Tekapo and Mount John Observatory

We had breakfast in the common room at our B&B in Tekapo with this marvelous view of the
lake. 

We visited some nice Hot Pools above the lake. These pools are ingeniously heated by heat transfer from maintaining an ice rink in the complex. Three pools, each one a little hotter than the one before. 

Stephen, our host suggested that me might enjoy the views from the top of Mount John just above Lake Tekapo. We could also see the Observatory there.  Driving up the road were beautiful views of Lake Tekapo with its turquoise water.  Since the lake is fed by glacier melt, the water has "rock flour" or silt suspended in it.  This gives the water the light green reflective qualities.

The University of Canterbury, in partnership with many international organizations, hosts a number of VLTs, very large telescopes on site for research in astrophysics. The observatory is with in the dark sky reserve.  The Aoraki Mackenzie area is a gold-rated dark sky reserve, in recognition of the quality of the almost light-pollution-free skies of the Mackenzie Basin.
The dark sky reserve includes Aoraki Mt Cook National Park and the villages of Lake Tekapo, Twizel and Mt Cook.  Local residents have been restricted in how they use outdoor lighting for the past 50 years to help achieve this.

Mount John observatory offers tours so we had a young physics lady take us on the tour.  She was full of intriguing facts about astrophysics.  One of the telescopes here is managed by internet access and is used by a group in Boston who can control where it focuses in the sky.  That group is looking at variations in the stars, like super novas, etc.  Another of the telescopes is being used by a group studying and looking for asteroids.  

The Milky Way photo

Our guide took us inside the MOA telescope.  MOA stands for Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics, but was also named Moa to honor a large, heavy New Zealand bird that is now extinct.  It is the largest telescope in New Zealand (1.8 meter- about 6 feet reflecting mirror) and because it is in the Southern Hemisphere, it has the best vantage point on the center of the universe, the Milky Way.  The MOA project is dedicated to studying, not stars, but planets; and finding other solar systems with orbiting planets.  And they are being successful; having found over 200 such planets.  This project is done jointly between the University of Canterbury and the University of Nagoya, Japan. 

They are using the principal Einstein's principal of space density bending with gravity.  Someone has printed a copy of Einstein's theory from his 1912 notebook and posted it on the wall.  Amazing to think of the theory proposed initially as an idea in handwriting being proven true by all this enormous technology.

In May 2011 they discovered a rogue planet the size of Neptune (our largest planet) roaming through the universe without association with a star. It is considered a planet because of its size and dense atmosphere.  She also told us that one of the "stars" in Orion's dagger is actually a nebulae, a cloud that is a nursery for new stars. 

She also brought out a solar telescope and aimed it for us to take a look. They use it to see solar flares and spots on our sun, but I just saw red.

We had yummy soup and sandwiches sitting outside with an amazing view and then headed on to Christchurch.