LA LA Lunar
The South West Australian skies are at their most beautiful during winter but harder to see because of light pollution, cloud cover and winter storms. If you want to learn more about the creatures of the night, the constellations, aurora hunting and the milky way, you need to position yourself away from light pollution. Even the light from one street lamp can reduce your capacity to see at night.
As well as the daily turn of the planet, the Earth's annual orbit around the sun means we see slightly different sections of the universe every day. It also means we'll be back where we started in a year's time, looking at the same stretch of sky. As well as the Earth's position in space, the area of sky we can see at night is determined by how far north or south of the equator we are.
People in the Southern Hemisphere get an exclusive view of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — two of our neighbouring galaxies that can identified with the naked eye — and some of the brightest globular clusters — spherical clumps of stars that orbit galaxies — such as Omega Centauri in the constellation Centaurus and 47 Tucanae, in the constellation Tucanae (the Toucan).
Dark sky features such as dark nebulae — clouds of interstellar dust from stars that exploded long ago that obscure light from the stars behind them — are also more prominent in the Southern Hemisphere. The darkest of the dark nebulae is a feature called the Coalsack. Tucked in near the Southern Cross, the Coalsack forms the head of our best known Indigenous constellation, the Emu in the Sky.
In the Night Garden
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