Lake Tekapo

Next morning we were off to Lake Tekapo, en route to Mount Cook. Along the way we had great views of the mad blue lake itself, the surrounding hills and distant mountains, with a great vantage point at one point of the mighty Mount Cook itself. The lake is fed from glacial streams, which give the water this strange, but beautiful pale blue colour. The paleness comes from suspended rock particles (called rock flour), eroded by the glaciers as they make their way down from the nearby high mountains. It became a common feature of many of the lakes and rivers we saw throughout New Zealand.

After a stroll around the very picturesque Church of the Good Shepherd, we spent the first day just relaxed in the tiny Lake Tekapo village (only one lake-front street really), and booked a night tour of the neighbouring observatory for that night. Accordingly to our Lonely Planet the observatory wasn't running tours as this time of year, and so I was initially quite disappointed. But then Sarah just happened to pass by their booking office and noticed that they looked open for business, which they were. Naturally I booked our tour right there and then, as this was the realisation of yet another dream for me - the chance to view the heavens through a seriously big telescope.

The tour was totally brilliant, even better than I could have expected. The night we choose to arrive just happened to be the clearest night they'd had in many days. We drove up the hill to the observatory in total darkness, as even the headlights of our mini-bus would have been enough to disturb the working telescopes. Our guide was a very enthusiastic and passionate amateur astronomer (Eva from Finland), and she kitted us out in big puffy jackets and hot coffee to ward off the seriously chilly hilltop evening.

Then we had a quick orientation of the night sky's constellations with a very handy and effective laser pen. By far the most impressive were simply the Magellanic Clouds. Although I'd been to the Southern Hemisphere twice before, and seen wonderfully clear night skies, I had never realised that the two hazy, cloudy-looking things alongside the Milky Way were actually our two nearest galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. To think that you can simply look into the night sky on a clear day and with the naked eye see two huge galaxies (even if they do appear to be just hazy clouds), is just awesome to me.

Then Eva brought all of us into the 40cm telescope enclosure. Apparently that's about the state-of-the-art size for amateur telescopes these days, but still costing close to a million US dollars.
Eva then controlled the telescope and we each took turns in viewing some of the big celebrities of the Southern Hemisphere's heavens.

First up, and easily the most impressive, was Saturn, with it's rings being as clear as day (so to speak!). It really was an amazing experience to be actually looking directly at Saturn and seeing the disk of it's rings so clearly - obviously I had to go around the group and have a second look, as did most people I think.

Next up was the Tarantula nebula that looks incredible too (although you don't see the colours seen in the photos - they are added artificially to represent different, non-visual wavelengths). The third object was a globular cluster. With just binoculars or a weak telescope it looks like a dim, faint star, but through our 40cm monster it appeared as a mass of clustered individual pinpoint stars - again a beautiful and wondrous sight.

After all that we were brought outside again to view the night sky and had some more laser pointing and informative discussion. All in all, I thought it was a fantastic tour, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone, so long as you get a clear night of course.

The next day we did a big 7 hour hike under clear blue skies, starting off by hiking back up the hill to the observatory to soak up the daytime views, and have a spot of light lunch. Once here we realised that the observatory also ran shorter, cheaper day tours of they're latest working telescope, the US$7M MOA. This telescope does it's serious work during the night, so is only viewable during the day. Eva was our guide again, and she took us in to see the observatory's latest and greatest toy, and a mightest impressive piece of kit it is too. Basically this telescope is searching for planets around distant stars, and has already found a few. It was also pretty cool to get to see the computer room where the astronomers work, with it's banks of number-crunching super processors.

After the tour and a leisurely lunch looking down onto the lake, town and surrounding countryside, we set off again. We bushwhacked our way down the hill and walked along the edge of Lake Alexandria and swung back to the town via some more adventurous off-trail experimentation. The weather had been perfect, and it was a long day of hiking, so we stopped off on the way back for a well deserved soak at the hot pools. These aren't natural thermal springs or anything, just outdoor heated pools, but the effect was much the same and was utterly relaxing, and it was a great spot to see the last of the daylight fade. We spent so long at the pools, in fact, that we had a spot of trouble getting dinner that night in the town.

The next morning it was off to the famous Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest, and most culturally revered mountain.