Just like Texas, there are heaps of ‘big’ things here in the Land Down Under.

Take Uluru or, Ayres Rock as it used to be known. Uluru is in the Northern Territory, 335km or 208 miles south west of Alice Springs. It’s pretty big and I thought it would be ideal for todays subject.

Firstly though a little bit of history.

On July the 19th, 1873 William Goss, a surveyor became the first white man to see the ‘The Rock’ as we Aussies generally call it. Goss named it Ayres Rock after the then Chief Secretary of South Australia.

To local Pitjantjatjara people it was Uluru, a place of great spiritual significance and eventually the name was changed from Ayres Rock to Uluru.

Uluru is a sandstone monolith, 384 metres (1142 feet) high with a total circumference of 9.4 kms (5.8 miles). Most of its bulk is underground.

Uluru appears to change colour at different times of the year and often glows red at dawn or dusk, the most popular viewing times for tourists.

So, it is a great subject for today.

Just one problem though, Uluru is 2,818 km or 1,751 and a bit miles each way from my place. Just a tad too far to do today.

Fortunately I’ve been there on a number of occasions, most recently just last year and here is how Uluru appeared at 10.42am on May the 15th, 2014:

Some years earlier I was at The Rock on the bike and the following image was taken from a different viewpoint to the one above:

As you can gather from these two images, Uluru is situate in an arid area of Australia. It rains at Uluru on average for only 30 days per annum and these falls give an average of 217 mm( 8.555 inches) of rain per annum.

That means you are very very fortunate indeed to see rain on The Rock. I’m one of the lucky ones as these two following images show:

It’s purely coincidental that I was at Ayres Rock as it was then called almost 100 years to the day from when Goss first saw it. According to history it was raining then too.

Why was I at the Rock way back in1973? Well that too is a story for another day.

Anyway, these are images of something big taken from four different viewpoints. I scanned the final two from my slide collection.

Seeing these images again has given me itchy feet.