Wow – thanks Mike and the IIS gang, yet another birthday eh! Does that mean that I’ll be getting older twice as fast now!
We’ve been away for a few days, camping at
O’Reilly’s in the Lamington National park and returned last night to over 7 pages of IIS posts!
The camping holiday was just fantastic. After a couple of days, the peace and tranquillity of the camp site was shattered by the arrival of a school group, introducing an air of tension at the camp site, as most of the campers were outdoors people looking for the peace an quiet of the rain forest, finding the noise and bedlam of the city in the form of the Year 12’s a little unwelcome.
We had the WO 80mm F7 EDII with us and I set it up and invited everyone to come over and look at Venus, Saturn and later on, an almost full Moon. Most of the kids were kind of acting a little cool;
“yeah, okay, we’ll have a look, I’m sure it will be boring, but we’ll humour him as the teachers are saying we should have a look”.
Well, the awkward atmosphere just evaporated as everyone was gob smacked by seeing the phase of Venus, the rings of Saturn and the craters on the Moon. Saturn in particular drew gasps of wonder and amazement from everyone. All who looked were incredibly grateful and expressed wonderment at how much could be seen with such a modest ‘scope.
The next day, the tension had gone and everyone seemed to have more tolerance and understanding of each other. The students in particular were more considerate of the needs of the other campers. It was delightful to see how the community was transformed by the shared experience of just looking up at the wonders of the night sky.
Cheers
Dennis