Today Sue and I headed for the Warrumbungle Mountains. This was no small drive, and took us through many small rural towns along the way.
Muswellbrook, Scone, Murrurundi: names I’ve known since my childhood and have rarely (ever?) visited. The above is silo art right in the center of the small town of Quirindi; the last town before we turned west for Coonabarabran.
This leg took us along a straight road through cotton fields for over 80 kilometers. We saw cows and kangaroos, but almost no other vehicles. It was a lovely drive with iconic Australian rural scenery including a massive heard of cattle tended by actual stockmen (or ‘cowboys’) on horseback!
We made it to Coonabarabran then continued west a bit to visit our goal: Siding Spring Observatory. This is a complex of telescopes in 18 different buildings, built at this location over 60 years ago since this is one of the darkest parts of Australia. We checked out the visitors center (Sue had a muffin, I played a cocktail cab version of Terra Cresta) and then joined the last tour of the day into the large telescope in the big building in the above pic (I knicked from Wikipedia).
The tour was great, and our guide was an enthusiastic astronomer with decades of experience. The telescope we saw has a 4 meter mirror, is two stories high and for many years was the foremost tool to survey southern skies. When first installed the images were captured optically on photographic plates, but now the very same telescope is used for computer assisted astronomical spectrography and the photographic methods are no longer used.
Our tour took us into the telescope room as well as up on the gantry closer to the motto and even outside on the catwalk surrounding the dome. Although it was cold and very windy, the views from up there were stunning:
The tour was an hour and we loved it. Absolutely worth doing if you visit here. As a special bonus the site is full of kangaroos and we saw many of them hopping around. How many can you see in this pic:
The rains came in as we left, and mostly for lack of options (this is a small country town after all) dinner was at a Chinese restaurant far better than we expected:
On the short drive back to the motel we noticed Coonabarabran is a dark town, with almost no street lights and very little illumination at all. This is to help the telescope, but it’s a little eerie to witness. It may be the case most country towns are like this, and I’ll find out tomorrow on the second day of this road trip…
“Terra Cresta”! Gorgeous-looking restaurant. Safe journeys, guys.