Samir's Home

Hi! My name is Samir Kharusi, living in Oman.

(If this is not your first visit just scroll to bottom for recent additions, last updated 14^th February 2008)

Below are a couple of pictures of myself just to let you have an idea what I look like. This site is meant for friends and family scattered all over the world and as such there will be bits from the East as well as the West. Notice how I am dressed schizophrenically even on this one page. Hope you enjoy the selection. Any link clicked from this page should open a new window. To continue beyond that just return to the window showing this page. To send me an email just click => samirkharusi

I made the animated gif below to use on our company's intranet whenever I needed to congratulate my staff for something or other, before I retired, that is. I was supervising 2650 staff plus another 6500 contractor employees scattered all over Oman, so a face-to-face handshake for a job well done was not always a quickie. Our capital + operating budgets amounted to some $2 million per day, so it was always a battle to make sure that the little guy in a far off corner in the desert was spending his own $1000 budget wisely. He needed to know that the higher-ups did care.

So, right now, I take my hat off to you for your diligence and perseverance until you found this site! I do care.
I take my hat off, for you!

Having said that, bookmark this page NOW, i.e. put it in your Favorites, and revisit every now and again ;-)

I'll be loading up new stuff every couple of months or so.

By the way, just to prove that I was also a young, cool, active cat once, have a look at my photo below, taken at Lillehammer in December 1964. Yes, 40+ years ago! Way before the recent Winter Olympics; before most of the world had even heard of the place, and also long before Norway entered the oil scene. Ah, for those days when the place was actually affordable by a student. I was staying at a Youth Hostel, just behind me in the photo; the cleanest, nicest Youth Hostel I ever stayed in anywhere. The skiing was great; none of the eternal anxiety of not having enough snow that is the case in warmer places like Austria and Switzerland... Also note the rental ski equipment. Couldn't afford to buy any. Boots made of leather (in those days plastic boots were too expensive for students so I had to suffer soaking wet feet in the Cairngorms in Scotland. Lillehammer was too cold for the snow to get wet), ski poles were real wooden poles and had leather baskets, safety-release ski binders were an unaffordable luxury. Mine below were bear-claw bindings. One advantage of rigid bear-claws is that you can ski as violently as you wish and the binders never release... You can also break both legs and the binders never release either!

Samir in ski togs

Just as well. Through some strange youthful logic, that winter in Lillehammer many of us thought that to be really with it ("really cool" in current parlance, and why "cool"? Something to do with global warming?), you had to ski without ski poles... We even tried skiing without skis. All you need is your ski boots to have flat soles (as most do) and a steep slope with quite hard snow. It IS possible. Try it the next time you go skiing (not advisable if you are over 40!). Mind you, going up the slope on a tow rope or a T-bar without skis is not a very smooth ride either. Perhaps your skiing abilities are at a higher plane than mine ever reached, but it would be unwise to try skiing without skis and without poles at the same time. I grew up in the tropics. The local kids from Lillehammer were, of course, just amazing. After all, they even went to and from school on skis, with satchels on their backs. And their grandmothers went to the supermarket on stand-up toboggans. I often wonder how much the place has changed since then. My hat also had a tiny bell at the top. Why a bell? Don't know. Just seemed like a good idea to most of us staying at the Hostel that Christmas. Some had them on their parkas, some on their boots, girls on their bosoms, etc. Teenagers, you know. The thing hanging from my neck was an exposure meter. I always went for the top in photo equipment no matter how meager my scholarship was. That's a Gossen Lunasix for those in the know. Ah, those were the days...

Have you bookmarked this page yet? Please do so before continuing. I do not wish to lose you into cyberspace!

There's a lot of stuff on this site, so you need to come back several times to do even one full pass. I have been interested in photography since childhood, so there will be lots of photos. Perhaps you can now check out your monitor's contrast and brightness settings. Try to set them such that the colours below are nice and deep, and also that you can see both the second brightest and the second darkest steps simultaneously. The black and white bars at the bottom should appear smooth. If you see them as having steps, like the other bars, it's because your monitor has been set to 8-bit colour. You'll need to reset it to "millions of colours". It took me a long time to assemble this little collage, so you might as well make use of it :-)

Bought myself an astronomical telescope a few years back and I have been trying to learn how to use it for astrophotography. So do not forget to have a look at my puny attempts below. There's also quite a bit of stuff on normal (non-astro) photography.

Recent favorites: Below I am including some recent photos that I am quite pleased with. I'll replace them every now and again. Each has a story behind it. To jump to the relevant page, related to a particular picture, just click on it:

Quick: Can you identify these two spiral galaxies?

Hint: No telescope was used; one was taken with a 14mm lens, the other with a 600mm lens, both at f4, on a Canon 1Ds.

Map of California or a Giant Squid? Americo-centrics call it the California Nebula:

A wide view of the Orion region; note the Witch staring at the bright star Rigel:

Thuraya (the Chandelier):

Remnants of a Supernova in Cygnus. See the huge question mark lying sideways?

A closer view of that bottom loop accentuated by H-alpha and OIII narrowband imaging:

Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, a sparkly M13:

Liked the sparkles? What about a little twinkling?

Visiting Antares, the most colorful region of the night sky:

And here's Saturn through different sized scopes, different years, but same rooftop, a TV140 (5.5" aperture), a C8 and a C14. Aperture rules!

Recent Astrostuff, from 2004 onwards, using a Celestron CGE 1400 (lately an AP1200 and a Kenko Skymemo) and camera lenses (the thumbnails give you a taster for the page):

Trapezium Peeping (looking for A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I,...)