Welcome to the WAS website

Wellington Astronomical Society is an incorporated society and registered charity for promoting astronomy in and around the Wellington region.


Upcoming Events

Our latest events are always in the Events section of our Facebook Page. (It’s public, so you don’t need to be a Facebook user to see it)

March Monthly Meeting – Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lecture 2024

Our March meeting will also be the Beatrice Hill Tinsley lecture for 2024.

Monday 25 March 7.30 pm
GBLT 1, Government Buildings Lecture Theatre 1
Victoria University Pipitea Campus

Presenter: Dr Lisa Kaltenegger

Dr Lisa Kaltenegger

Subject: Searching for Alien Earths

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell, and is Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Her research focuses on rocky planets circling other stars, with a focus on potentially Earth-like exoplanets in the Habitable Zone.

Lisa Kaltenegger serves on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s TESS Mission as well as the NIRISS instrument on JWST.

Note that you don’t need to be a WAS member to attend our meetings. All are welcome, so come along and see what we are about.


Dark sky observing

WAS Astrophotography Group / Dark Sky Observing

Star Party

Dark sky observing Saturday 2 March and 9 March at Star Field, John Whitby’s dark sky site in the southern Wairarapa from 7.30 pm onwards. Weather dependent, of course.

The evening of 2 March will be a dark sky till the Moon rises around 11 pm. The Milky Way and many of its wonders will be high in the sky as well as its satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Jupiter will be low in the northwestern sky.

‘e have another event scheduled for the following Saturday 9 March, which is a moonless night.

‘Star Field is at the heart of the newly accredited Wairarapa Dark Sky Reserve, the second dark sky reserve in Aotearoa NZ. (The first is the Aoraki/Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in the South Island.)

If you’ve never seen the night sky from a dark-sky site before, this will be unforgettable. Antony will give you a tour of the sky with his laser pointer before we get on the telescopes. There is also a lot of expertise available for anyone wanting to photograph the night sky.

Star field sign

How to register: Please email Antony at events@was.org.nz if you are planning to go. (If you have never been to Star Field before, you will need to contact Antony to get the directions for finding it.)

What to bring:
Warm clothes, as it gets pretty cold at night, beanie, gloves etc.
Snacks if you want.
Warm drinks are provided.
A warm room is available if you need warming up.
A flush toilet is available on-site.

For astrophotography, bring:
A DSLR or mirrorless camera,
A wide angle lens (preferably),
A tripod to fix the camera to.

Be careful with car headlights when you arrive. With people taking photos, please keep lights to a minimum (use red lights if you can), especially car headlights (use parking lights).

For further details or cancellations contact Antony (021 253 4979). This event will be updated on the WAS Facebook page by the afternoon of the day of the event if the weather forecast is not looking good.

For those just interested in Deep Sky observing, telescopes will be provided unless you want to bring your own.

Note: This is a WAS members-only evening.


Council News

In March, President Demi is leaving Wellington and moving to Christchurch. At the February meeting at SpacePlace, VP Andrew Fuller presented Demi with a beautiful memento of her time with us: a photograph of Thor’s Helmet, NGC 2359 (see image above).

Demi tells us she will be back to see us from time to time – but sadly she will miss the Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lecture on 25 March.

Anne French, Newsletter Editor, will be Acting President from March until the AGM in November. The president@was.org.nz email will still work.

A message from President Demi

Kia ora all

As I pen this note, my heart is filled with a mix of emotions. Serving on the Wellington Astronomical Society’s Council for two years, and as your President for one, has been an honour and a privilege. As my first leadership role, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience.

I am grateful for the support, friendship, and countless memories we’ve created together. It’s been a pleasure to work alongside all of you. I encourage you all to continue looking up and exploring the wonders of the Universe. I hope you never lose your curiosity and drive to learn more.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve as your President. I look forward to seeing the Wellington Astronomical Society continue to grow and achieve great things.

Demi


Get involved with WAS

Is there anything more awe inspiring than looking through a telescope to see the wonders of Matariki, or showing a child the rings of Saturn?

It’s been a bit hard over the last few years, especially if you don’t have access to a telescope of your own.

Now that the Covid emergency is over, we want to get a bit more astronomy into the Wellington Astronomical Society. But we need your help!

Running outreach events, holding viewing sessions, teaching telescope skills, running observatories (and mowing their lawns), arranging astrophotography nights, writing funding applications, managing social media accounts, finding guest speakers, making the tech work at our meetings… it all takes time! So this year your Council has decided we want to have more fun and spend more time with our members.

Very shortly we will send out a survey form to members, asking how you would like to be involved in your society and what you are most interested in doing.

After we have your response, a Council member will be in touch. There are three things we can guarantee:
• We won’t ask for more time than you can give
• You don’t have to know about astronomy to get involved
• It will be loads of fun!
More soon

Cretney Observatory News

Curator of Instruments Matt Balkham reports that the OTA is due to be dispatched from Italy (after being repaired) next month. In the meantime, he’s been taking pictures with the back-up telescope from the Gifford Observatory, the Celestron C14 Edge HD telescope. One of them, shown below, was awarded Top Pick on AstroBin a couple of days ago – another Top Pick for the Cretney.

Thor's Helmet: NGC2359 in HOO with RGB stars (~7.5 hours).

As ever, if you want to know how he did it, make sure you catch Matt for a chat at our next meeting – or wait until the Cretney is back up and operating the proper OTA later in the year, and Matt is running the first How to Use the Cretney Observatory workshop.


Gifford Observatory Refurbishment

The Gifford Observatory was originally established in 1911 on the slopes of Mt Victoria, where Wellington East Girls’ College is located now. It was moved to its present location, above Wellington College, in 1924. It was named in honour of its original founder and benefactor, A.C. Gifford, also known as Uncle Charlie.

The Observatory hosted a Zeiss 130 mm refractor and was operated by Wellington College students until the late 1970s, by which time adult support for its continued operation had faded out. The dome eventually rotted and collapsed, leaving only the shell of the building.

In 1999, the Gifford Observatory Trust was formed. Its aim was to ‘restore, maintain and operate the original Gifford Observatory to establish a useable astronomical observatory for the recreational use of young astronomers in the Wellington region’.

The Trust refurbished the building with a new 4.5-metre dome and reinstalled the 130 mm refractor. The Gifford was reopened on 25 March 2002 by one of its former student users (and New Zealand’s most distinguished rocket scientist), Dr William Pickering ONZ, KBE. (see below).

In 2022, the Trust was dissolved, but not before it had transferred the ownership (and upkeep) of the Observatory to the Wellington Astronomical Society. We are now renovating the observatory with the aim of making it fully automated.

Interested in helping Andrew with the refurb of the Gifford? Have a chat with him at the monthly meeting or contact him at adfuller@gmail.com.

William Hayward (Bill) Pickering (1910–2004) was a frequent user of the Gifford Observatory during his school days at Wellington College. He finished his BSc at Caltech and completed his PhD in Physics there in 1936. A few years later, in 1944, he went to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On 31 January 1958, his group at JPL launched Explorer I on a Jupiter-C rocket from Cape Canaveral, less than four months after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik. It’s a tale of innovation on the surface, but it’s worth remembering that rockets for space could not have been developed so fast without the rocketry programme of the Second World War – as the Jupiter-C’s history shows. It was designed, eerily, by Wernher von Braun, who worked on the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany’s weapons programme during the war. Von Braun was spirited off to the US afterwards, as part of the innocuous-sounding Operation Paperclip. Similarly, the R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik 1 was originally developed as an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, i.e. an offensive weapon capable of travelling thousands of miles.


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