Darling Range Visits Bickley Observatory
On 20th February nineteen brothers, family members and friends were treated to a visit to Bickley Observatory organized by Bro Patrick Burke who volunteers there.
Preceded by a barbecue dinner before sunset, we then moved to a tour of the museum and finally to telescope viewing of the heavens above us. Although there was low cloud coming up from the south, it moved fast enough to not obscure our viewing too much. Once again we are grateful to Carl and Faye Rechichi for taking care of the catering and cooking. Over the next few hours we had a beautiful evening.
We were escorted out to the observation domes and over the next hour or longer were treated to views of Jupiter and some of its moons, the Orion Constellation and Nebula plus the Tarantula Nebula.
Orion’s Belt is well known but some other big stars form the rest of the constellation. Rigel is the brightest while Betelguese is a red supergiant with a radius of around 700 times that of our sun. How the stars are seen depends whether they are viewed from the southern or northern hemispheres.
The Tarantula Nebula is an intense star forming region which is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy and visible in the southern sky in January. It gets its name from the wispy trails that make it look like a burrowing tarantula’s den, or a tarantula itself if your imagination allows.
While nobody could capture photos of the heavens through the telescope eyepieces, Mary Throssel did capture our setting lit by red night vision lights. Our thanks to Mary for a closing reminder of a lovely night.
Finally, sincere thanks again to Bro Patrick for organising and putting this together for us. It is a fitting reminder of where we actually fit in this vast creation
