Australian Bed and Breakfasts: Astronomy Style
Barry Wolfe
On my maiden trip to Australia in March of 2001 I took my newly constructed 12.5-inch Dobsonian reflector to the South Pacific Star Party and had some exciting and novel views of many of the showpiece objects seen only from the southern hemisphere (for a full report see the NOVAC newsletter, Jul/Aug, 2001; or www.angelfire.com/stars2/bwolfe). However, between airline baggage problems and clouds, I only had one and a half nights of telescopic viewing on that trip. Thus, I was determined to return to Australia with more potential viewing nights, a better itinerary with higher probability of clear skies, and, importantly, a mid-Austral spring sky with objects to complement the late Austral summer sky of March. My plans began to materialize when I accumulated the required 60,000 frequent flyer miles for a free ticket on American/Qantas. I booked a ticket from Washington, D.C. to Sydney for a two-week stay around the new moon of November, 2002 and began researching bed and breakfast spots throughout New South Wales. The general concept was to work my way into the interior with the anticipation that the skies in the outback would be dry and cloudless.
Mudgee and Protea
Farm
I decided to begin the trip with a short stay at Protea Farm
(http://www.proteafarm.com.au),
a small place near the town of Mudgee, approximately four hours northwest
of Sydney. I was familiar with Protea Farm as I had stayed there on my first
trip since it is fairly close to the site of the South Pacific Star Party
sponsored each March by the Astronomical Society of New South Wales. I rented
their three-bedroom house for A$100 (US$56) per night for the first two nights
after my arrival. I knew that I would be fairly tired from the 22 hours of
traveling and didn't want to go too far right away. Additionally, my first
experience there was delightful. It is a very comfortable and well-furnished
house; with nice beds and baths, a fully-equipped kitchen, and a front yard
that gets very, very dark at night. The owners, Paul and Mandy Jeffrey, live
in a small house attached to the rental unit. They are lovely folks, easy
and interesting to talk to.
 |
In addition to the two rental units on their property, Paul has a 1928 Chevrolet pickup with a professionally crafted wooden unit in place of the truck bed designed to accommodate about 10 passengers in style. He uses this restored antique to do winery tours and to chauffer wedding groups. The photo shows his Chevy with my rental house in the background. Arriving in Sydney at 8:30 am on Wednesday, October 30, clearing customs with all my telescope and photographic gear, and picking up my Toyota Tarrago van from Avis, I made the four-hour trip across the scenic Blue Mountains to the small town of Mudgee (pop. 6000; famous for its wine and honey) where I stopped in a market to purchase a few staples and a bottle of local wine to tide me over for the next couple of days. Protea Farm is fifteen minutes from Mudgee and is protected from whatever light pollution that the town might generate by a line of low hills to the east. |
 |
 |
Upon arrival I unpacked my scope on the front porch under
blue skies and the hot Australian sun and reassembled everything. To keep
the weight down on the box which is my telescope, I remove part of the mirror
cell and pack it into the cardboard box that the truss poles are shipped
in. Reassembling the mirror cell, inserting the primary mirror (which I carry
on the plane), and attaching the altitude bearings completes the mirror box.
The upper tube assembly, which ships stored inside the mirror box, requires
the focuser and the secondary mirror, both packed in my suitcase, to be
reattached. The rocker box, which contains the mirror box during shipping,
needs the ground board reattached. All this took about an hour and needs
to be done only once at the beginning of the trip. I set the telescope up
for viewing on the lawn, went inside, made myself an early dinner, and took
a nap in anticipation of the coming evening.The rocker box, with a mating
top, forms the outside of the packed scope. Inside is the mirror box followed
by the upper tube assembly, all nesting like Russian dolls. The aluminum
truss tubes shown in the left image pack into a cardboard box along with
my disassembled observing chair and observing table legs and barn door mount
for photography. See
https://www.angelfire.com/stars2/bwolfe/12picscontents.html for a complete set of pictures of the telescope. The
right image shows the assembled scope, my observing chair and, in the background,
the house at Protea Farm.
 |
 |
It was very dark by 9:00 when I reemerged. The Milky
Way with Sagittarius at its center was low in the west and would set in another
couple of hours. High in the southern sky was the Small Magellenic Cloud
(SMC) and rising in the east was the Large Magellenic Cloud (LMC), two local
galaxies that I planned to spend a lot of time with on this trip. However,
I could see, naked eye, the glorious globular cluster 47 Tucana just
to the upper right of the SMC. This was my initial object and "What a wow!"
to start with. This is arguably the best globular cluster visible from earth
and is seen only from very southerly latitudes. My favorite eyepiece is a
14 mm Pentax which, on this scope, gives 118x magnification and 33 arc minutes
field of view. 47 Tucana completely filled the eyepiece with stars!
The stars all seemed to be of similar magnitude and color (yellowish) and
very homogeneously spread out. The very bright core was not resolved at this
magnification and required 236x to begin that process. It seems to me that
47 Tuc is a very large and bright version of M15. For comparison,
I looked at a nearby globular, NGC 362, just bordering the north edge of
the SMC. This object in its own right is excellent, being fairly large (13')
and bright (mag 6.6), comparable to many of the great globulars of the north.
For a familiar comparison, I looked at M22 in Sagittarius and, although it
was a bit more impressive than NGC 362, it paled by comparison to 47
Tucana.
Scanning the SMC with my low power (52x) wide-field (1.25 degrees) eyepiece I could see many patches of nebulosity and several clusters embedded in this nearby galaxy. As the entire galaxy spans an area approximately 4 degrees by 2 degrees (the full moon is 0.5 degree) and is less than 200,000 light years from earth (in our front yard!) there are dozens of very bright objects to see. I started by finding NGC 346, a nebulosity with several stars embedded. It was an amorphous patch 5' across and easily seen, but the contrast was improved by a UHC filter. A second, less bright patch of nebulosity was just to its east and was included in the 33' field of view. On this trip I decided to keep a log of my observations and to sketch most, or all, of the objects that I viewed. In retrospect, this was a great decision. Sketching an object forces you to really look at detail and to notice the surrounding field. Keeping a log gives you a lifetime of memories.
 |
I moved on to NGC 456 which was not as bright but a quite interesting string of three patches of nebulosity stretching east-west for 15 to 20' with the westernmost object being the brightest. I think the eastern pair was actually NGC 460. The arrow in this and other drawings indicates the direction of drift (west). That evening I focused mainly on objects in the SMC although I was distracted a bit by galaxies in Sculptor. In particular, I couldn't resist looking at NGC 253 which crossed near the zenith at 11:00. I have observed this edge-on galaxy (declination -25 degrees) many times from Savage Farm in northern Virginia where, at its best, it is low in the south and always in the atmospheric muck. Even so, it is an impressive object spanning 26 arc minutes and showing some degree of mottling and dust. But the view of NGC 253 at the zenith was remarkably different. So much detail could be seen. The galaxy spanned the entire field of view of my 14 mm eyepiece and lots of bright and dark regions could be discerned. This may be the best galaxy one can see from earth (but viewing M51 or NGC 1365 at the zenith of a dark sky may provoke an argument). That first, fantastic night lasted till about 2:30 when all of my traveling crashed in on me and I retired for the night. |
 |
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) photographed with a 50 mm lens. This is a 10 minute exposure at f/1.4 with ASA800 film with the camera tracking the motion of the stars on an ultra-simple barn door mount that I built using a hand-driven bolt to track (see explanation at bottom). The stars are getting a bit blobby as these conditions are pushing the limit for such a crude device. The LMC is about 7 degrees long and 3 degrees wide and just chock full of visual goodies, including the Tarantula nebula. For comparison, the full moon would be about this big at this scale. m |
I slept till early afternoon and started up again Thursday night around 9:00. I sought out a few galaxies in Sculptor and Fornax and poked around the SMC and the LMC. In particular, I looked at the Tarantula nebula (30 Dorado) in the LMC. This nebula is wonderfully complex and very bright. It just fit into the 16 arc minute field of my 7 mm Pentax eyepiece and, if you look hard enough, you might just see the tarantula. There are tentacles or legs and two bright stars for the eyes. In my notes I wrote "Bright! Ugly, mean, evil!" The size, shape and uneven brightness conjured up all sorts of visions. A great object. I think it is best viewed without a filter.
The sleepies hit me about midnight but a nap from 12:00 to 2:00 allowed me my first views of the late-rising Milky Way objects. The Carina nebula is an extremely large, bright, naked-eye object in the Milky Way that was just above the rising southern cross. The nebula itself is an object one can wander around in as it spans more than a degree of sky and has many bright knots and dust lanes. One object in particular stands out which is the star eta Carina and its associated nebula. On my first trip to Australia I could not find eta Carina, but this night with a Digital Sky Survey photo in hand, it was easy. Eta was simply the brightest object in the region. However, I still could not detect the tiny nebulosity that surrounds the star and is shown so beautifully in the famous Hubble picture (sometimes seen on the bridge of the Starship Voyager). I noted that the sky seemed to be a bit hazy and the smell of smoke from nearby bush fires was in the air. So I hoped that darker, drier skies of the outback might reveal this object.
Warrumbungles and Coonabarabran
| The next morning I was off to the Warrumbungle mountains, three hours further northwest. This mountain range is home to Siding Spring where the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO), the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and the UK Schmidt Telescope, among others are based. Many of the most famous astronomical photographs have been taken with these telescopes over the past three decades by David Malin who retired last year. Just down the mountain from the observatories is the Warrumbungles Mountain Motel and Cabins (http://www.warrumbungle.com/) which I had contacted in hopes of spending a few nights there. Their website indicates that they are astronomy friendly and I had a great stroke of luck when I was informed that their annual star party (Astrofest 2002) would be occurring the Friday through Sunday (Nov. 1-3) that I wanted to stay there. The Master of Ceremonies of Astrofest 2002 was to be Steven Lee, discoverer of Comet Lee (C/1999 H1) who had made his discovery at a star party near Mudgee in 1999. Steve is shown in this picture with the scope he used when he serendipitously discovered his comet. See his website describing how he did it at http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/sl/discovery.html. |  |
 |
In Warrumbungle National Park, where the AAO is located and where Astrofest 2002 took place, the mountain range with its 3000 ft peaks was low and rolling, like the Appalachians. It had a volcanic origin leading to a large number of spectacular mounds that were the insides of ancient cinder cones but now rise vertically 500 to 1000 feet above the surrounding countryside. Several, like Timor Rock (shown here) and The Breadknife are famous in New South Wales. The landscape of the Warrumbungles was very scenic and one of my wishes would be to spend more time there. The nearest town was Coonabarabran (pop. 2960), which rightly billed itself as "The Astronomy Capital of Australia". Their month-long Festival of the Stars was ending that weekend with a public lecture by a professional astronomer, Dr. Brad Carter, entitled "Discovering New Worlds". The annual lecture was named after the famous astronomer and former head of the AAO, Bart Bok. |
Warrumbungles Mountain Motel and Cabins, sponsor of Astrofest 2002, is 9 km out of Coonabarabran on the road to the AAO. The cabins are owned and operated by Mark and Alison Boyd and consist of about 20 rooms laid out ranch style. A large common dining room was used not only to serve up great meals cooked by Mark and Alison, but also as a lecture hall where speakers such as Steven Lee, Dr. Scott Croom, who both work at the AAO, and Andrew Murrell, a dedicated amateur with a fine 20-inch dobsonian, gave interesting talks on Saturday. Much of the 25 acres of this facility is a cleared field allowing lots of telescopes as well as campers to set up. Overall, there were about 30 attendees with about 20 telescopes set up on Friday night. This smallish group got to know one another at the meals which were included with the star party.
 |
Friday night was dark and clear and I found several galaxies, both bright and dim. NGC 55 which is a dim blur from northern Virginia due to its southerly (-39 degrees) declination, was at the zenith and very bright. It was clearly assymetrical and the west side was much more prominent than the east. It was very large even at 52x. Andrew Murrell indicated that NCG 1566 in Dorado was one of his favorites. It was a fine, face-on spiral which, with averted vision, I could imagine seeing the spiral arms. Using Andrew's 20-inch I confirmed the spiral arms. He showed me NGC 1365, the best example of a barred spiral in the sky. In his 20-inch the arms stood out easily. In my 12.5-inch I could see them with averted vision. Later in my trip, from the outback, the arms became easy in my scope. This drawing reflects the sum of all my observations of this great galaxy. West is indicated by the arrow. In the 14 mm eyepiece it spanned about a third of the 33 arc minute field of view. Looking at it in the eyepiece it was easy to visualize the famous photograph of it taken by David Malin (e.g. see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970519.html). |
Saturday, as noted above, was filled with interesting talks by Steve Lee (How to get the most out of your equipment), Dr. Scott Croom (Quasars) who concluded that evolution of quasars cannot account for the observations that they were much more numerous in the early universe, and Andrew Murrell who discussed the local group of galaxies which he extended past the LMC, SMC, Andromeda (M31), M32, NGC 205, and local dwarfs to include the Fornax cluster which is only 4 to 8 million light years away. That evening grew quite cloudy and was spent drinking beers and discussing why amateur astronomers continue to get older as a group (i.e. Where are all the young people?). My take on this question is that there are plenty of younger folks interested, but it is often only when you get more comfortable with job, kids, money, etc. that you have the time and resources to spend on this pass time.
Sunday dawned bright and blue and I rose early, killed a big (>1") hairy spider in my room - reminding me why the screen door should be kept tightly closed - and went out to do some photography in the Warrumbungles and explore Coonabarabran. There were lots of parrots in evidence. One species (King?) had males which were green and bright orange and females which were lighter green. Another species was grey/white on top with a red/pink undercarriage. Flocks of white cockatoos with large crowns on their heads were also in evidence. Later in the morning Steve Lee took us all up to the AAO for a guided tour. On the way up I drove by a mom emu with three chicks near the road.
 |
Steve marched us around the mountain showing off the numerous domes housing the various telescopes, noting that a number of projects were ongoing including one to rapidly capture images from gamma ray bursters. For this purpose they have built a small dome with a hydraulically-assisted roof that can pop open within seconds of a report of a gamma ray burst. A 16-inch automated telescope (which hadn't arrived yet) would then image that region of the sky. |
 |
He took us into the large (5-6 story tall) dome housing the 3.9 meter Anglo-Australian Telescope and talked about the most recent project called the 2dF. This ambitious study mapped a huge swath of sky using fiber optic technology that allows the spectra of 400 objects within a 2 degree field (2dF) to be obtained simultaneously. This permits calculation of the redshift of each object and, ultimately, a 3-dimensional map of the southern sky. I was grateful to Steve for his very informative tour and lecture. For more information regarding the 2dF see Sky and Telescope, February 2003, p. 32. |
Sunday night began clear, but by the time I set up my scope and found the first object (NGC 6752), a fine globular cluster in Pavo which had a smallish bright core and several long, spidery arms of stars reaching out, clouds were covering much of the sky. Soon the whole sky was gone so I gave up about 11:00 and went to bed.
Come-by-Chance, Bunglegully, and the
Outback
Monday morning I was off to the outback. Using the web,
I had discovered a farmstay called
Bunglegully
which was near a town called Come-by-Chance. It was about 2 hours northwest
of Coonabarabran, so my general direction of northwest continued. The mountains
soon gave way to flat, open country with a gum tree here or there. The sky
got bluer and my hopes of clear, dark nights got higher. The last 50 km was
on a dirt road that ran straight as a string across quite desolate country.
When I got to Come-by-Chance I was prepared for the tiny group of about 10
weathered buildings set amongst the dry scrub that constituted the town.
There was one 'store' that was a single room and sold things from cold beer
to laundry detergent. The turn-off for Bunglegully was 1 km up the road and
as I approached the farm house I was amazed and delighted.
 |
It was Shangri-La in the desert! A lovely, well-designed home with green grass, a swimming pool, and beautiful, large Jacaranda trees in purple bloom. A long concrete airstrip ran in front of the house and under a nearby hanger sat a twin-engine Piper Comanche. The owners, Fiona and Bill Buchanan, turned out to be wonderful people who were both interesting and worldly. They had lived on Bunglegully, named after the creek that flows through the property, for many years and appeared to have done well with its 20,000 acres. Half of the land was typically planted with crops and the other half was used to run cattle. This year, however, the ongoing Australian draught had forced them not to plant crops. |
As Bill worked until sundown, I took a nap till 9:00,
arose, and had a great meal with them. It turned out that Fiona is a fine
cook and I was treated to excellent dinners each of the four nights I stayed
at Bunglegully. It was fun to get to know Bill and Fiona and discover that
their 3 children are off to college or working prior to starting college
and that, in addition to Bill being a pilot, they were sailors and, until
quite recently, owned a yacht up in Queensland. Again, A$100 per night got
me a comfortable bed, breakfast, good dinners, and interesting
acquaintances.
 |
After dinner I set my telescope up at the far end
of the runway. There was a fairly serious wind that died off around 1:00
and from then on the sky was glorious. That evening, followed by three other
perfectly dark, clear, calm nights were the astronomical highlights of my
trip. About an hour before dawn, I had another look through the Carina nebula,
this time with my 7 mm eyepiece at 236x. To my delight, when I came to eta
Carina, the homunculus surrounding the star was not only quite visible,
but in color! The star itself was yellow and embedded in lots of grey nebulosity
that was streaked by dust lanes coursing throughout the field. Surrounding
the star was a tiny oval-shaped, orange-yellow nebula. I could imagine the
close-up picture taken by the Hubble of this object
(http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/1996/23/)
and realized I was seeing it in miniature. That was a "Make my day!" sort
of moment. |
Over the next three nights I ran through several observing
lists that I had prepared. One in particular involved a list of edge-on galaxies
that I enjoy. NGC 7410, 134, 1332, 1448, 1511, 1515, 1532, 1596, 1792, 1808,
2310, 2397, as well as IC5271, and 5264 comprised an interesting subset of
such objects. Before I had left home I put the Saguaro data base
(http://www.saguaroastro.org/content/downloads.htm)
into Excel, isolated galaxies with southern declinations and sorted them
by the ratio of size max to size min (aspect ratio) and found
that lots of these targets popped up. Thresholding to at least an aspect
ratio of 2.5 and re-sorting these according to magnitude and/or surface
brightness yielded approximately two hundred potential targets with magnitudes
less than 12.5 and aspect ratios greater than 2.5. Not counting the showpiece
edge-ons like NGC 55 and NGC 253, some of my favorites included NGC 134,
1532, and 1448 all fairly bright, spindle-shaped galaxies.
 |
One night I devoted several hours to photography. I had constructed an extremely simple barn door mount for my camera from plans in Phil Harrington's book Starware. A description of the mount is at the end. By attaching my old 70s Pentax Spotmatic camera with a wide-angle (28 mm) lens I was able to take this shot of the LMC (on the left) and the SMC (on the right) with Achernar (the head of the river of Eridanus) above the SMC, near the top of the photo (The real photo is better than this scanned, cropped image; 5 minutes, 28 mm lens, f/2.8, ASA 800 Fuji Superiora). For comparison, the full moon would be about this big: m This is also about the size of the field of view in my 14 mm eyepiece at 118x. I experimented with exposure time and tried my 50 mm lens (see above) and a 100 mm lens. Each increase in focal length caused a noticeable degradation of image sharpness and the stars in the shots with a 100 mm lens are very blobby and distorted. Nevertheless, I came home with a shot of these two galaxies and another reasonable one of the rising Milky Way with the Southern Cross and the Carina Nebula visible. |
My last night at Bunglegully I tried to systematically go through the LMC. This was hopeless. There is so much bright stuff in this galaxy, I could not keep track of where I was. To aid me in this task, I brought the Herald-Bobroff Astroatlas which is a marvelously detailed atlas having, in particular, a set of very high resolution maps of the LMC at 2 inches per degree and stars plotted to the 13th magnitude. Even so, I could not keep track of where I was in this congested field. I think the maps are fine, but to do this in one evening is unrealistic. In spite of this frustration, I found it quite exhilarating to see so many nebulae and clusters passing my eyepiece in so short a tme. I guess this just means I have to make a return trip in the future.
Back to Mudgee and Protea Farm
On Friday morning, I said good-bye to Fiona and Bill
and began retracing my steps southeastward. I stopped in Coonabarabran at
the Internet Cafe to send my wife and son an email that all was well. While
having a cup of coffee I noticed that the walls of this coffee shop were
plastered with images of M20, NGC 253, M42, etc., another reminder that this
little town really is the Astronomy Capital of Australia. I pushed on to
Protea Farm where I had secured three more nights before my flight left on
Monday afternoon. That evening was very hazy and by 9:00 the sky was almost
opaque. So I went to bed early figuring I would get up early and visit the
two National Parks that are within an hours drive of Mudgee. Saturday morning
dawned with a bright blue sky and I wondered what time it had cleared. Had
I gone to sleep too early? Well, at any rate, I went to the tourist information
center in Mudgee to get maps to the National Parks only to be told that all
Parks had just been closed that morning due to extreme fire hazard. So I
poked around Mudgee till just after noon when absolutely every store in town
closed (till Monday I was told). Small town Australia, I guess.
 |
That evening it also got hazy and the sky was again nearly opaque by 9:00. So I went to bed early again, but arose at midnight to check the sky. Perfectly clear! The moon was just setting in the west as I got to the eyepiece. I checked out several great nebulosities with embedded clusters. NGC 3576 in Carina was in a dense portion of the Milky Way and presented a fan-shaped nebula that had a vertical dust lane dividing it. Lots of stars in and around it. NGC 1763 was in the LMC and was a nebulosity in four distinct parts that all fit into my 33 arc minute field and each having associated groups of stars. Both of these objects were excellent with no filter. |
 |
 |
In the rising Milky Way near Carina , shown at left,
there were several naked-eye open clusters that, when viewed at low power,
were truly stunning. My favorite was NCG 3532 which was 1.25 degrees wide
with about 200 evenly spaced stars. This is perhaps my choice for best open
cluster ever. However, IC2602, IC2391, and NGC 2516 were each naked-eye and
spectacular in the eyepiece as well. This is the eastern sky about 1 hour
prior to the beginning of astronomical twilight. Crux is on its
side.
This is a 5 minute exposure at f/2.8 on a 28 mm lens with ASA800 Fuji Superiora film. Remarkably, 5 minutes seems overexposed. On my next trip ;-) I would stop down a bit to decrease the level of exposure and to decrease the vignetting that can be seen here which is likely due to using the lens wide open. |
|
Home Again
As the sky lightened that Sunday morning Venus was just
poking up above the eastern hills and I noted in my log "A great night!"
And, it was to be my last clear night as Sunday night began cloudy again
but failed to clear up till it was time for me to begin packing up around
3:00 am. That morning, during my four hour drive back through the beautiful
Blue Mountains to Sydney, I reflected on my trip and realized I had been
lucky to get 8 out of 12 nights clear. This provided me the rare opportunity
to view hundreds of really fabulous objects not seen from the States. I met
a number of interesting people, saw new birds and animals, as well as new
territory, and was able to capture many of these memories on film. Would
I recommend such a trip to other amateur astronomers? Absolutely - every
part. I am already saving up frequent flyer miles and estimating the date
when I will reach the magic number of 60,000 again.
Construction of a Barn Door Mount for Photography
Click FOR A DESCRIPTION OF HOW TO MAKE A BARN DOOR MOUNT l
Return to the 12 INCH MENU OR HOME
