Astronomy!

Hi everyone,

This post is going to be very astronomy-based, basically because I have recently become fascinated with all things stars/planets/space; I'm such a loser and/or geek...

Last week, after a couple of days um-ing and ah-ing about when the best weather would be had, I took an evening trip to Sydney Observatory, hoping to delve deeper into all things "space". Unfortunately, after an amazingly clear day, the sky became quite overcast in the evening, but that didn't put me off. As was expected, the tour was pretty touristy/lame: we watched a few short 3D movies about how big/small objects in the universe are, and then went to the "planetarium", which was basically a big umbrella with the stars projected onto it. The part of the tour I was most excited about was looking through the telescopes, to see what exciting wonders could be seen. As I said before, the weather wasn't great for this, but luckily there was a break in the cloud which allowed a view of...SATURN! I have to say, I was incredibly excited about this, and have since been mocked for that reason. Anyway, it was pretty damn amazing; the telescope wasn't particularly strong but you could easily make out saturn and it's rings, and two of it's satellites, Titan and Rhea. It was definitely an awe inspiring sight, and it somehow made the planets more "real". Here is a picture of roughly what I saw.

The space-fetish doesn't stop there...

On Sunday morning, I awoke at 4am to go and see an allignment of 4 of the planets: Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. Usually a 4am start would not be something I would do, but this was totally worth it. Armed with my camera, I headed down to Coogee, and snapped happily away until sunrise, and then I snapped away some more! I think that was the first proper sunrise that I've seen in Australia.



I have now also learnt/seen:
- the Eta Aquarid meteor shower (I think I saw 7 - almost doubling my lifes total of shooting stars)
- constellations - I have seen, and will now recognise, Scorpio and Sagitarius
- The Pointer Stars, Alpha and Proxima Centauri
- The Southern Cross
- Canopus - the 2nd brightest star in the sky
- and probably a lot more than I now have forgotten