Starry Nights by Barbara Erasmus

As pensioners, we know that our days on the planet have moved into the count-down phase so our policy is to seize any opportunities that arise - including a mid-winter excursion to Verlatenkoof, a rustic chalet, lit only by candles. It sounds romantic until you hear that it’s in Sutherland – the coldest place in South Africa, which regularly records temperatures well below freezing. According to cliché, the journey is as important as the destination and this is certainly true of the drive from Cape Town to the Karoo. It’s easy to understand the success of the tourist board campaign to market the Western Cape as a winter destination. The mountains are framed against a sky which seems almost artificially blue, accentuating the autumn colours of the changing vines.

Sutherland is a typical Karoo dorp which would be easy to by-pass without the lure of the Observatory which has created a thriving B and B industry – even the café where we stopped for coffee was called Halley-se-kom-eet! Our tour guide was the proprietor of the Primrose B and B which must be an advantage for his clients – although not an astronomer, he was very knowledgeable about the specialised material he had to explain to an ignorant audience. Evening tours of the Observatory are fully booked until the end of the year and mid-week day tours have recently been extended to include night-time viewing as well.

A visit to the Observatory at Sutherland is nothing like a visit to the Planetarium. The latter is a commercial show-piece - a special-effects movie projected onto a domed ceiling. Tourists are only a fringe benefit in Sutherland. The South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) is part of the National Research Foundation and is a world class facility which carries out fundamental research in astronomy and astrophysics. Observatories were initially set up in Cape Town, Joburg and Pretoria to map the southern skies and provide the time signals needed for marine navigation. When light and air pollution reduced their effectiveness, the hill-top of Sutherland was chosen as an alternative. With its clear, dark skies, good weather and seismic stability, it is one of the finest astronomical sites in the world and is also part of an international network used to monitor earthquakes and nuclear explosions.

The tour starts in a user-friendly information centre featuring colourful and informative posters, various instruments to gaze through and wonderful photographs from the Hubble telescope which reveal a kaleidoscope of far-flung galaxies, too distant to comprehend, despite a movie clip which attempts to give the layman some perspective with regard to the distances and time-scales involved. We peered into lenses showing a spectrum of colours while our luckless guide attempted to explain how these variations provided information about the gaseous composition of the stars. He was a clear articulate speaker but I fear that astrophysics is beyond me.

The hill-top where the telescopes are positioned feels like a science-fiction movie set. The telescopes look like a cluster of mini-planetariums although not all their roofs are domed. There is a strong international presence with telescopes erected by countries as far afield as Japan, Korea, New Zealand and the UK. The majority of these are unmanned, transmitting data to their home countries robotically. All the telescopes are reflectors which collect starlight through mirrors rather than lenses. The size of the mirror determines their ability to study the very faint light that reaches us from distant stars – our guide compared it to trying to pick up a candle on the moon. The standard mirror diameters range from 0,5 to 1,9 m which explains the excitement generated by the recent establishment of SALT, the project flagship which has a mirror with an 11m diameter! Astronomers may be scientific boffins but they seem to lack imagination. SALT stands for South African Large Telescope. South Africa is also a contender for SKA, an R8,5 billion project to build the world’s biggest radio-telescope near Carnarvon in the Karoo. SKA stands for Square Kilometre Array. I’m sure J.K. Rowling could have come up with less pedestrian titles for machines destined to unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Because we were on a day tour, we were allowed into the SALT dome; tourists can’t go in at night when the astronomers are working. The room was freezing as heating is detrimental to the accuracy of the telescope readings. Adjacent to the telescope are the computer rooms which are heated although the astronomers do have to venture out into the cold to make adjustments to the telescope to enable them to track the particular feature they are focused on. The computers are largely unmanned during the day as the scientists sleep in specially darkened quarters, readying themselves for a long, cold night collecting the data they require for their various research projects. We were impressed to hear that the enormous telescope fits into the Proudly South African category and scientists from all over the world compete to find a vacant slot on the calendar which will give them access to the facilities for one or two weeks

One of these scientists is Dr Don Kurtz, an American astrophysicist of international repute - his name will be familiar to many people who have attended his mesmerizing lectures at Summer School at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He spoke about one of the projects he’d researched at the SAAO. ‘I studied variations in stars caused by sound waves and used them to look inside the stars in the same way that one can see the face of a foetus using ultra-sound,’ he told me. ‘We asteroseismologists are like bats – we use sound to see!’ He went on to explain that if one combines the pitch emitted by various stars, you can hear an eerie, haunting symphony of stellar music. Our tour guide was probably right when he remarked that Sutherland has the highest average IQ in South Africa!

We returned to the Observatory for a night tour which was considerably colder. This allows you to look at the night sky through some of the most powerful telescopes in the country. We had some wonderful close-ups of the pitted surface of the moon and were given a guided commentary on various celestial features. I found it difficult to focus on the features she mentioned and obviously one cannot linger indefinitely because the rest of the tour group also wants to have a look. I don’t think children would enjoy the Observatory - it’s highly specialized work environment for astronomers rather than a tourist attraction

We returned to our candles in Verlatenkloof to find that the family retainer had lit a warm fire in the boma which allowed us to sit outside with a glass of local wine while gazing up at the clear night sky which is impressive even without the aid of telescopes. Reaching for the stars is definitely an experience I’d recommend.