Oh my gosh, have you ever seen anything like that in your life?!
That's the most incredible view of the Milky Way I've ever seen!
Oh I need to turn the lights off, I want to see it again!
About a year ago i got the best email of my life: Hey you want to come and spend
10 days at our luxury eco-friendly resort in the Maldives and lead stargazing sessions for guests
at our private island observatory? And so here we are ten whole days in Soneva Jani. Now beyond
the obvious beauty of this place - seriously can i just live here all the time?! - the reason why I'm
so excited as an astronomer to visit the Maldives is because it's very nearly almost on the equator,
about four degrees north in latitude, and that means you get the best of the northern
and the southern skies! So the skies are really different to what I'm used to seeing in the UK.
For example the north star, Polaris, is right down near the horizon here and you really get a
sense of the earth's movement on its axis. Also i feel like when I look north obviously I recognize
everything, it's the sky I'm used to seeing, I can navigate my way around. But then I turn
this way and I look south I don't recognize a thing like i'm so lost like there's a couple
of things I recognize you know that rise high enough in the summer in the UK but most stuff
I'm just absolutely lost. I've started making up my own constellations because i don't know
half of them, but like i see just triangles and stegosauruses everywhere! Dinosaurs is all I see
in the sky! The night skies here truly are some of the most incredible I've ever seen because we're
so isolated on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere so there's no light pollution. One of the
most amazing things about the villas is that the roof opens so that you can enjoy the stars from
bed, check this out! That is an astronomer's absolute dream and it's luxuries like this that
i could really get used to. And in case you're thinking well that doesn't sound like work this
just sounds like a holiday, don't worry I've been doing some serious scientific experiments as well
like: testing the fact that gravity is weaker near the equator,
or determining the coefficient of friction between a swimsuit and a slide, or investigating the
effect of ultraviolet radiation on pasty pale skin that hasn't seen the sun in 18 months!
In all seriousness, though this is why we're here, this is the very first overwater observatory
in the world and they have this incredible 16-inch Meade telescope with a zoom of 300 times. The view
is spectacular while I was here i got to teach guests about the wonders of the night sky. I mean,
I always say the sky becomes a lot more beautiful when you know what you're looking at, like for
example this center of the Milky Way. This is the place in the sky where you see more stars because
you're looking towards essentially the city center of our galaxy of over a hundred billion stars. And
we also know that there's a supermassive black hole lurking in the middle of it all that's four
million times more massive than the sun! As a black hole astrophysicist that's what I care
about, being able to look in the direction of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole is so
cool but for everybody else, it's the planets here that really shine. So because we're pretty much on
the equator here and it's only a few weeks past equinox the sun is rising directly in the east
going pretty much straight up overhead, so you have no shadow at midday it's so weird, and then
it sets directly in the west. Now that's also the path that all the other solar system objects take
in the sky like the planets as well because the solar system is a flat plane. It's like a disk
and that's because the solar system was one day a big cloud of gas that also happened to be spinning
and just like when you take a ball of pizza dough and throw it above your head and set it spinning
it flattened out into a flat disc and then all the planets formed from there.
And so what it means is that while I, in the UK, am used to seeing planets really low down in
the sky because that's also the path that the sun takes, here they go directly overhead and Jupiter
and Saturn right now are right at what we call the zenith, right above your head and we have
the best view of them. Woah! Saturn looks incredible! I never get tired of that view!
It's amazing to get to experience different night skies from locations around the world and
what I love about traveling to see the night skies, especially ones so clear like this,
is the feeling it gives me. I know that some people can get very anxious or feel insignificant
over the scales involved when you look up to the sky but what I feel is hope. I feel limitless,
like I could go anywhere or be anything. I feel so privileged to have experienced skies like this in
such an incredible location this past week. I'm very aware that not a lot of people in life will
get to experience what I have, especially in this amount of luxury as well at Soneva Jani,
because I never thought I'd be able to afford it, especially on a research scientist salary
as well I'll tell you that for free! But it's thanks to people like YOU, watching my videos,
engaging with content on my channel, that I was even invited here in the first place. So a huge
thank you from me to you just for being here. It's our last night tonight so I'm just soaking
in the skies while I still can and tomorrow it'll be time to head back to the real world...
All right, back to science...
Ah, hang on! I have a hair mustache
The night skies here are truly some of the most incredible I've ever
seen because we're so far away from light pollution it's a tiny isolated island right
I just watched that video back, did I capture a shooting star in the background while I was
filming?! I was too busy filming that I missed a shooting star over there?! Like what the hell?!
Oh who am I kidding I'm not gonna get any science done, I'm gonna have a load of emails