Southern Cross
15 January 2008 | 1000m up, Mount John
Cold and windy
The day started with the trip to Mount John. The bus got us up there at 2330, and we stayed till well after 0100. Our tour leader was the Dutchman Renee, an experienced astronomer who loves the skies. With his amazing laser pointer he showed us the Southern Cross (only four stars visible from here), Orion, Regel, and the Magellanic Clouds.
The tour company own one of the telescopes up there which can be pointed at all sorts of objects in the sky. We looked at the Keyhole Nebula and the bright globule of stars called 47 Toucanni. The most extraordinary thing was Saturn, bright in the scope with its rings just as if a child's transfer had been stuck on the lens. Magic!
We were lucky; it was very wet and windy earlier in the evening, but between 0000 and 0100 we had a lovely clear night, with Saturn just high enough in the eastern sky to be seen. After that, black clouds came up from the south, bringing a vicious wind with them, so less could be seen and it got very cold. We were glad to collapse into bed at 0200. A really worth while trip and our amateur astronomer friends (Sally, we'll send you the postcard) can eat their hearts out.
Mount St John is the most southerly such observatory apparently, as Patagonia has nothing to compete. Amateurs are not allowed to take pictures (because the flash screws with the serious science being done up there), so this view of the Southern Cross comes from the local photographer Fraser Gunn, a disc of whose photos we found irresistible.