Yeah, I worked out how to log into this account again.
And I'm off to Alice Springs this weekend for a bit of a bike ride (to Uluru). It's more stressful than I expected because the baggage has been riding 800m to the railway station most days, and that's her entire prep for riding 500-700km with ~200km of gravel. Oh, and limited water, so we'll be carrying a lot of water.
@andy256 my life cycle is "get interested, decide to create an account to answer, sometimes carry on and build up some points, decide it's taking time I can't spare, bin the account"... then do the same again later. Most obviously there are two "moz" accounts with different unicode characters in them.
@andy256 we have a weekend in Alice then booked into the Astronomy Weekend two weeks later, so ~12 days. We have booked the bus from King's Canyon to Uluru so if "we" feel like taking it easy/struggle we can get by on about 40km/day (assuming there's water)
@andy256 I am more worried about fitness. I know from experience that I can panic ride ~200km of gravel on my last litre of water because I can ride gravel at night using my head torch. But I fear that she will find 40km of corrugated bulldust a real challenge.
I expect it won't be that bad and we'll end up with time to spare and opportunities to spend time exploring stuff on the side of the road.
Yes, I recalled that you had experience in the conditions. It's be a great adventure. Will you carry a beacon? And did you look at the Jupiter-Venus conjunction?
Nah, I'm not really an astro geek. I like remote areas. She likes science talks.
Not carrying a beacon, the real problem out there is traffic. It's a busy road in the "more than one vehicle every day" sense of outback busy. Probably worse than Gibb River Road.
So it's fairly safe to rely on [assing traffic, especially since there's two of us which greatly reduces the chances of something taking out both of us in a situation where we can't crawl onto the road to die.
They're still close together, but ten times as far apart as they were at their closest. The first "star" of the evening is Venus, the next below that in Jupiter.
Realistically, the beacon is there to help people find your body - the times when it will save your life are when you aren't prepared for the conditions or you haven't told anyone where you're going.
@andy256 yeah, they're all just coloured dots in the sky to me. I'm more a Kerbal Space Program person than a telescope on a cold night person. I've been outside and played with telescopes, but I just can't really get excited about it.
@andy256 I was ... educated? ... as a youth by volunteering with the local search and rescue crew. It has given me a passion for never being the example held up to others of what not to do.
