As a child, i once dreamt of working with telescopes and the stars. so the nearest thing to that is the recent dark sky project stargazing summit experience at Mount John we went to last May. The dark sky project is located in the middle of Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve.
We were a pretty lucky bunch. The visibility was 100% (no clouds or anything) and while the temperature at the summit was around zero degrees, wind chill was not harsh as the previous night and jackets suited for really cold weather were available for use during the tour. We boarded a bus towards the summit and the driver was pretty entertaining regaling us with stories and songs.
Since the observatory had some ongoing studies and observations, we were asked to minimize using any white light. This meant lowest light on the phones or best to turn off the phone. Which kind of explains why we didn’t have any pictures of the entire experience. It was all stored in our memory bank 🙂
The area was so dark that the milky way was visible with the naked eye. it was fun to realize that the stars and the night sky looked different compared to the philippine night sky. Orion for one was positioned differently. The guide pointed us to different stars, 6 of which we got to peak into using the research-grade telescopes. there was a star that looked like a bucket of jewels for example. The guide pointed out the Magellanic clouds as well and shared a lot of info about the night sky including the Starlink satellites. Best of all, during the entire experience, there were at least 3 shootings stars that joined the show.
The dark sky project summit experience is something i would recommend especially when you are round Lake Tekapo. It was just one for the books and one of the most memorable experiences i have had in my life. this has got me to thinking about looking for other dark sky project locations in future travels.
Mount John University Observatory, Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve : long, lat ( 43.9852° S, 170.4641° E)
my take 