Sydney Obsevatory

Sydney Observatory is perched on a hill just behind the harbour bridge in the middle of a nice little park that would make a great vantage point to watch the New Year's fireworks. When built it provided a view across the whole harbour and (as we found out on the tour) actually served as a noonday clock for sailing ships back in the day. Now though it has the whole city skyline behind it, providing a good view of the drab 1970's towers of the Four Seasons and Shangri-la hotels. Since we've been fast running out of things to do in Sydney without a car, we tried booking a tour recently after having seen some ads up during the Aroma Festival. Usually this place would be full of kids on a school trips during the day but it turned out to be just as busy on weekend nights causing us to wait another week before we could get a free slot (just as well as the original night turned out to be raining). So on a cold Saturday evening as we walked up from the city we crossed paths with a man in a dark trenchcoat and fedora clutching what looked like a old lantern and leading a group of people behind him - he was the guide for Sydney's ghost tour, and when I overheard him pointing out the particular trees that various people were hanged from I was left wondering if we should have gone on their tour. To start everything off we led outside in separate groups of 20 people and given a quick lesson on what was viewable in the night sky. Our guide was a 60-something lady who'd just completed her degree in Astronomy post-retirement; pretty impressive for anyone. We were then shown around the observatory itself and led up some rickety stairs, one at a time, into the two domes that housed the still in-use telescopes When we got upstairs in the first the guide pressed some button and the whole roof rotated - making everyone feel dizzy - until the thin slit in the roof open to the night sky was showing the moon. Everyone got a quick chance to squint through the eyepiece and the guide repositioned it after everyone's turn. I was a little disappointed that the view didn't seem that much more spectacular than the one through my small plastic telescope I had when I was 10 years old. The other dome housed a much more modern piece of kit - chunky and short, this thing was computer controlled and I thought we'd be able to see what it saw on some of the computer screens in the dome - but we still had to squint through the small eyepiece and just made out some stripes across Jupiter and a few pin pricks of light from a few of its moons. Ace.