- Right now, I am heading out of Mount Cook.
I'm staying in a place called Twizzle.
It's actually called Twizel, but I'm calling it Twizzle
'cause I think that sounds funnier.
I'm staying on a farm!
Yeah, man, I'm staying on a farm, yo,
with pigs and chickens and (beep).
So I'm headin' that way now.
And then, I've got, I'll have a nap
at some point because I've got super late-night
stargazing tonight.
(uplifting music)
It's about 1:00 a.m., and I'm just heading out
now to Tekapo again, the same place I went to
last night for a late-night observatory
session at 2:00 a.m.
The weather is really changeable, I just
called them for a weather update.
It's super changeable.
It's raining one second
then it's stopped the next second.
Last night we had quite the very very thin
layer of cloud covering most of the sky.
Tonight we've got thicker, lumpy chunks of cloud.
But then, where there's not cloud,
it's super super clear.
Which, I think, as long as we get a nice clear window,
it is probably a better situation
because then we'll get to see some, certain
sections of the sky really clearly.
But, anyway, there's no guarantees.
So, just gonna head down there and see
what the situation's like when I get there.
So, embarrassingly, I showed up on the wrong night.
(laughs) Apparently our booking was for tomorrow.
But, luckily, there was a no-show so I managed
to get a spot on the bus.
(upbeat music)
Alpha Centauri.
That's another star there, that's one's called
Beta Centauri.
The reason for those names is because
they're the brightest and second-brightest
stars in the constellation Centaurus.
Appear to be of similar brightness.
We've actually found binary star systems
of other stars are over a light year
apart from each other.
But there's still nothing else around them
so they're the only things that act on each other.
So we've got this specialist astro photographer
who's set up a bunch of SLR's, including my one,
just there, and this device tracks the movement
of the stars so it's moving very very slowly.
So what that means is, we can do a long exposure
on the sky and it'll move with the star
so we don't end up with star trails.
And instead we actually just get
like a really kind of deep exposure of the stars,
so we're really looking forward to that
and how it turns out.
(upbeat music)
Also, got a sort of telescope lens over here
where, I think, she's attached a couple
of the cameras just to take some other photos
of the moon using that.
(upbeat music)
So we just headed down to this big
telescope thing to look at some
deeper-space-type objects.
So the telescope's looking at the
Alpha Centauri system, which is a (mumbles) star.
- [Woman] So this is 47 Tucanae, a globular cluster.
This is a very star-dense region,
and very very old.
So one of the oldest things you will ever see.
- [Man] How far is it?
- [Woman] Far?
It's 15,000 light years.
So that's how long it took light from these stars
to reach you now.
(upbeat music)
Alright so that's the stargazing all done.
Back in the car now, just gonna shoot back home.
It's about five o'clock in the morning,
or 4:30, something like that.
It will be about just after five by the time I get back.
So, it was good, got some amazing
astro shots on the camera.
I have to cut those into the video.
I got the Southern Cross,
a few other things, some nebulae, and a few
other kind of cool astro pics.
So, yeah, it was a good night.
Really enjoyed it!
(upbeat music)