Big eye for a southern
sky
Coffee
and cereal for breakfast, watching fighting roos and listening to
screeching cockatoos, doing some blogging. We had a little time to
kill because our first stop of the day would be at the Sliding
Springs Observatory,which didn't open until 9:30. It's located in
the Warrumbungles and is the largest optical telescope in Oz, and for
awhile after it was first built in 1975 the largest in the southern
hemisphere. Interesting fact for us Ohioans, the 3.8 meter glass
disc that serves as the mirror for the reflecting telescope was cast
in Toledo. From there it was shipped to England to be 'figured', or
ground to the precise parabolic shape, before being sent on to Oz.
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| Sliding Springs Observatory |
The road from the Observatory leading all the way back to Gunedah,
about 150 km away serves as the world's largest to-scale virtual
representation of the solar system. With the telescope dome scaled
to the size of the sun, hemispheres attached to billboards scaled to
the size of the planets are placed at the proper distance away.
Mercury is only half a foot in diameter and is placed about a mile
down the winding road that leads to the observatory. Venus, Earth
and Mars follow in relatively quick succesion, getting you about five
miles down the road. Then it's all the way to Coonabarabran to
Jupiter, another 40 km to Saturn, 50 km or so to Uranus, and finally
outside of Gunedah is Neptune. Poor old Pluto, thrown off the
Olympic mount of planets, doesn't have a place in the model, but if
it did it would probably be at least 100 km further on (as some of us
astronomy nerds remember, for part of its wayward orbit upstart Pluto
actually is closer to the sun than Neptune, probably the real reason
it got ejected as a planet,).
Speaking of astronomy nerds, the road up to Sliding Springs has a
number of homes with their own private telescope domes out front,
including one that bills itself as the Warrumbungle Observatory.
There, Mr. Starr (his real name?) has occasional instructive night
viewings for $20 a person. We figured the scientists that work at
the SS (sounds ominous) never get time to actually use the telescope
for their own enjoyment so they've built their own at home.
Long
day of driving
The rest of the day was spent driving towards Broken Hill. Expecting
to see the beginnings of the dry outback landscape at any point along
the way we passed instead miles and miles of woods and grasslands
populated by sheep, endless small herds of feral goats, emus, and
every few miles or so a gravel turnoff leading to an unseen
'station', or ranch. We didn't see a house or building for a hundred
miles, and very little traffic, maybe a car or truck every five
minutes or so. And this is one of the only east-west routes across
Australia. As I've said before, it's a big, sparsely populated
country.
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| The main road between Broken Hill and the rest of Australia west |
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| Cute little guys, aren't they? |
Although we didn't see many cultivated fields, all along the sides of
the road was a constant fluffy white litter. At first I thought it
might be raw wool, but we passed a big processing plant surrounded by
huge bales of cotton. Probably headed off to China and then onto the
racks of American stores.
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| Cotton bales |
Friday
night in a mining town
We stopped near sunset at a roadside rest area and I quickly went
about setting up for dinner. The sky had turned a dark gray and
spits of rain were falling. We were sharing a sheltered double
picnic table with an older couple cooking their foil-wrapped meal in
a fire. As I got out the stove and gas tank and cooler and boxes the
wind picked up and it began to pour. We covered everything with our
big tarp, hoping it would blow over, but it just got worse. Finally
we decided to give up and drive to Cobar, a small mining town 50 km
away, and get a hotel room.
The wind and rain never let up the whole way there. Since it was now
dark and our worn windshield wipers barely kept up, the narrow road
and threat of a kangaroo incursion made it a nerve wracking drive to
town. There are five or so hotel/motels in Cobar. We stopped at all
of them trying to find the best deal, (except one advertising lap
dances in the hotel bar that for some reason Diana chickened out of
going into) and ended up at the main place in town. I walked into
the bar to ask how to check in. Against the background of loud
country western music, a couple dozen men were whooping and hollering
and drinking up their Friday paychecks. Seemed like the wild west
except for the six-shooters.
We got a spartan room in a single story building behind the main
hotel for $90. We'd planned to go out for dinner but Cobar is a
small town and our choices ran along the pizza or bar food variety
and it was still raining outside. So we had cheese and crackers,
salad and wine and watched some Australian footy, an old episode of
'Doc Martin', the movie 'Taken', and a documentary about dinosaurs,
each of which we stumbled upon part way through. Seemed a little
decadent, but the noise from the bar was so loud that we probably
wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway. Finally at around 11:30 we
turned off the TV and went to bed.
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| Home is wherever you hang your hat |
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