Rhythm of the Night
It looks like my days here are going to settle in to a nice rhythm, a medley of relaxation and ‘work’. It's day number five here at the resort, Sunday, although I'm finding it harder and harder to keep track of what day it is because every day is about the same: perfect weather, perfect food, perfect sky and the unbelievable beauty of the Namib desert.
So a typical day goes like this: wake up around 11 am do all the morning things you have to do and carry a couple of things up to the observatory on the way to the lodge for some coffee followed immediately by lunch. Today it was chicken schnitzel in some kind of multi-bean concoction, delicious as usual. Then I go to the workout room, and usually I'll do the treadmill but today I did the rowing machine, interesting! Then back to the room for a shower and work on either the blog, editing a video or soon I will be processing images that I've been taking.
Then mosey on back to the lodge about 6:30 for a cocktail and to record the cocktail video blog, eat dinner as soon as it’s available so I can get to the observatory, uncover the scope and get star aligned before the guests start filtering up from about 8-10:30.
After that I fire up the photography scope and hit the next thing on the list and shoot it up until about 4 am (moon permitting).
Then I cover the scopes, close up shop and in bed by 5 am.
First Astrophoto in the Southern Hemisphere
Last night I finished a two-night run on a star cluster called 47 Tucanae, which is a truly impressive ball of stars just off the side of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) very close to the southern pole. The SMC and its larger brother the LMC are faint, largish clouds in the sky, but clearly visible to the naked eye. They are both thought to be satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, dwarf galaxies officially, and are one of the things that you can't see from the northern hemisphere at all so definitely a “check off” on the ‘ol Astro Bucket List. I tried to run the processing on this but it messed up in the early stages and I’ll have to dig in and find out why the Blue and Red layers didn’t process and Green and Luminance did.
I've been having trouble getting the camera the proper distance away from the last optical surface of the telescope so that the stars in the corners of the image aren't distorted – I'm still working on that but this particular star cluster doesn't reach out that far in the camera frame so I can just crop off all of the distorted stars and still have plenty of space around my image while I work on the backfocus spacing issue.
Guest Shots
It's been great meeting all the fine people that come to stay here; sometimes I have a lot of people come up to the telescope after dinner and sometimes it's just a few but either way, it's always a good time because there are so many really stupendously good things to show them. If they don't live in the southern hemisphere already, they have absolutely never seen these objects before. It's always great fun to hear somebody gasp when they've seen the stunning grandeur of Omega Centauri star cluster or the Carina Nebula for the first time!
Today I met Nick and Madison, who are new to the resort and have been doing a whirlwind tour of Namibia (one of the few African countries they haven't been to already) and took advantage of the private airstrip here by flying in with their own pilot and his plane. Nick is a filmmaker from Los Angeles and got some incredible footage from the plane because he could tell his pilot to fly at whatever altitude he wanted!
This is Jo, one of the great managers here. Definitely get the “Biggest Earrings” award!
Stretching Out
I've started hearing about some of the excursions that people have been on and when I hang with guests in the dining room, they've showed me some of the incredible sights you get from the helicopter ride, which goes 100 km out to the ocean where you can see African Penguins and Africa's second largest sea lion colony! One of these days I'll be able to do that but right now I'm staying focused on getting the astrophotography set up working and reliable.
Also available is a hot-air balloon ride, and there is a nature walk out to a rock wall area with ancient paintings on it that is highly recommended.
Moving Up
Norman, the general manager here told me today that they had a cancellation and have a sort of "slow period” coming up and would I like to stay in one of the guest cottages for a week? Well, of course I said yes and so I'll pack a little bag and move over there for a week, so I'll certainly be doing a video on that!
As I settle into my daily pattern here, I'm struck by the incredible juxtaposition that this place is (and what musician doesn't like a juicy juxtaposition?!)—the desolate beauty combined with absolute luxury. I left a bag of laundry for the staff to do, and when I got it back, my clothes were all precisely folded, wrapped in paper and tied with a bow! I just might be able to get used to this...
