Star Safari

27/08/2024

Hari is one of the few people with an asteroid ☄️ named after her, hers is Haritina 7101 and we imaged it today with Slooh’s Chile 1 telescope 🔭. The asteroid is annotated in the image quite close to the star marked as GAIA 2613061641940391808, it’s the faint grey mark next to the star. It’s a main belt asteroid with a current apparent magnitude of about 16.4.

26/08/2024

The two images below are taken with Slooh’s remotely operated telescopes 🔭. The one with Saturn’s 🪐 rings more visible was taken on 23 October 2020 from the Slooh telescope in the Canary Islands and the one with the rings edge on was tonight with the Slooh telescope in Chile. It shows how much the aspect of the rings has changed in the last four years.

18/08/2024

If you are keen to see Saturn 🪐, join us at Star Safari (www.star-safari.nz). Weather permitting, our big telescopes 🔭 will be trained on the ringed gas giant. Our main planetary telescope is a D&G 8" Refractor (in the picture below). This stunning telescope is great for the planets.

Saturn's 🪐 rings are slowly getting edge on to us and on 23 Mar next year they will be almost exactly edge on - unfortunately by then the Sun will be getting in the way with the angular separation between the Sun and Saturn being only 5 degrees, meaning we won't see it so come and enjoy the view of this amazing planet now (or in the next few months) 😄.

09/07/2024

Star Safari is having the most amazing time visiting NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with some amazing behind the scenes experiences. Here’s a pic of us visiting the Mars Yard.

09/07/2024

Hair’s favourite… tungsten. Very very cool. Only made by kilonova.

04/07/2024

We are on a field trip to learn how to improve our telescopes at Star Safari. First stop NOAA’s Inouye Solar Telescope. This is the most powerful solar telescope in the world. https://nso.edu/telescopes/inouye-solar-telescope/

24/06/2024

On Saturday there was a lot of high cloud and we captured a Moon halo. Haven’t seen one for a few months.

08/06/2024

An absolutely stunning night with the stars tonight. Looking south you can see the Milky Way curving above.

04/06/2024

Wairarapa Dark Sky Reserve has been recognised by the International Dark Sky Association for about 18 months. Despite this we still have no signs indicating to the many visitors to South Wairarapa and Carterton Districts that they are entering an internationally recognised dark sky reserve. Come on Wairarapa Sky stop congratulating each other and start getting the signs up. Kaikoura are already putting their signs up!

19/05/2024

This month, we've been running around taking photos of all the amazing celestial events we saw: a comet, a supernova, the Aurora Australis, and we almost could not keep up with so many things happening at once. And thanks to and the amazing Jet Productions we got in front of camera for a change, for an awesome photoshoot. All happened in May. What a cool month!

Check out some of the highlights and photos!

Check out what you can see in the night sky in May - galaxies, quasars, globular clusters, constellations, the Moon and other wonders.

15/05/2024

Here’s our latest picture of SN2024ggi in NGC3621. The star that the arrow is pointing at is actually a star blowing up in the galaxy in the picture. The galaxy is called NGC3621 and is 22 million light years away. The star blowing up is called a supernova and was discovered on 12 April and given the designation SN2024ggi. This image is about 27 mins of exposure through our LX200 telescope.

11/05/2024

The Aurora was so strong that our meteor camera, which points North, picked up some of it in the top left of the video.

11/05/2024

11/05/2024

Zenith

08/05/2024

We’re at at in . A great opportunity to take Star Safari to the world!

08/05/2024

An opening address from Dame Kerry Prendergast, former Mayor of Wellington and Chair of the Tourism Industry New Zealand Trust

08/05/2024

We are super excited to participate for the first time in the greatest tourism conference in NZ representing our fabulous dark sky from the Wairarapa Dark Sky Reserve. .wairarapa

02/05/2024

We are often asked what we see from Star Safari. More often, it is not what we see but what hides inside the things we see that is equally fascinating.

Take, for example, M42[Photo Taken from Star Safari with the Jim McCoy telescope and a Canon RA (28 April 2024), single shot, unprocessed].
In the evenings, from November to May, we can see M42, also affectionately known as the Great Nebula in Orion. While this is a favourite object because it is so beautiful, M42 is also home to the Becklin-Neugebauer Object!!

Often abbreviated as the BN object, The Becklin-Neugebauer Object is a compact infrared source located near the centre of the Orion Nebula - a well-known star-forming region in the constellation of Orion. It was discovered in 1967 by Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer, hence its name.

What started as uncertainty, as the astronomers were not quite sure about the nature of the BN object, later was revealed as a massive young star, unlike any other, embedded within a dense cloud of gas and dust. It's now considered one of the most luminous infrared sources in the Orion Nebula, emitting intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The BN object is particularly interesting to astronomers studying stellar formation processes and the environments in which stars are born. Its proximity and luminosity make it an ideal target for observations to understand the early stages of star formation and the dynamics of young stellar systems.

Hari interviewed Eric Becklin in 2013 when he flew to New Zealand on board the SOFIA telescope. https://youtu.be/u13tR_Grcmc?si=_A9RIuokykHX7Eqd

01/05/2024

Now, there are spectacular deep-sky objects to stare at, and there is NGC 5139, also known as Omega Centauri. 🤣

If you're from the Northern Hemisphere, nothing will prepare you for a globular cluster that fills the eyepiece. If you're from the Southern Hemisphere, hopefully, you'll take it for granted as you grew up with it.

This odd little thing is made up of a staggering 15 million stars. One of the most fascinating aspects of this cluster is the many blue giants visible, a sight you can definitely see in photos (rather than with your eye). And to put things into perspective, Omega Centauri is a mere 15 to 17 thousand light years away.

We took this photo from Star Safari with our Jim McCoy Telescope - LX-200 and a Canon Ra. F 1/8, 20 seconds, ISO 6400.

30/04/2024

Take II of the comet 12P/Pons-Brooks - 28 April 2024. We photographed it through our Meade LX200 + Le Canon Ra . The comet was a bit higher in the sky than the previous night wasted all the extra time trying to take a wide field photo. So green!!! Lovely comet, looks like a Tribble.

28/04/2024

We photographed SN2024ggi tonight. It’s a supernova in the galaxy NGC3621, about 22 Mly away in the constellation Hydra.

28/04/2024

This is Acrux, one of the stars in the Southern Cross. There’s actually two stars there and the gap between them in 72 billion km. This was taken carefully with my phone through our LX200 telescope.

27/04/2024

This is the comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, photographed by Hari through our Meade LX200 tonight at Star Safari. It was a pretty limited window between sunset and the comet setting to capture this image.

27/04/2024

The Moon last night taken with a very carefully held iPhone up to the eyepiece of one of our big telescopes.

26/04/2024

Looking at the Arrow Cluster

24/04/2024

The Moon rising over the ridge on the other side of the valley through our Meade LX200.

23/04/2024

The almost Full Moon at 99.5% illumination last night on our way to Star Safari.