On Wednesday night, February 19th, we joined a night-time astronomy tour sponsored by Earth & Sky. The University of Canterbury operates several telescopes at the summit of Mt John near Lake Tekapo and we had an opportunity to view several celestial objects through different telescopes. Located in the Mackenzie Basin far from city lights, Lake Tekapo has some of the darkest skies in the world and has been designated as an International Dark Sky Reserve.
We saw several objects that we cannot see in the northern sky, including the Magellanic Clouds, Alpha and Beta Centauri (the “pointer stars”), the Southern Cross, and the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae.
We were lucky not only that skies were clear, but that an aurora was visible that night as well. We could see greenish streaks and a reddish patch of light in the south. Cynthia and I appear in the group photo taken with the aurora as the backdrop.
Maki Yanagimachi, a very talented astrophotographeron the staff of Earth & Sky offered to take photographs for tour participants using their own digital SLR cameras. She collected half a dozen cameras, mounted them on a long aluminum bar attached to a tracking mount and proceeded to take several photos, including the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is a sister galaxy of the Milky Way, but with only about 1% of its mass.
Maki also attached my camera to a telescope and took this photo of the moon.
