We had a visit at Lauder last week from NIWA’s PR team. They’d come to film the launch of a balloon ozone-sonde (hence the relevance to this column). They took a few other pictures too. Here are a couple they shared that I thought would be of wider interest.
The first, below, is a photo-shopped mosaic of images by Lana Young from a series of 30-second exposures she took of the southern sky at Lauder over a one-hour period on the night of November 17, 2022. Those whirls created by Earth’s rotation relative to the stars are evocative of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, like his Starry Night. But if you look closely at this one you can see streaks from a couple of satellite overpasses. They weren’t quite as common in van Gogh’s day.
The foreground image shows the building that normally houses the Dobson Spectrophotometer that’s provided the primary measurements of ozone at Lauder since the 1980s (more relevance there 😊). But at the time the photo was taken, the instrument was en route to Melbourne for cross calibration against other similar instruments.
The photo below was a team effort, snapped by Jessica Rowley from her mobile phone camera just after sunset, but with extra flood-lighting provided her assistant who’s been caught in the act using her mobile phone torch . Pretty impressive too. Can you spot the Southern Cross? (* see answer below).
They also took a few mug shots of staff - and hangers on the next day. I also liked the one they took of me. Very good, given the material they had to work with.
The light must have been better than usual. The picture’s truncated above chest level because the shirt I was wearing sported the old NIWA logo - which as we all know - is no longer “fit for purpose”.
Finally on that light relief theme, there was an illuminating yet easy-to-read feature article about Lauder in the most recent North & South magazine. It was written by George Driver, who hails from nearby Clyde. Here’s a link to it.
* The Southern Cross is low in the sky above the left edge of the dome. The two Pointers to it are slightly higher, to the right of the dome. It’s used as a navigational aid in the southern hemisphere, where south is identified by the intersection of the perpendicular bisector of the line through the pointers and the line through the major diagonal.
You mean the one of the handsome geriatric?
Great photo!