G’day! I write this from far, far away in the hot centre of Australia at the sacred Aboriginal site of Uluru. Low humidity and lack of light, make Uluru one of the best stargazing spots in the world. The night sky south of the equator is a different view of the universe than we have in Cornwall. For instance, the constellation Orion that we see in our wintertime can also be seen down under in Australia’s winter time (our summer) but upside down. Djulpan is the name given to the constellation of Orion by the Yolngu people and they interpret the three stars in its belt as three brothers fishing in a canoe banished to the stars for eating the sacred kingfish.
However, some wonders in the sky can be seen only south of the equator and with modern phone camera magic they can be imaged. I pointed my phone upward and with its night vision setting caught two hovering fuzzy blobs. These are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) which are conspicuous naked eye objects in the Southern Hemisphere. They are not actually clouds but Dwarf Galaxies full of millions of stars and roughly 75,000 light years (ly) apart. Until the discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy in 1994, they were the closest known galaxies to our own Galaxy. The LMC lies about 160,000 ly away, while the SMC is around 200,000 ly distant. The LMC is about 32,200 ly across with the SMC at a smaller 18,900 ly across. These actually orbit our galaxy so are known as satellite galaxies and are dwarfed by our Milky Way with its diameter at about 87,400 ly, hence “Dwarf Galaxies”.
The most well known constellation in the southern sky is the Southern Cross which is prominent on the flags of Australia and New Zealand but also appears on the Brazilian, Samoan and Papua New Guinea flags. The five stars are called Acrux, Gacrux, Ginan, Imai and Mimosa and make up a distinctive cross or kite shape. Just next to the left hand star Mimosa is one of the most beautiful open star clusters in the Southern Hemisphere called The Jewel Box which you can see without scopes but binoculars or telescope will bring its colourful stars into focus. Just below the Jewel Box and next to the Cross is a strange dark empty patch. This is The Coalsack Nebula, a dark, cloudy patch of dust and gas that obscures an entire swath of the Milky Way’s stars that lies behind it.This dust absorbs and scatters the light of the background stars and creates a region of the sky that looks starless, but it’s really a place where new stars are forming.
So, new exciting wonders to view… and as a bonus while I’m here, there are very active solar storms creating possible Aurora Australis displays and a brightening comet next to Venus as the Sun sets over the massive red sandstone outcrop at Uluru.
Glynn Bennallick