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- Having calmed down a little bit after the old skydive,
I'm down in Queenstown now,
leaving, I'm on my way up north,
sort of north-easterly-ish direction to Mount Cook,
the first night in the Mount Cook Village
and then, I tried to get one night accommodation there
and then two nights in an Airbnb,
staying on a little farm
and apparently I get to feed the pigs
and collect my own eggs from the hens in the morning,
so that will be fun
and the objective of going to Mount Cook
and then Tekapo is obviously the scenery,
do some hiking trails
and of course, late night astrophotography,
which I really, really, really love doing,
so I am fingers crossed that we'll have some clear skies,
the weather forecast hasn't been so great, if I'm honest,
but I don't have enough, any more days to play with.
Yeah man, just driving, baby.
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How cool is this?
I'm surrounded by lavender,
it smells really good, I love lavender.
Now we're kind of approaching Mount Cook area.
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This whole area, including Mount Cook is a national reserve,
is a protected region for light conservation,
so obviously to maintain
all of the great astronomy views etc., etc.,
there is an observatory with big telescopes etc. in Tekapo,
which is about an hour or so away from here
and they do special guided night tours
and I was lucky enough to get the last spot,
they've got two different observatories,
I managed to get the last spot available
for the next week in one observatory tonight
starting at 10:40 p.m.
and I managed to get the last spot available
in the main observatory tomorrow night,
which is at two a.m., super, super awesome.
Now on tomorrow night's one, I get to attach my SLR camera
directly to the telescope to take deep space pictures,
which will be absolutely breathtaking,
now of course this whole thing is weather-dependent
and the forecast for tomorrow
is for the clouds to come in and for it to rain,
but regardless, I've booked tomorrow's one anyway,
I know the weather forecast isn't good,
because you know, if I don't try, I'll see nothing,
so I may as well try, even if I just see
one star, one planet, it will be worth it.
So it's just after nine now,
so I'm just rocketing down these roads on the way to Tekapo,
I'm really, really excited.
It's about two o'clock in the morning
and I have got back from the late night astronomy tour,
had a few problems with this camera,
whilst I was on the tour,
so I couldn't really do any shooting,
we've got a full, supermoon,
which means that the moon's at its closest point
in its orbit to earth, which makes it bigger
and it's a full moon,
so that makes it a little bit difficult,
but the cloud cover has actually been not bad,
we can see quite a lot of sky, so it was alright,
but I got a nice few little snaps of Mount Cook
and stuff in the background,
that behind me over there
with the moon shining over it is Mount Cook.
I know, rabbits everywhere, man.
But yeah, it's like I'm in the middle of nowhere,
it's pretty cool, man, pretty scary as well.
I'll see if I can actually show you some stars.
That,
if you can see it,
is the Southern Cross,
which you can't get in the Northern Hemisphere
and you know it's the Southern Cross,
because these two
form a straight line
with the bottom part of the Southern Cross.
Good morning, good morning, good morning,
so after a long night of stargazing, just woken up,
gonna head out for a jog
and take a look at my view,
just wanted to grab that quickly,
got a little time lapse going over here
for about half an hour or so
just to capture a bit of movement in the clouds.
Anyway, the plan is right now, I'm gonna go for a jog
and then I've got a couple of little,
and then check out of here,
we'll check out of here, go for a jog
and then I've got a couple of little hiking tracks
to do this morning.
Just looking at the lake on this walk,
got a little time lapse going over here.
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This is a really beautiful, beautiful walk,
I'm really enjoying it.
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Looks like a face.
What a cool view, eh?
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