The Southern Heavens

The southern heavens are amazing.  Carol and Roger got fantastic views of them almost every night they were in New Zealand.  The skies were cloudless and smog-free.  The population of New Zealand is small and scattered, so that it's really dark at night...enabling us to see stars too faint to be visible near big cities.  But most of all, the stars above the southern hemisphere are simply more numerous than those in the north.

Our guide to the southern heavens was Alastair Brickell.  He is a Canadian-born geologist who's worked all over the world, has lived in New Zealand the past 30 years, and has had a passionate interest in astronomy since he was a teenager.

Carol spotted a brochure advertising his observatory on the Coramandel Peninsula the same day she and Roger were both wishing they could learn something about the panoply of stars they saw every night.  It was kismet!

Alastair is not you average hobbyist-astronomer.
His telescope is research-grade, and the observatory in his back yard would make most university physics departments jealous.








Just a note here...for the sake of full disclosure.  All the photos in this blog post come from either Alastair Brickell's web-site (www.stargazersbb.com), NASA, CalTech, or an Australian astronomy web-site.

Since there was a beautiful half-moon out the night of our tour, our first stop was the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.

Then on to the stars...

The most obvious constellation in the New Zealand sky is the Southern Cross.



Unlike the northern hemisphere, there is no star directly over the South Pole.  Still, early sailors found a way to use the Southern Cross to calculate true south and navigate the South Seas.

In the middle of our tour of the night sky, an alarm went off.  Allister took is outside the observatory to watch the International Space Station pass overhead.

It was plainly visible to the naked eye because the solar panels that power the space station reflect the sun.

As it meandered across the sky, Allister pointed out it was traveling at an orbital speed of 8 kilometers per second...that's 18-thousand miles per hour.

That was just the first of a night of concepts that challenged comprehension.




This prepared us...or did it?...to take on the big concept...the Milky Way.

In the northern hemisphere, we had obviously seen stars that were part of the Milky Way.  But we had never seen the mass of stars visible in the south.

Courtesy of the big telescope, we were treated to a peek at a few things inside the Milky Way.

The Jewel Box is a cluster of about 100 stars 6,440 light years away.  They contain some of the brightest stars in the Milky Way.  The stars vary in color, "sparkling like different colored gems"...thus giving the constellation its name.

The most mind-blowing of everything we saw was what's called a globule constellation.  This one was comprised of roughly a million stars...that were created 10-million years ago and might...or might not...exist today.  We won't know for another 10-million years.




And to think...we went to Allister Brickell's observatory because all we wanted to know was what were all those beautiful stars in the southern sky!