Star Safari

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Star Safari

Stargazing in Wairarapa. Visit our Carterton Observatory, Star Safari for dark skies & big telescopes. Hot chocolate served with every ticket bought
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We are Hari and Sam, an astrobiologist and an astrophysicist and look forward to showing you our night sky.

20/07/2025

A bit of rain over there!

18/07/2025

A Sundog greeted us on our way back to Carterton today

17/07/2025

We’ve been testing our new telescope, the Muon Detector, heaps over the last week and have developed this display for it. This was run over last night showing an average rate of just over 3 events per second. Yay for Muons!

11/07/2025

This is a muon detector, our latest sensor at Star Safari Observatory. Muons are subatomic particles that are a decay product of cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere.

10/07/2025

This is the Moon last night at Star Safari taken through one of our 405mm reflectors with my phone. It’s almost full at 99.5% illumination.

03/07/2025

It’s Aphelion Day tomorrow! That’s when we are further from the Sun than at any other time during the year. The exact time is at 7:54am tomorrow morning (4 July) and we will be 152,087,738km from the Sun. That’s 4,984,052km further away than we were on 5 January, when we were at perihelion. That info is from timeanddate.com and the picture below is of the Sun a few days ago using Slooh’s solar telescope in the Canary Islands.

01/07/2025

Fantastic to host Mount Maunganui College at Star Safari Observatory. We had an awesome night with an amazing sky and a great opportunity to share Wairarapa’s stunning sky with New Zealand’s future scientists, engineers and astronauts!

23/06/2025

Stunning first images from the much awaited Vera Rubin telescope!

18/06/2025

The next instalment of pictures of cool objects we look observe at Star Safari is the stunning globular cluster 47 Tucanae (NGC104). Visually it is quite close to the Small Magellanic Cloud and visible to the unaided eye, looks like a slightly fuzzy star. In the telescope it’s spectacular, I can spend ages looking at this object, it’s so beautiful.

The image of the cluster was taken last night by me with Slooh’s remotely operated telescope based in Australia. Total exposure of 22 minutes. The diagram is a Colour Magnitude Diagram using Gaia DR3 data. With a bit of rough isochrone fitting the cluster looks about 12.5 billion years old, which agrees with the literature. Based on the sample of stars plotted, the distance is close to 5000 parsecs (16000 light years).

17/06/2025

This is the Open Cluster NGC3532, also known as the Wishing Well, Pin Cushion, or Black Arrow. This is a bright cluster quite close to Eta Carina Nebula. The image was taken by me using the remote Slooh Australia telescope last night, it’s 22.5 minutes total exposure. This is a great object to see in a telescope, it fills the eyepiece with beautiful bright stars. This cluster is one of our favourites.

The diagram next to it is called a Colour Magnitude Diagram and it helps us work out various properties of star clusters. This diagram was made using the Data Release 3 data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia Mission. From the diagram, and a bit of analysis, it’s shows the cluster is about 400 million years old and about 1500 light years away.

16/06/2025

This Open Cluster is one of our favourites, NGC3293 or Gem Cluster. This cluster is quite close to Eta Carina Nebula and looks stunning in a telescope. The image has a total exposure of 22.5 minutes and was taken with Slooh’s Half Metre Australia remote telescope by me last night (they’ve had good weather lately).

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+6421663808

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https://www.star-safari.nz/

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