It was funny to read this morning, that it was so rainy in Coogee on Saturday evening that cars were floating on the roads, while we were so lucky to see the stars on a completely clear sky in Parramatta for several hours…

Last week one of the friends/colleagues of Attila invited us to go to this program in the west of Sydney. Okay, why not? That’s a great idea, especially, because we are celebrating the Year of Astronomy this year.

This event was organised by Parramatta Park Trust: some dozen of professional and amateur astronomers gathered in a huge park with impressive telescopes, one better than the other, to show the stars and the sky for the broad public. There were a lot of people living nearby and even more school children, so the atmosphere was really good.

My husband and his two colleagues represented the CSIRO and its department for astronomy called ATNF (Australian Telescope National Facility) with two telescopes. This was the very moment, when being a so called `astronomer wife` was a very good thing)) I could stand there with these guys and I could touch the telescopes and see whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, at least before the people arrived. This was a really big experience to see the Moon with the bigger telescope for a quarter of an hour or more, and see all those little and big craters, as I had never seen it before. It was so amazing!!!

I took some photos with our camera, but if you want to see better photos, maybe this blog will contain some. It is written by one of our friends, and he is blogging about astronomy in Spanish. But since he has put the Google translation program on the blog, you can follow his astronomy-stories in English as well. Sometimes it is funny because of the translation made by computer, but the blog itself is really interesting.

Back to the evening…I do not know why, but it was organised in the period of half moon, so you can imagine there was a lot of light, but no worries, we could see some real beauties…. For example Saturn with its ring and moons. I was told it would be more attractive in a few years, when it is tilted a bit, so you would see the ring even better.

Then there was the wonderful Orion Nebula with its gas cloud, this was very popular on Saturday night. We also could see the so called Stellar Jewel Box in the Milky Way, except for me. It was a small accident… I was freezing so much after two or three hours in the middle of the park at 10 p.m.,  that I sat into the car for a couple of minutes. Then I just missed it, because the sky became cloudy… But to tell you about the Jewel Box: it is a cluster of stars, nearby and shining in different colours.

Further more, there was a really interesting thing about the `double star`, as we used this term often to invite people to our telescopes. Would you like to see double stars? Double stars? Yes, they like two shining diamonds. WOWW!!Do you see them? Yessss,amazing!!!!What`s the name? Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri….

I did not know, that one of the Pointers - the two stars under the Southern Cross-, actually consists of three stars. The lowest bright star has three stars in reality, but you can see only two of them with these telescopes (and only one with your eyes).

And then it was interesting to see so many telescopes in one big park. There were also some bigger ones than ours. One particular one was sooo big, that you had to use a 3 m high ladder to reach it. The owner told us that the lens inside was 25 inch wide… Yes, this is the size of an average bicycle wheel…This telescope was actually very popular among the public: you had to wait in a queue))) It was pointed toward Saturn, and we also wanted to look have a look. But to tell you the truth, it was not much better than our telescope, though it was really amazing.

One more thing…I was amazed how clever the little children were. They asked several intelligent questions, so they made the atmosphere even better)))

Summarizing, I was really happy to be there. I can recommend you to visit this kind of event if you have one in your neighborhood. Everyone was so amazed by the stars!! Plus the sky in the southern hemisphere is much clearer than in the north. Attila will write a post about this later, if I ask him kindly)))

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