star light, star bright

When I was little, I was allowed to stay up late, on a school night, once a month, to watch the sky at night (UK telly show with monocled gnomic genius Patrick Moore) with my father. I’m certain this was the result of a ruse for I remember being feted by my peers for being allowed up so late (was it 10 or 11pm?) and I maintained a pretense of interest for years despite my actual frank terror of the programme itself (booming theme tune, the alien delivery and mannerisms of the frankly odd presenter, the incomprehensible science and the scary subject matter...outer-space (which meant only one thing in the mind of me the 7 year old. Aliens!).

Growing up in a high density, coal burning area in England in the late 70's’s the night skies were not terribly clear, but I do vividly remember the first time I recognized a constellation. I convinced myself the pattern of stars was the headlights of some terrible alien ship come to get me and was literally paralysed with fear, until I screamed my parents out of bed. My teenage cousins were subsequently banned from babysitting me for filling my head with creative alien ‘facts’. But the damage was done.

Despite that, perhaps because of that, I have always maintained a passing acquaintance with the night skies; at the doorstep fag-before-bed in my teens: the neck cricking stumbles home from the nightclubs in town in my twenties: and the enduring ‘let’s sleep under the stars’ impulse of combined wine and warm weather. The exact moment I decided to stay in New Zealand permanently I was naked. (laying on a plank of wood, in an old clawfoot bath, filled by a lengthy hosepipe, heated by a small fire, under the stars in a remote garden on Banks Peninsular...drinking wine!).

              a constellationally incorrect depiction of the Southern Cross; and little green man, 

                                                            on cool, old, (? air nz) brooch

Though these star-gazing occurrences were always of the woolly ‘isn’t the infininite wonderful’ kind, rather than a scientific-ey “crikey, I wonder at what Saturn's doing tonight” kind, I’ve had had some wonderful experiences as a result of taking the time to stop and look up when it's dark. I saw The fearsome Northern Lights (after escaping Jimi Hendrix's love-child in an Orkney pub); a spectacularly heavy meteorite shower in Manchester in the 90's, that seriously put Sydney’s millennial fireworks display to shame, (noticed after a heavy night at The Hacienda resulted in a lying-down rest in a park for a time); a comet (can't remember the circumstances, probably due to the drink); a solar eclipse (boozy Peak District camping trip); though I’ve yet to see the Matariki constellation (soon to reappear to signal the Maori New Year around June 26th and news-flash it's in the morning night sky-durr!). Erm. that'll be a flask of tea then.

And I know that, and all manner of other science-ey sky-clever stuff, cause on my actual day-of-40 night, me, the hubby and the kid went to the Mt John Observatory at Tekapo for a tour of the heavens with some boffin-acious astronomers. Whilst Claud fondled ’midnight’, the black observatory cat and slurped hot chocolate, we toddled between the naked eye and the telescopes and said "wow". A lot. (And thought about how we might smuggled our divinely-warm-and-seriously-cool red Antarctic Program down jackets away with us. A lot). A lot of people have been saying wow there lately. So much so the area has been designated an international gold starlight reserve something or other (aka the best place on earth to go stargazing) just this week.

Here's my epic photo of the event

                                 (come on Apple, an astrophotography app. already! Please?)

(This is it with the lights on)

Seriously though. I'm O.B.S.E.S.S.E.D.

i've trapped a nerve in my neck from craning it for long periods in my garden trying to work out the constellations, cue odd headaches and earache. do not cue giving up of squinting up at the dark-in-pain with hot chestnuts in my pockets and a smile on my face. i figured out Sagittarius last night. i jumped up and down and freaked out the cat when i did. when i've got them all sussed i'm going to buy some binoculars and suss out the moon and the planets. I'm also going to get a lilo to lie on in my dark, below freezing garden to save my neck. seriously i am! told you. obsessed. 

I wonder if you can get heated lilo's?

And in sharing my library loot I might point out that all normal reading matter has been suspended in favour of Stars of the Southern Skies by Patrick Moore (on the poor pull of Pluto he said "...one may as well try to stop the charge of a hippopotamus by throwing a baked bean at it..." Ha ha ha! Hurr. OK. Perhaps you have to be obsessed?!)

Anyway, I abandoned Patrick Cox's Northern hemisphere-centric 'wonders of the solar system' since it didn't even get the wonders of the planet right in it's neglect of the aurora australis (apparently aurora can only be seen in the northern hemisphere!?! that geezer needs to get his floppy fringe out of his eyes!); Stargazing Basics by P. E Kinzer and Sky Watching by D. H. Levy are next on the list.

But the book i can recommend enthusiastically is How to gaze at the Southern Stars by Richard Hall. A wonderful, accessible book, it has a reassuring chapter about why there is unlikely to be extra-terrestrial life, which makes hanging around in the dark outside a lot more relaxing...

linking up with ta-da! tuesday