Having seen The Dish, we now set off to Dubbo, and later that night we would be attending the stargazing session at Dubbo observatory.

This was definitely one of our quicker drives, and we were in Dubbo in pretty good time.

As we were staying at a Big 4, and the weather was yet again great, the kids hopped in the pool for a splash and a lot of fun was had.

After a camp kitchen tea and a chat wih our fellow nomads, it was time to hit Dubbo observatory.

http://www.dubboobservatory.com/

We had booked a personal session as a treat for Jimi (kind of a birthday treat).

The experience was excellent. Everything was outdoors, inlcuding a guided powerpoint presenatation onto a large outdoor screen, explaining all about the night sky, and the guide-bloke also had some massive laser-pen thingy so he could point things out.

There was a slightly quirky start to the evening when we were presented with two pairs of binoculars which he made clear were only for mum and dad. I think this bloke’s propeller had blown his empathy chip, but it was a bit odd to say the least (and we’d paid for 4 people). Binoculars were worth $200 a pair he reminded us. Hardly engaging the kids!

Anyhow, the session itself was great. The few bits of knowledge we had were useful, and he explaned the bigger picture stuff very well. To accompany the explanations were the use of a load of telescopes, so you actually got to see what he was talking about. That definitely helped. It was also a clear, and very cold night so viewing was good.

The highlight was looking through the massive telescope in the motorized dome.

This gave us great views of the moon, but the the highlight was the astrophotography.

Propellor-head basically plugged in our DSLR into his largest telescope, configured he camera for some long exposures and snapped away. The results were amazing.

There are a few pictures below. These are straight from our camera from a single-take. No colourisation or stacking of images and no effects were applied. Due to the moon being out, the background is slightly more gey than black, but its pretty impressive imagery (well we think it is!).

Jimi was definitely in his element, and we were also putting our newly acquired thermals and coats to good use, coz it was a very cold night (again).

Poor old Mazzy. She was on her best behaviour, but after an hour of squinting through small holes looking at stuff that for her is not that interesting, she got very cold and very tired.

The session also ran over a little, and was gone 10:30 pm on a very cold night.

We politely wrapped up the session and went home, forgetting that home is really a large car which was also freezing cold! One of those times when it would have been nice to return to a warm place to live. But after a few minutes of heating and a swift glass of port everything was good. It had been another great day hopefully captured in at least some of these blog posts.

Stay tuned for more ….