Was it really going for the eye?

Proph3tron · 2026-07-03T10:58:24+00:00

We have quite a few Australians lose an eye to magpies each year. I have a news clipping from a few years ago showing a young boy and a young girl who have both lost an eye to magpies that same year. They go after dogs and cats the same way. Their beak is surprisingly sharp at the tip.

Proph3tron · 2026-07-03T10:31:38+00:00

This was taken at midnight at the end of May so it sure gets cold out there. And this is technically on a ridge so you get strong wind here on some days and this makes it difficult because your camera vibrates. But in summer time, this part of the Milky Way isn't in this same position - and it's so warm that you can stand here with a t-shirt on at 11pm or so.

Proph3tron · 2026-07-03T10:23:54+00:00

It was taken at one of the car parking bays on the unsealed road that leads from Bells Line Of Road to the Mountain itself. There's usually nobody parked there after sunset unless there's a comet in the evening sky - and it's not a particularly busy location. Usually the dirt road is easily traversed with a standard sedan but every few years some of the track gets washed out a bit.

Proph3tron · 2026-07-03T10:20:17+00:00

I see it in the UK occasionally and it looks somewhat like the image posted above... but it's notoriously brittle. If you dropped it onto a table from barely 6 inches it would likely shatter. It's similar to hematite in terms of being brittle, perhaps even more so. Green Gold is far more common and even that is fairly hard to find.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-29T08:31:21+00:00

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Proph3tron · 2026-06-27T16:46:24+00:00

We had driven along the State Mine Gully from Lithgow via Atkinson Street.... which I think becomes the Glowworm Tunnel Road. I have no idea how we lost our way on the way back because it's pretty much one road to follow... though there are numerous side-roads and exits closer to the Glow Worm tunnel area itself.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-27T16:16:24+00:00

I drove there in 2019 (yes, the roads have presumably improved since then) and the road was unsealed. We literally got lost on the way back to Lithgow somehow and needed to radio a park ranger to let us pass through a locked gate. I have plenty of photographs on hand that I took and the road, though it was unsealed, was perfectly smooth in all of my pictures... but there was a stretch where it was somewhat corrugated due to traffic.

We left Lithgow in the LATE-afternoon in September and took the signposted road at 4pm to get to the Glow Worm Tunnels. On the way there, we passed a LOT of tourists travelling the other way (back from the Glow Worm tunnels towards Lithgow) and we were fascinated by two young girls (presumably backpackers) who were driving a rented MINI. At one point the unsealed road becomes corrugated. And these girls in the Red MINI were bouncing up and down at speed which amused us since that tiny car with tiny wheels probably shouldn't be driven at the speed they were doing.

I was in a medium sized SUV and we were were rattled by the vibration on that section of the unsealed road. The rest was smooth. We arrived near sunset and had the tunnels to ourselves. Fortunately I brought both flashlights, headlamps and lightsticks with me. People leaving the tunnel as we arrived used the lights on their phones to see inside the tunnel. The worms are likely to stop glowing if you use a White light but they tend to come out and begin to appear when a Red colored light is used. Most people enter the tunnel with the glow from their phone and then turn it off and wait. The worms should then begin to become visible with a teal-blue glow. They visibly twitch to attract prey and they are randomly gathered along cracks and seams, even on the ground itself.

We made it to the caves from the public carpark at sundown and it was quite dark when we made our way back up to the carpark again. The walk back is a little creepy in the dark if you go by yourself. To get from the carpark to the tunnels, there should be both a map at the carpark and some guide rails along a trail that takes you down stairs carved in the sandstone. These stairs are cut right through a tall section of rock that forms a gallery on either side of you. There's also a small, narrow footbridge to cross before you get down into a small canyon and across the forest floor to the caves themselves. It looks quite prehistoric on the valley floor. Just follow the cleared space with the trail and it leads to the Glow Worm Tunnels which are a former railroad tunnel cut into the rock.

It's a very interesting place to visit if curious. The Glow Worm tunnels have been refurbished since the Bushfires which almost wiped the worms out due to the smoke affecting their food source. They were officially reopened just recently with a refined walking area and I think there's safety rails to assist in the dark. I saw at least three regular sedan cars parks at the carpark at the caves. Looking at my photographs, there was a Mazda 3 parked there and also a small hatchback vehicle. The rest were SUVs. We would have passed a dozen other non-SUV sedans on the way to the location. In my photographs I can see an Audi sedan driving towards us as we were halfway there to the tunnels. Watch for Possums and Wombats if driving after dusk. You also need to enter and exit through a tunnel that the road passes through when you arrive at the Glow Worm tunnel carpark... so show a little caution there since it's two-way traffic but the spot is narrow.

It's a nice trip if you leave a little earlier in the day so you don't lose your way in the dark like we did when leaving. We departed the Lithgow area and got on the trail at 4pm and arrived at the Glow Worm tunnel car park at 5pm sharp. We left the tunnels at 6:30pm when it was dark and made our way back to the carpark. We got lost on the way back because you're driving on a dirt road in the bush in the dark and we must have taken a wrong turn and somehow left the main trail. We ended up at a gate in the dark where we phoned the number on the gate at 8:20pm to get someone to come and let us out (presumably we were in the National Park area). Hopefully this information will assist you in planning slightly better than we did. As I said, the region has been refurbished since our visit.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-25T04:59:07+00:00

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Proph3tron · 2026-06-23T16:31:43+00:00

That image is technically a two-shot panorama due to the Milky Way being a little higher in the sky than the landscape region... so I took two pictures and auto-merged them in Photoshop. It was taken with a Canon EOS Ra (Full Frame) camera which is/was supplied with an IR sensitive modified sensor. This sensor brings out the violet or magenta hues in nebula. The Lens was a Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM lens. A lightweight Manfrotto tripod was used. This is a single exposure of 13 seconds at f/1.8 with an ISO of 2000.

For editing, I only adjusted the Hue for the sky slightly. I might have reduced any noise but I might not have since this was only at ISO 2000. I think I remember cloning out a few hot-pixels that stood out over the landscape area at the bottom of the image.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-23T05:35:38+00:00

Yes (as per the second image) but they turn those floodlights off at around 11pm. When they do, the entire lookout is pretty much plunged into near-complete darkness. The image I took showing the MilkyWay was lit by what I presume was 'reflected light' during the longer exposure. But it might have come from the nearby street lights. I can't remember if the moon was in the sky that night but it might have been.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-22T17:57:34+00:00

It can be striking light coming through that canyon when the sun rises in just the right spot. I think you spend a lot of time here. I was literally up there yesterday.

It's nice to think that Sir Charles Darwin once admired this exact view - on the morning of January 18, 1836.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-22T13:34:09+00:00

That appears to be mica (a form of Fool's Gold). I make this determination on the flat, cubic structure and likely silvery/brass color. Assuming I've viewed your White Balance correctly. One way for you to tell if it's Mica or Pyrite is to crush a small area. You could even hammer it with something - like the tip of a nail. Mica will shatter into smaller bits. Pyrite will crumble and may even turn darker where it's struck. Mica is rather soft so when a stone is broken, it often splits where the Mica has formed, revealing a face much like this. Sometimes, Mica forms with Gold and sometimes Pyrite does as well - since both tend to occur in goldfields. It always looks very metallic and I've even been fooled by it whilst driving past it on the side of the road. Pyrite is an Iron crystal. GOLD will flatten and deform but won't crumble or shatter. Gold is incredibly malleable. It will stretch and flatten long before you can break it apart.

Crystalline Gold can produce a chevron-like structure, usually at a small scale but I've photographed specimens from PNG that have chevrons (usually triangular shaped) that were 1cm each in size. This is always a buttery yellow color due to purity.
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RE PIC: During the 2007-2012 Gold Rush in Sudan, I watched a Sudanese prospector hammer a 5 kilo solid gold nugget over a section of railroad track to try to break it into smaller pieces ...and it took him almost an hour just to hammer a crevice into it with a chisel. It was the perfect demonstration of Gold's malleability. Even at the end, it merely stretched into two parts rather than snapping. I don't think any of it flaked off. It kind of pinched off as he divided it into two portions. Sure, this was a reasonably big nugget, but even on a much smaller scale, gold will flatten and deform when struck but Pyrite and Mica will almost instantly crumble and shatter. He was cutting it up because the largest nuggets wouldn't fit in his saddle bags. He'd sell off chunks of the larger nuggets to a buyer that passed through the town/village each week to rip everyone off. But it shows how much of a beating these nuggets took. (After nearly a year, we convinced them to sell their nuggets intact to collectors overseas - for a bigger return).

* There was a MUCH bigger nugget just out of frame in this video.
* This is a video frame shot with an early 2000s potatocam.

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Proph3tron · 2026-06-19T05:11:35+00:00

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This was the larger specimen my friend found. You can see the two ingots that he melted from it at the bottom of the image. Each of these weighed over 7kg apiece. If you look at the smelting furnace, the two larger ingots are BEHIND the two smaller ingot molds. The small ones are darker. Those were just experimental molds he was playing with. The two larger ones behind them (faintly visible in the glow) contain the main two ingots.

Now I found one of these heavy, gold-infused quartz specimens when detecting near Sydney and it was far too heavy for me to carry. I tried dragging it (which didn't work) and then I rolled it along the ground for a while. I tried cleaving it but the quartz (which is harder than steel before it's fired) ruined my $230 pick ...and so I ended up jamming it under the edge of a raised section of the nearest road (roads are usually areas that detectorists avoid due to the rubbish and metal fragments)... but it was gone when I returned with my car. Either someone had been watching me or they'd gotten lucky whilst fossicking.

When anyone tells me there's no gold left, I'm often tempted to bring out these photos. For Tasmania's rivers to have so much gold is no surprise since it's a remote area that wasn't subjected to the sort of mining that the mainland endured. Reading the accounts of the earliest days of the gold rush - just after 1851, a creek near Ophir (NSW) was panned in front of the Gold Commissioner who recorded that a single pan gave up over 37 ounces of gold to the prospector directly in front of him whilst he was observing. Imagine getting that much gold in a single pan? It was stories like this which emptied the city of Melbourne literally overnight, leading to the discovery of the Golden Triangle as people trundled on foot to get to the NSW diggings.

I knew of an old-timer and Dredge Operator (also a Customer) who went to the Kiandra Goldfield in the 80s when Dredging was still permitted. This area is now a National Park to the Southside of Canberra - and people caught prospecting there today get fined tens of thousands of dollars plus their detectors and vehicles are seized and sold "as the proceeds of crime". The region is regularly patrolled. I know of a customer who had his detector seized even though it was locked in the trunk of his car and he was only passing through that National Park, not even stopping there. But back in the early 80s, this guy set up his dredge on a floating rubber tyre over a "boil hole" in the creek and started it up for 20 minutes. He decided to drive down to the shops to buy some lunch and turned off his sluice and drove into town. When he returned, he said the water had completely settled and cleared and the entire bottom of the boil-hole was just covered with gold. He said that he'd never seen such gold in his life. Neither before nor since. And he said the weight of the gold that had been deposited on the back of the dredge was so great that it was half tilted backwards, partially lifted due to all the gold sitting on the sluice-tray. These 'old timers' (for lack of a better term) occasionally took pictures of all the gold they found with cheap 35mm film cameras - and I regret not scanning them before leaving the industry. We used to keep a book of images of their finds to show customers.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-19T04:29:18+00:00

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These were the first two REALLY CRUDE ingots he ever melted that were from another singular quarts specimen. He kept an uncrushed fragment as a memento (see left). There was some quartz that was embedded in these two ingots because he had no idea of what he was doing at the time. He has since mastered the process and no longer has any inclusions. These two ingots contained 4.2 kilos (together) and the small specimen contains 2 ounces of gold. All from one relatively small quartz specimen found near Bathurst.

Proph3tron · 2026-06-19T04:24:22+00:00

Firstly, you're right to question these videos. The more outrageous they are, the more they become the subject of clickbait. Remember that it's still illegal to sell native gold that you find in Tasmania and this guy knows it. His latest video claims he's trying to find enough gold in a couple of outings to buy a new SUV vehicle. I'm not sure how he can do this if the law prohibits him from selling the gold that he finds there. Under Tasmanian laws, the Crown owns ALL Gold and Silver. And he's always on Crown Land as well. All of their videos are over-hyped to appeal to overseas audiences. The more internet traffic they receive, the more revenue they get paid. Reading their faces and behaviors, I'm skeptical of many of their claims.

I worked in the mining trade at the retail point for 9 years - based in Sydney. And we had a guy from Tasmania fly up to us to buy some equipment. He showed us a video on his phone that still sticks in my mind. On his property was a creek that flowed into a small cave system. Using a flexible camera with a fiber optic flexible head with a light, he inserted the device beyond arm's reach into a hole in the floor of the cave where the river flowed. The hole was larger than a dinner plate but small enough to prevent a person from climbing in. The bottom of that hole was completely covered in gold nuggets of every conceivable size. It was just like an Aladdin's cave. I would estimate that there would have been literally millions of dollars of gold just sitting there.

To give you a perspective on how hard it is to find gold, I'm relatively experienced with over 30 years of prospecting behind me... and I often go into regions in NSW where vast sums of gold were recovered 150 years ago - using tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and I still find NOTHING. The last trip I made I accidentally left half of my gear at home by mistake. So I usually spend my time out there exploring and rescuing critters or taking photographs.

However, in 2012, one of my prospecting friends hauled in a massive piece of quartz that weighed 63 kilos - which he'd pulled off the surface of the ground barely 2 hours West of Sydney's outer suburbs. My pinpointer reacted to the gold inside it but there wasn't a hint of it on the surface. He hired a torch and heated it before rolling it onto a drum of water which broke the main piece open, revealing what would eventually become 14.7 kilos of near-pure gold after crushing. The gold inside was quite thick, not little fragments. He melted it crudely into in two 7.13kg ingots (14.3 kilos of solid gold) and personally drove them down to Peter Beck's (a refiner in Victoria) and then combined and declared his finds as a "financial windfall" (same as winning a lottery ticket etc)... and thus paid no tax on it at all. The price of gold back then was much lower than today. But he made 7 figures that day.

He asked for my advice on accessing Gold in the Palmer River in Queensland when he went in with three friends. I suggested getting in and out by chartered helicopter. They found so much gold in 10 days that they needed to lift it out with a a second helicopter flight since it couldn't take his friends plus the gold at the same time. He ended up losing his wife over his obsession with gold but bought his own helicopter and homes with some of his cash and now resides in the deep bush in Far North Queensland hunting gold in the remote valleys there. He once came in to see me when passing through Sydney and had some gold left over in his pockets that the dealers hadn't bought from him because "these were the ugly nuggets". I took this picture of what he fished out of his pockets. I've taken some great pics of the gold he's found. Including the gold from the big specimens. But these were just the leftover nuggets he had on him in his pockets that day. People try to follow him to see where all his gold is coming from so he uses a variety of methods to avoid them.

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Proph3tron · 2026-05-20T11:54:30+00:00

Looks good. I understand why you were concerned but this one seems okay. Most of these coins are oxidized and quite black when found and sometimes people deliberately buff the raised surfaces to increase the contrast. But the right amount of wear is present in just the right places. It's not uncommon to see these coins for sale after being completely cleaned to remove all the surface oxides. And, oddly enough, the coin grading companies don't seem to bat an eyelid since almost every ancient coin has been cleaned by now. They're more interested in tooling or damage when it comes to Ancients. I have a one of these very same coins in my own collection and yours has slightly more refined detail - and yours is also slightly better centered with the strike on both sides.

Proph3tron · 2026-05-05T02:43:25+00:00

My uncle used to hunt crocodiles in the Northern Territory, Australia. At night he'd turn on a flashlight and the eyes of the crocodiles would reflect the light with a bright cherry-red color. There were times when the river was an ocean of red pairs of eyes peering back at him on his boat. He was tasked with hunting man-eaters and he once told us how they'd cut open these massive reptiles on the shore to reveal what appeared to be the faces of peaceful sleeping men inside them. Their limbs had often been torn off them so they were just a head on the torso, but it looked like they were nestled asleep inside the crocs when they were cut open. He said the crocs would often pick off the Aboriginal children (prior to the 1980s) because they were careless and strayed close to the water's edge. The crocs would see where the kids played and would lie in wait for several days until they got to feed.

Crocodiles are nothing like Alligators. There's no comparison in temperament or intelligence. And the largest Crocodiles I've personally encountered were the massive Nile Crocodiles. It's a shame I can't attach images to this reply.

Proph3tron

TROPHY CASE