The resort at &Beyond, Sossulvlei
In a stroke of random good luck it appears that I’m going to have my first astronomical southern-hemisphere experience later this year, with both total immersion and fine style! Here’s how it happened…
From time to time I’m hired to give public stargazes at some of the local gated communities both here in the Hilton Head / Bluffton area and also in Savannah. Late last year I was doing one of these at a community called “The Ford” which was Henry Ford’s estate back in the early 20th century and as I understand it, they even manufactured the Model A there for a time even using the local spanish moss as seat cushion padding!.
A couple of the attendees there said to me, “You’re real good with this public stargaze thing, you should check out this resort place we know in Namibia Africa. It’s in the middle of the desert and they advertise their great night sky as an attraction and even have a nice telescope but they need to have people come in to run it since obviously nobody on the resort staff is an astronomer!”
Now I didn’t even know where Namibia even was much less have any desire to go to Africa at all, but I had been looking for an opportunity to see the southern sky. In 2020 I was all set to go the the Oz Sky Star Party in Australia which is an annual week-long event with big telescopes under pristine dark southern skies, fairly deep into Australia in the Southeast area of the continent; more or less inland from Sydney. This trip was booked for March 2020 and we all know what happened about then; and Australia shut the door to all incoming international travel three days before I was to leave! Heartbreaking (and the promoter kept my money too!) Since then I’ve been wondering what kind of astronomical southern sky opportunities there were other than packing up a bunch of gear and booking an AirBnB in the Atacama Desert in Chile!
So I got the name of the resort from them and reached out saying I was interested and after a couple back-and-forths of email I was slated to do 9 weeks there from late July through the end of September!
The resort is run by a company called &Beyond which is an upscale management company that has around a dozen places around Africa, but this is the only one in Namibia. It’s in a location in the middle of the desert and carries the name Sossulvlei although there’s so little out there you would have a hard time even recognizing it as a “town”.
It’s a very upscale, small resort; when it is “jammed to capacity” there are 25 guests on property! My job is to use their fine telescope to show guests fun things in the sky and tell them about the nature of what they’re looking at the same way I do at my stargazes here in Hilton Head.
There is a limit to how much time people are willing to spend at a scope and since it’s winter in the southern hemisphere in August it’ll be getting dark pretty early and after the “crowd” thins out I’ll have the rest of the night to do astrophotography!
So I’m bringing two different photographic rigs with me. They are small enough to travel easily but also good enough quality to get great images. One of them them is a black & white camera with a filter wheel which will get some good wide-field shots of the great, large targets you have in the southern sky. The other rig is a very compact super wide-field rig that can see 7.5 degrees of sky (that’s about 15 full moons shoulder-to-shoulder) and I’m hoping to shoot some wide-field multi-panel mosaics of the Milky Way and the Large and Small Magellenic Clouds down there which will be a new thing for me.
This is going to be an astronomer’s “trip of a lifetime” so check back here for updates and pics as I get them done.
Bill the Sky Guy
July 1st, 2024