Adventures with Adam, Part 5: Lake Tekapo

Our drive from the Central Otago region to Lake Tekapo took us through some fairly bare hills, but also past a gorgeous lake with the snow-covered Mount Cook in the distance. Lake Tekapo itself is very pretty, but there is not much to do in the town and the main reason we stopped there was to do a star-gazing tour.

Lake Tekapo is part of a dark sky initiative, which seeks to limit light pollution in order to allow better stargazing opportunities. We noticed that even most of the streetlights are low to the ground, and a yellow-ish color rather than night-vision-killing white. Our stargazing tour was fantastic as we learned about the southern sky including how to find the Southern Cross and use it to identify due south (more complicated than simply using the North Star to find north), saw Jupiter and Saturn through a telescope, and looked at much more distant objects, including a beautiful view of the Milky Way. We even learned that some of the constellations we know in the Northern Hemisphere can be seen in the Southern, but they might be a little different. For example, the constellatiion of Orion (the Hunter) is easy to find by the three bright stars on his "belt", but in the Southern Hemisphere Orion is standing on his head.

They tour even provided us with pictures that show the beauty we witnessed:

The next morning, we spent a bit of time wandering around down by the lake, and saw the two most visited sites in Lake Tekapo: the Church of The Good Shepherd, and the Sheepdog Memorial, a statue of a collie, which was built to celebrate all of the dogs who came with the Scottish settlers to the area and helped them complete their work.

There was also a public art exhibition by the lake, and given Lake Tekapo's importance to astronomy, we thought this globe statue was the most interesting and relevant.

After leaving Lake Tekapo, we dropped Adam in Christchurch so he could make the (long) journey home to Seattle while we returned to Conway Flat. More about our adventures in New Zealand soon.

Jeff and Shana