the do-not-touch sign.  When they finally left him alone, I took a closer look, without touching, and in his mirrored helmet visor I caught sight of me and my son, who was reading some information on the wall behind me.  I snapped the three of us:

Astronaut head

And I wondered how he would look in a space suit, sans visor:

While I was dabbling in moon history, the DSS43 began to move:

DSS43 on the move, Tidbinbilla

I went out onto the balcony to watch closely as the dish rotated to look straight up at the sky.  I wanted to know more.

DSS43, Tidbinbilla

Back inside, I read the information about the big dish and tried to understand it.  Of course, I couldn’t.  But perhaps you can.

DSS43 info Tidbinbilla

Yesterday at Tidbinbilla, the weather was stunningly clear and fine, if wintry.  Today it’s raining, the wind is howling and blizzards are threatening in the mountains.  We had picked the perfect day for dish-watching.

Thanks Marianne for the prompt to take one trip EVERY month.

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Photo challenge: Cities

Ailsa has posted a photo challenge:  take her on a tour of my favourite concrete jungle.  Well I’m not partial to concrete, and I don’t have a favourite city, but I do have a favourite photo of a city.  Here’s Nairobi in 1941.  Or 1942.

Bombay, 1941/42
Government Rd, Nairobi, Kenya, 1941/42

Ailsa quoted John Berger:

‘Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.’

Nairobi is a young city, established in 1899 by the colonial authorities in British East Africa. So that tells us her age. But is this city feminine or masculine?  Perhaps a long-time resident of Nairobi could tell me.

It’s now one of Africa’s largest cities, with a population of 3.1 million, but look at this photo from the ’40s – not a lot of people on the street, not a lot of cars on the road.  Plenty of space for everyone.

And from the same photo album, this mosque in Nairobi, a very attractive building made of bricks, not concrete, and only three stories high, not scraping the sky. I like the man in uniform helping the woman cross the street, though she is also in uniform and obviously very competent. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. They’re easy to spot in the vast space of the uncrowded streetscape.

Bombay 1941/42
Khoja Mosque, Nairobi, Kenya 1941/42

The photos are from my father’s World War II album.

Thanks Ailsa for the prompt to find photogenic cities.

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