We’ve arrived at our final stop on this NSW trip – Coonabarabran. This beautiful area at the foothills of the Warrumbungles is the lands of the Gamilaraay (or Gamilaroi) people, and we thank them for caring for this land for tens of thousands of years.
Being in Coonabarabran, our day heavily revolved around astronomy. We packed up from Dubbo and started the drive north up the Newell Hwy… and very quickly, we commenced the World’s Largest Virtual Solar System Drive! It’s a scaled model (38 million times smaller) of the solar system, which leads to “the sun” at the Siding Spring Observatory outside of Coonabarabran – where we were heading for a tour this afternoon. The first 5 planets are on the road out of Coonabarabran to the observatory – but the final 4 planets (three plus Pluto) are then duplicated on all the main roads into Coonabarabran. So Pluto was in Dubbo, then about 80km up the road (at a rest area in Gilgandra) was Neptune, and so on. So as we headed along into Coonabarabran, we stopped alongside each of those 4 planets to grab a photo. It definitely made the drive interesting and fun to watch for!
We stopped in at the Coonabarabran Visitor Information Centre on our way in for a look around. They had a great display of some amazing astronomy photos that looked to come from a recent competition. They also had a display which contained bones from a diprotodon! This is the megafauna we learnt about yesterday at Wellington Caves.
We headed across to a park for lunch. We had some left over sausages that we wanted to use, and so we aimed for a park with a BBQ to cook and enjoy them for lunch. The kids had a great time on the play equipment, creating their own obstacle course and timing each other – that was until Alexander whacked his elbow on one of the poles and really hurt himself. Hopefully he’s just bruised it and he’ll be back to himself soon.
After lunch, we headed west from Coonabarabran to the Siding Spring Observatory – an amazing collection of huge telescopes, but in particular, the Anglo-Australian Telescope, which we were looking forward to having a tour of. Our tour guide was such a passionate guy, who had a huge knowledge of astronomy and the facility, but just had a great ability to make it accessible to us throughout the tour. There was still so much information that went over our heads though! We got to see the workings of the huge telescope, and it was moved for some maintenance work a few times while we were there.
But the icing on the cake was getting to walk around on the outside of the huge dome and look out into the Warrumbungles! There were some truly incredible views from there!
After a bit of a break back at our accomodation for tonight, and after a quick trip to the local Chinese restaurant (amazing!), we headed a tiny bit out of town to our second fun astronomy event for the day – a stargazing tour! It ended up being run by the same guy who did our earlier tour of the Anglo-Australia Telescope, so it was great to have the same style of tour guide, but a completely different environment this time. He had a couple of telescopes set up in a little grassed area just to the side of a caravan park on the outskirts of town, along with a bunch of chairs. He’d explain a bit about a specific star, or galaxy – point to where it is in the sky, tell us about how far away it is, a few other bits of information about it – and then we then all got to have a look through the telescope at the star. I think all up we got to see about half a dozen different stars. But the best bit was saved for last – we got to see a close up of Jupiter! It was amazing to be able to see its colour, and also the bands around it. The stars in the sky are spectacular enough just looking up them in low light – but it was definitely a brilliant experience to be guided through some specifics in the sky and learn a little more about just how vast it all is.
That’s almost it for our NSW trip! We’ve got one more little adventure tomorrow morning before we start the drive home.
