Gender: Male
Status: Married
Age: 40
Sign: Sagittarius
City: Luton
Country: UK
Signup Date: 3/30/2006
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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
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Category: Travel and Places
This time last year, my Astronomy travels took me to Australia!
Of all the sciences known to man, astronomy is probably the oldest, since it requires no tools other than just one's eyes and some curiosity to do it justice. Few scientific disciplines out there can boast the kind of expansive flair to all-embrace Heaven and Earth in the way that astronomy does. Pursuit of the subject today is a highly varied and enjoyable interest that can take you to many different corners of the world. In May of 2006 - soon after completing my second novel, "The True Price of Immortality" - I went with a couple of friends on a sightseeing, fly-drive holiday to none other than the remotest inhabited continent on planet Earth : Australia! It was essentially a nature and astronomical stargazing tour that took us from the southern city of Melbourne, through beautiful Adelaide, all the way up to Alice Springs in the heart of the Australian interior.
One of the main reasons why astronomers do a lot of globe trottings in this way is because we happen to live on a spherical Earth. That means not all of the universe is on view to us from any one given city or particular country where we might be resident. For example, I happen to live in the UK, which means I can only readily see all the stars and constellations of the northern sky (effectively half of the total observable universe), but most of the wonders of the southern hemisphere of the celestial sphere will remain permanently out of sight below my horizons. I also happen to live in a somewhat light-polluted region of the UK, so the opportunity is rare for me to drive out of town and peer up into the dark heavens through crystal clear transparent skies, with their associated celestial splendours.
Take Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our Solar System and the 3rd brightest star in our night sky (after Sirius and Canopus). With a declination of minus sixty degrees on the celestial sphere, Alpha Centauri is a celestial wonder of the far southern skies, best seen from countries like South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, Chile and of course Australia. It never rises here in the UK, and will be permanently below the horizon for people living in Canada and much of the United States.
The yellow arrow shows the way to the next solar system in space: Alpha Centauri
The desert wilderness
Driving out into the desert for the first time was an unforgettable experience. During the day time, let me tell you, the Australian continental interior was a truly ancient and mysterious place, reminiscent of scenes from old dinosaur movies like One Million Years B.C. and The Land that Time Forgot. There was nothing but a terrifying silence all around, when you're hundreds of miles away from any civilization... I actually felt quite lonely and it was quite spooky at times. Even the eucalyptus trees took on a different character in the desert, compared to the ones I saw back in town. Some of them were charred and blackened by forest fires and most were scorched by the sun. Whilst driving alone, hundreds of miles across the outback, it can occur to you at times that this might be the last place on the planet where some tiny, isolated community of people might survive as the last remaining inhabitants of Earth... If there should be a global catastrophe of some magnitude that wiped out the rest of humanity... Spooky thoughts 
The colour of the desert soil was deeply orange in all directions. At times, you could vividly imagine you were driving the alien terrains on another planet like Mars, where the landscape would easily be even redder.
A typical Outback road
When you're used to living in a small country like Great Britain, in a tight knit urban community, such long desert journeys can make you feel lonely and homesick. But surprisingly, I found the experience gave me a feeling of peaceful solitude and isolation that was calming beyond description.
We killed a few kangaroos
Australia wouldn't be Australia without its vast kangaroo population. The graceful creatures were all over the place and impossible to avoid, especially when you're doing 60 or 70 m.p.h. on the roads at night. I wondered if kangaroos were nocturnal in their roaming habit, as they seemed to congregate by the roadside in such huge numbers after dark. One or two of them would dive straight onto the bonnet of the camper van that we'd hired without warning. Their body shape and jumping habit made them appear similar to miniature Tyrannosaurus Rexes and Velociraptors, like the ones graphically animated in Jurassic Park. They spring out of nowhere from behind the roadside hedges, leap ten or twelve feet up into the air and then you get 50 to 75 kilograms of meat land on the bonnet of your vehicle like a giant hammer. I was totally freaked out when my friend, who was doing the driving, managed to hit the first one. What a waste of life, I thought. I felt sorry for them, but then the following day, we saw strewn along the roadside there were carcasses of them hit by other drivers. Australian black vultures feasted on their rotting flesh.
Views of the Southern Ocean looking toward Antarctica
The drive along the south coast of Australia was a memorable one. There was an ancient light house at Cape Otway that we visited, dating back to the 19th century. It had a plaque showing the latitude as -38 degrees and 54.9 minutes South, longitude 143 degrees 38.6 minutes East - that marked the southernmost point of Australia, west of Melbourne. I was able to confirm these coordinates quite readily using my pocket GPS. I could only imagine what the mariners of antiquity would have paid for such an accurate and easy to use navigation device as an electronic GPS that we now take so much for granted today. When the first sailors were navigating this part of the world, they will have relied on such things as sextants, marine chronometers, star clocks and nautical almanacs to know where they were and where they were going.
We stayed over at an apartment in Glenelg, Adelaide right next to the ocean for a couple of days. One night, there was a thunderstorm brewing and the winds were picking up so I rushed out with an umbrella and went to the sea side. The calmness of the day had given way to extremely rough seas and stormy waves. On this night, the gales buffetted the coastline and the Southern Ocean had been transformed into a supernatural state; it was more like what the ancients might have imagined Oceanus Procellarum ("The Ocean of Storms") on the Moon to be like. Or it could have been Mare Desiderii, the "Sea of Dreams"; it certainly was like no earthly oceans I'd seen on any of my other travels before. The Atlantic Ocean was much calmer when I'd been boat riding on its shores in Tenerife (November, 1999) and the Pacific Ocean was breezy at Coronado Island, San Diego California that I'd visited way back in September 1996.
I'm on the shores of the Pacific in California (September 1996)
I was humbled to know that these were the furthest shores of the remotest continent of planet Earth that I had the good fortunes to go visit.
My photograph of the Southern Ocean, looking out toward Antarctica from the southernmost point of Australia
Staring out across the waters reminded me first and foremost of Earnest Shackleton's famously documented Endurance voyage across the south Atlantic into Antarctica back in the early 1900s. Notable mariners sailing these uncharted seas on astronomical trips also abound in the history books. One of them was of course Captain Cook, who made a voyage around the globe to observe a transit of Venus from Tahiti back in the eighteenth century.
The astronomical perspective of visiting the southern hemisphere
If you rearrange all the letters in the word 'astronomer', it turns out to be an anagram for 'moon starer'. It is not surprising then, to know, that I do happen to stare at the moon quite a lot - lol... Since it is the closest celestial object to us in space, a whole lot of detail is constantly on view through even the smallest of telescopes. But the moon looks upside down as seen from Australia. The reason for this is we are literally seeing it from 'down under', i.e. the bottom of the Earth, looking up. The moment of my visit to Uluru (otherwise known as the famous "Ayers Rock"), south west of Alice Springs coincided with the Moon being of a gibbous phase :
I'm pictured at sunset with a gibbous moon at Ayers Rock
There are also several other oddities that a northern hemisphere person who lives in Europe or the United States will immediately notice as he/she sets foot for the first time in a country like Australia in the southern hemisphere. Get this. Here in the northern hemisphere, if we wanted to buy or rent a house with a sunny garden, we would simply choose a house that has a south facing garden. This is because the sun reaches its highest point (astronomers call this 'transit on the meridian' or 'culmination') at noon due south. Not so in the southern hemisphere! I found the sun actually reached a maximum elevation due north and that fact alone took some getting used to. From Adelaide, of latitude - 34.9 degrees South, the sun was at a midday altitude of yy degrees due *north* in mid May.
Reversal of seasons is obviously the biggest change one would experience by crossing the equator.You leave behind a snowed out mid winter's day in New York or London, and you're greeted by a sunny, scorching hot midsummer's day in Sydney or Cape Town. There is yet another phenomenon, called the "coriolis effect", which can demonstrate that you have changed hemispheres on the planet. I wanted to see for myself if the water draining through the plug hole of a bath tub or a sink would spiral anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere; and sure enough it did in Australia! One of my friends even took video footage of the swirling water going counter-clock wise, might have to post that sometime on myspace or U-tube...
The night sky would appear totally unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated northern hemisphere stargazer, who happened to be equipped with star charts on his/her laptop or PDA. On a breezy overcast night, with masses of white clouds racing across the sky light and fluffy, the constellations of the southern hemisphere appear strange and exotic. Especially when you get fleeting glimpses of them through gaps in the clouds. Some are prominent in their patterns and stars, others appear faint and totally obscure. Eridanus "The River", Horologium "The Clock", Puppis "The Poop", Pavo "The Peacock", Grus "The Crane", Circinus "The Compass", Musca "The Fly", etc...
My first glimpse of Alpha Centauri
After many years of reading about Alpha Centauri in the astronomy text books, it was a truly defining moment when I finally caught sight of the "star of my dreams" (and novels!).
My epic photograph of the star Alpha Centauri rising above Ayers Rock!
The desert air was dry and exceptionally still, the nights were warm and star-filled. Alpha Centauri was shining bright and yellow in the sky and the southern Milky Way appeared particularly stunning in the direction of Crux (the famous "Southern Cross") and Centaurus regions. The Clouds of Magellan and globular clusters 47 Tucanae and Omega CentauriOmega Centauri were breathtaking, cast against the pristine skies. With no light pollution in the remotest regions of the Outback, the luminosity of the sky appreaed dazzlingly bright and it all seemed rather strange and mysterious... The best part was when we'd switched off the engine of the camper van whilst driving at night... and allowed the vehicle to simply coast forward without any power ... Then I was able to fully appreciate the stillness of the desert night all around. Just the hissing of the tyres on the tarmac, whispers of the night breeze and the open skies blazing with stars up above. A thrilling experience! Totally empty midnight roads left so much freedom to pull over whenever we wanted to. The three brightest stars, Sirius, Canopus and Alpha Centauri, all shone with such intensity that they seemed like little miniature suns suspended in space. Through binoculars, I could even make out a bluish halo of the sky around each star, reminiscent of the same blue sky we see in the daytime.
Long exposure photographs bring out the rich Milky Way star fields near Crux (Alpha Centauri is arrowed)
The heavens of a dark desert night when set against this desolate land, truly made the universe seem like a dark, deeply mysterious and lonely place. Set against the blackness of infinity, the fuzzy patches of silvery light from the Milky Way really shone in their fullest glory. Strewn amongst them were star clusters and nebulae which I saw in fine detail through wide field binoculars. Their light hitting my retina almost made me hallucinate... the effect was that much more mesmerising and magical. It was also evocatively nostalgic, as we once could experience similar views of the northern Milky Way from the UK back in the glorious days of the 1980s before light pollution started creeping in. Some people have claimed that you could see your own shadow cast on white sands purely by the luminous glow of the Milky Way alone. I thought I could *just* make out a faint and fuzzy outline of myself as I walked around briskly, but one of my friends who was equally as astronomically inclined as I, said he could never see any shadows. So my observation of this phenomenon unfortunately remains inconclusive.
The opal mines at Coober Pedy were something else. I bought an opal necklace for my wife and saw all the fossils of marine creatures that once roamed Australia when it had been submerged under water in some prehistoric sea dating back to the early Earth. We went into this museum-like cave for a thought provoking experience, with skeletons of weird, dinosaur-like creatures on display inside glass cabinets.
Aborigines were nice
The word "aboriginal" means "the first" or "earliest known". The first inhabitants of Australia were the aborigines. Today they account for only about 2% of Australia's total population.
Seeing the aborigines for the first time was something. They really did give me the impression of what prehistoric man might have looked like. The features of their head and skull was all prehistoric. Their behavior was sometimes strange, but they were really friendly overall. One of them was looking in the trash cans for cigarettes and food. I couldn't help feel sorry for their humble ways, though.
What I really hated was the way some of the local people were treating them. This one woman, then a man, when they walked past them, they would look away with an expression of visible contempt! I also learned from one of the locals, that they call them "abbos" which apparently is a racist term, I felt was quite disgusting. A big part of our ancestry is rooted in these people and they deserve our utmost respect, in some ways perhaps even more than the wider abundance of more modern races? I dunno...but a world without the aborigines would be a poorer place, because there are hidden talents in these ancients that modern man will never comprehend...
12:47 PM
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