The night sky — Lake Tekapo, New Zealand: "
Lake Tekapo, New Zealand
I have never seen such blue lakes in my life. After a great pit-stop at Poppies Café in the charmingly named town of Twizel we drove past Lake Pukaki and then arrived at our destination Lake Tekapo in the late afternoon. The blue colour of both lakes was simply gorgeous and was due to the rock flour suspended in the water which causes the light to be refracted in such a way that you get this simply stunning milky blue colour.
We only had one night in Lake Tekapo so I decided to take advantage of the fact that it has several observatories on the top of Mt. John and join a sky watch tour. This started at midnight and it was so cold they gave us old down jackets used by scientists in the Antarctic which was pretty cool but did their job of keeping us warmish in the windy conditions, apparently each jacket costs $1000 new. I wanted to see the Milky Way in the southern hemisphere along with some southern sky constellations, but I was a bit disappointed on both counts. The tour guides were pretty good, but not astronomers. They took us into a pit and used a laser pointer to show the Southern Cross and then Orion, Taurus and The Pleides. These last three are constellations that I know very well from the Northern hemisphere so I was enjoying seeing them upside down but didn't really learn anything new. They had some good telescopes, although only one had a go-to device so every so often they had to reposition the telescopes. I saw 'The Jewel Box’, ‘The Diamond cluster’ a globular cluster, Orion’s nebula (just) and the moon through the telescopes and it was nice to have someone else do the work of finding the objects. It being a full moon though meant that the sky wasn’t very dark so I didn’t get to see the Milky Way. It was also too windy to go to the top of Mt. John so we had to settle for a site at a much lower altitude, but the following day we drove to the top of Mt. John for some more stunning views."
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