Cool movie of New Zealand's night sky

[Kiwi]

... by new photographer Mark Gee (four years' experience), just to get you northern hemisphere astronomers jealous of our views of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, Omega Centauri, etc. And also to give posters a few minutes of something more intriguing and productive than attempting to get some sense out of AwE130.

Video of 3 minutes 24 seconds

rom=outro-embed
Mostly taken in or close to Wellington.
Click on the arrow at bottom left to run and pause.

For anyone who is interested in Gee's equipment and techniques, click on Read More... at the bottom of the short bio, and at the bottom left are links where he shows more of his work with more links and talks about how some of it was done.

I used to be a professional photographer in Wellington who was interested in astronomy and swapped notes with people at the Carter Observatory, but my name isn't Mark Gee. Unfortunately. :-(

[Zakalwe]

Lovely!

I'd kill for those dark skies!

[Luke Pemberton]

... by new photographer Mark Gee

Stunning. Thanks for sharing.

[Echnaton]

Really beautiful.  Thanks

[Kiwi]

I'd kill for those dark skies!

They don't look like that to the naked eye -- from the little I read about Gee's work, each individual shot might have had 30 seconds of exposure.

I have nearly-dark sky from the back of my house, and only have to move southwest for about 450 metres to get darker still. On a clear night at home it takes 12 to 20 seconds to dark-adapt enough to see Omega Centauri after leaving a brightly-lit room, but I prefer to lie in a dark room for about 10 minutes then go outside and instantly see the sky in all its glory.

[Kiwi]

Here's another nice 3:45 video of Gee's, showing the moon rising above Wellington's Mount Victoria on 28 January 2013:

For anyone who wants to browse at the location in Google Earth, the centre of the lookout, where the people are, is at 41º 17' 45.80” S, 174º 47' 39.52” E, elevation 182 metres.

That lookout is the one I drove up to early on the morning of 9 March 1986 to view Halley's Comet for the first time.  Just as I arrived in the dark I heard a voice that sounded like it originated from somewhere in the southern United States: "D'yall mean that ah travelled 12 thousand marles to see a smurdge!"

The guy had probably been shown pictures of Halley's Comet, on its previous visit to Earth when it looked much more spectacular, and told it would look that good if he travelled to New Zealand. Because of the crowd there I never got to talk to him and recommend he grab a car and travel a little further out of the city for an hour or so, to get away from all the light pollution. A few miles more would have made a big difference to what he saw, but I guessed that his travel agent didn't mention that.

A few weeks later I travelled to where I live now and got excellent views of the comet with the darker sky, but Halley's Comet was fairly ordinary as far as naked-eye comets go.