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)

February Monthly Meeting

When: Tuesday 11th February at 7:30 pm
Where: Space Place
This meeting is also available on Zoom. Meeting ID 868 3785 7650: Passcode: 155311

Subject: From Sophia Brahe to Beatrice Hill Tinsley: a brief history of women in astronomy
Presenter: Dr Yvette Perrott


This is our first meeting for 2025. February is Women in Astronomy Month. Our speaker, Dr Yvette Perrott, will survey women astronomers in history, from Sophia Brahe, who made meticulous observations as assistant to her brother Tycho, to Kiwi cosmologist Beatrice Hill Tinsley.

Radio astronomer Dr Yvette Perrott graduated in physics from the University of Auckland moving to Cambridge University on a Rutherford PhD Scholarship in 2010. She completed her PhD in the Cavendish Astrophysics Group in 2013 and was awarded a Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship in the same year. In 2017 she was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship which she took up at VUW in 2018. She teaches in the Astronomy programme at Victoria University.

We’ll bring some telescopes for a viewing session outside SpacePlace after the talk.

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

When: Saturday the 1st February from 8:00pm on-wards. Weather permitting.
Where: Star Field, John Whitby’s dark sky site in the southern Wairarapa

Star Party

This will be our first Dark Sky observing session for 2025.

‘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.


When: Saturday 8 February, early evening
Where and What: Waterfront observing event

Join us on the waterfront by the lagoon to look at the Moon and planets. The Moon will be at first quarter a couple of days earlier, with Venus close to the western horizon, Jupiter in the north, and Mars in the east (see star chart below). Also of interest nearly overhead are the bright stars Canopus, Sirius, and Orion.

As usual, this will be a weather-dependent event, so keep your eyes on our Facebook page if the weather looks doubtful.


Cretney Observatory News

Above: One of the latest Cretney images, IC434, taken by Curator of Instruments Matt Balkham. 12.5 hours of HaRGB. If you’d like to see the version with stars, here’s the link.

We held the second of two working bees a couple of weeks ago, and the dome and environment are now looking very clean and tidy. Next step is to erect the shed (I know…), and we will have our own storage facility.

Coming up this year:

  1. A workshop on astrophotography, and the formation of an active astro group within WAS
  2. A workshop or two on how to use the Cretney, with manual
  3. A workshop on how to process Cretney data to produce beautiful images like the one above, and
  4. Whatever else you tell us that you need to get the benefit of your WAS membership and access to the Cretney Observatory. Talk to Matt Balkham, Anne French, or any Council member about your ideas.

Total lunar eclipse Friday 14 March

There will be two lunar eclipses in 2025. The first of these, on Friday 14 March, will be a total lunar eclipse, visible when the Moon rises above the eastern horizon just after 8 pm. We are planning a joint event with SpacePlace and will have our telescopes set up next to the Dominion Observatory, ready to go. Come along and bring yours. Kids welcome.

If you would like to bring your telescope, please let Anne know.

Our March talk will be Antony on lunar eclipses – what they are, when they occur, and why they are interesting. Bring friends and family along so they will get more out of the eclipse itself. (Venue details to follow, because Space Place will be closed for refurbishment in March.) The talk date will be 11 March, because Andrew Buckingham from Astronz will be popping in to Wellington that day on his national tour. If you want to get some new kit, this is a great chance to talk to Andrew about the options and actually get a hands-on look.

Here’s the rough timetable for the Eclipse Event:
• From 7:00pm: Arrive and start setting up
• 7:30pm: Public can start queuing
• 8:00pm: Moon rises over hills and sunset, will start getting darker
• 8:45pm: Astronomical Twilight
• 10:00pm: Moon returns to normal state
• 10:30pm: Wind down public viewings
• 11:00pm: Pack up complete
The second total eclipse is due to occur on 7 September.


Royal Society Affiliation

Wellington Astronomical Society is now confirmed as an affiliate organisation of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. We received the glad news in early July. We’re on the RSNZ website here. If you are not already a member, keep an eye on the RSNZ website for science news and events.


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.

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!


Gifford Observatory Refurbishment and News

A few days ago, we had a break-in at the Gifford Observatory. Some schoolboys stole various cameras (by ripping the cables out), damaged the guttering and the fence, knocked a hole in the door, and tried to burn the place down. Fortunately their actions were caught on our CCTV cameras, and they have been referred, via Wellington College, to the Police. A substantial insurance claim is in progress. This is a set-back, but the working bee at the Gifford will be going ahead on Sunday 7 April. Contact Andrew Fuller if you’d like to lend a hand 

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 usable 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 refurbishment 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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