Namibia: Post No. 5: First Day In…

First Light

I woke up surprisingly early and went about trying to figure out the electricity in my room. They are 220v 50Hz here and they had told me the style of plugs that they use, but there are two similar styles of plugs that are of slightly different dimensions and I of course had bought the wrong size; the prongs were just too close together to fit in the sockets here. So I looked around and found a power strip that had some alternate choices on it and was able to find one outlet that I could use to charge my phone, the watch or run a computer.

The last time I ate was 15 hours ago so I ventured in for breakfast, which was absolutely amazing as is all the food here I've come to discover. I don't eat them, but you could have a omelette made or pancakes, all kinds of fruit, cereal, and every kind of coffee you could imagine–it truly is amazing what they have together here!

So today was the day to get all of the Astro equipment from my room to the observatory. I ended up making about eight trips (my exercise ring on my watch closed three times that day) and eventually had all the pieces for my main photographic rig up there, and started putting it together and getting it configured hoping that after the guests left at stargaze I'd be able to get everything up and running and get polar aligned.

Around 5 o'clock I went down to the lodge and had a beer on the terrace staring at this amazing desert landscape which, if you took away the little vegetation that you see you could convince yourself you're on Mars! They only get about 3/4 of an inch of rain here in a year!

Venus was just sitting over the mountains in the West, setting just after the Sun and once it had gone down a little bit, you could see the planet Mercury, blazing away right next to the bright star Regulus in Leo. Sunset here is about 6 PM because of the mountains in that direction with stargazes starting between 730 and 8 PM. Twilight seems to hang on for a long time here.

Dinner is served from 7 to 10 PM and was amazing; every dish here is prepared by an excellent chef and staff, and it arrives so well presented and artful you almost hate to eat it–but you do! I had Tomahawk beef with roasted potatoes and an excellent fishy salad kind of thing as an appetizer–I don't even like fish and this was terrific! I've decided that I'm going to discard all of my food preference prejudices and just eat whatever it is they serve because it's going to be amazing!

The Resort

As I was enjoying my cocktail on the terrace, Norman Walker, the general manager here came and sat, and we had a nice chat and I asked him questions about how they make this place work in such a remote location. It is really an amazing operation; maximum capacity here is 25 guests, but because of the remoteness of the resort and the quality of service they intend to provide, they have 65 staff here.

I asked him how much it cost to stay here and he told me 70,000 in the local currency which is about 18 per dollar so if you do the math it's $3888 to stay here for one night! This is the cool time of year and is considered ‘high season’. During the hot months, which are December, January, and February, because of the fairly brutal temperatures they cut the rate in half so it's only $1944 a night, such a bargain! Nevertheless, he says that they operate continuously with 85% capacity year-round and the resort has been here 35 years so it’s well-established. It really is amazing to see the service industry operating at this high level, in such a remote, beautiful location.

As part of my ‘gig’, I’m supposed to circulate in the dining room at meal time introduce myself to the guests as the resident Astronomer and invite them to the stargaze each night. I was having a great time talking to people, but I needed to get up to the telescope because it was dark now and I needed to get the scope aligned to the sky so we could find things automatically.

The staff lines up guest parties in specific places because they know you’re there. I always get the two seater and ask them to find me a date!

Scoping It Out

After a couple of tries, I was able to get the right date and time entered into the hand controller and got the telescope to start its automatic alignment process, but failed to notice that the cable that supplies power to the top of the telescope had gotten wound around the mount a couple of times and when it tried to search for it targets it snapped the connector that provided power to the telescope! I was able to abort but not before damage have been done, but amazingly the cable was still working so I went with it.

I manually turned the telescope around two complete revolutions until the power cord was not wrapped around and then tried the alignment again and it worked! We will have to see about some kind of repair for this in the days ahead, but I was interested in getting through the first night without breaking their equipment!

It took a while, but people started filtering in up from dinner. I always like to start with something impressive so I chose the finest star cluster in the sky Omega Centauri, which you can just barely see from the United States, but here it's nearly straight up overhead and is unbelievable in the 11-inch diameter telescope they have here. The one thing that's different about doing a stargaze here as opposed to my regular shows in South Carolina is that here, people just come up whenever they want whereas my shows in Hilton head start at a specific time and people all show up more or less together so I realize I'm going to start to have to keeping track of who’s seen what so when new people show up I don't show the same thing to the people who have been there for a while.

Norman says the average guest stay here is 3 to 4 days and that most people are over the age of 50 and are predominantly from the United Kingdom and from the United States. However, the people I met from dinner were from Singapore and Australia so they were no strangers to the southern sky, but had never really looked through a telescope. The scope worked well enough even though it was limping and we had a great time for about 2 1/2 hours.

Time for your closeup

It was now time to get to work on my photographic set up. The first order of business was to make sure everything was plugged in right and it wasn't so I tracked all that down and then started the process of getting polar aligned.

You can't take Astro photos if your telescope is not aligned with the rotational axis of the Earth. In the northern hemisphere, we have the bright star Polaris "the north star" to guide us to the pole, but down here in the southern hemisphere, there is nothing; just a blank area of sky with a couple of weak stars in it. I have a special-use polar alignment camera specifically for this task, but had no idea what to look for. When I tried to compare what the camera saw to what the chart said should be there I realized that I had no idea what I was looking at, so I decided to try the other polar alignment method that I know is called ‘drift alignment’, but you have to be reasonably close for this to work and as it turned out, I was nowhere near close.

I was relying on the compass app on my phone to tell me where south was and after trying the first time and failing I looked at the compass again and it was pointed in a completely different direction this time so now I know you can't trust the compass app! After about four hours and a trip back to my room to get a couple of coats to wear because it had dropped to the 50s I ended up calling tonight about 4 AM. I figured I could look at some videos and get some better procedures to try in the next day.