I meant to post this a while ago but the worlds first Space Beer (or perhaps the galaxy's) is going to be a local Sydney brew. Specially designed for space and intended for tourists when the Virgin Galactic trips start to get going, it's the first beer designed for zero gravity ..apparently. The design process was not without issues. Another issue is the lack of gravity to separate air and liquid in the stomach, which Mitchell explained could cause "wet burps" in space.. When you're on Earth, the gravity actually separates the air and the liquid such that if you burp, you burp the air, whereas when you're just floating around in space you can do what's called wet burps, which are little suspended balls of liquid just hovering around," he said. Yuk. Read more

Sydney Observatory is perched on a hill just behind the harbour bridge in the middle of a nice little park that would make a great vantage point to watch the New Year's fireworks. When built it provided a view across the whole harbour and (as we found out on the tour) actually served as a noonday clock for sailing ships back in the day. Now though it has the whole city skyline behind it, providing a good view of the drab 1970's towers of the Four Seasons and Shangri-la hotels. Since we've been fast running out of things to do in Sydney without a car, we tried booking a tour recently after having seen some ads up during the Aroma Festival. Usually this place would be full of kids on a school trips during the day but it turned out to be just as busy on weekend nights causing us to wait another week before we could get a free slot (just as well as the original night turned out to be raining). So on a cold Saturday evening as we walked up from the city we crossed paths with a man in a dark trenchcoat and fedora clutching what looked like a old lantern and leading a group of people behind him - he was the guide for Sydney's ghost tour, and when I overheard him pointing out the particular trees that various people were hanged from I was left wondering if we should have gone on their tour. To start everything off we led outside in separate groups of 20 people and given a quick lesson on what was viewable in the night sky. Our guide was a 60-something lady who'd just completed her degree in Astronomy post-retirement; pretty impressive for anyone. We were then shown around the observatory itself and led up some rickety stairs, one at a time, into the two domes that housed the still in-use telescopes When we got upstairs in the first the guide pressed some button and the whole roof rotated - making everyone feel dizzy - until the thin slit in the roof open to the night sky was showing the moon. Everyone got a quick chance to squint through the eyepiece and the guide repositioned it after everyone's turn. I was a little disappointed that the view didn't seem that much more spectacular than the one through my small plastic telescope I had when I was 10 years old. The other dome housed a much more modern piece of kit - chunky and short, this thing was computer controlled and I thought we'd be able to see what it saw on some of the computer screens in the dome - but we still had to squint through the small eyepiece and just made out some stripes across Jupiter and a few pin pricks of light from a few of its moons. Ace.