| [ Home ] | [ Photo Diary ] | [ Image Gallery ] | [ Contact Me ] |
It was the first full moon of the lunar new year, a special day for Koreans. They eat peanuts for good luck! They also go outside to look at the full moon. Some of them head to Daejeon Observatory to have a close up look. I decided to join them.
|
| The first full moon of the Year of the Monkey |
The night air was cold and spectacularly clear, the moon high and bright in the sky, totally unmissible. It would have been casting strong shadows but for the huge amount of light pollution thrown up by the city. The stars were defiantly battling the artificial light and I could even make out a couple of constellations. The Observatory sits on a hill behind KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) surrounded by huge satellite dishes. This is the part of town that puts the Science into the Science City. The observatory is three story building made distinctive by the big silver dome on top of it. Inside there is a Space Museum, a planetarium, and on the top floor there are two observation decks. The larger of the observation decks contains a handful of telescope mounts and a smaller handful of telescopes and astronomical binoculars. Predictably, most of them were pointed at the moon, though one was aimed at the Pleiades cluster and one gave a stunning view of Saturn, rings and all. The view of the moon was incredible, I'd never seen so much detail before. Given that entry was free and this *was* the first full moon of the year, there was quite a gaggle of Koreans wandering around the building. When the main observation deck was opened up, the one beneath the dome, a huge rush of young families organised themselves into a line to look through the single big telescope within.
 |
| A young astronomer glances at the moon. |
The line progressed extremely quickly, with everyone taking a glance at the moon for not more than five seconds, as if only going through the motions. Perhaps the pressure of having twenty people waiting for you to move out the way was to much for them. And it is, after all, only the moon. If you've seen it once... After ten minutes the room was virtually empty and I had the telescope to myself. I had another good look at the moon, but I can't say it was any better than the smaller telescopes on the other deck, and there had been no queues for those. I would rather have seen what I could have seen if this one was pointed at Saturn. I wanted to check out the planetarium, but the last show (at 9pm) had already played. I got to chatting with the staff, at least two of whom spoke excellent English, and it turns out that most nights the observatory doesn't attract crowds. I'm thinking I may become a regular visitor to the observatory as now is an exceptionally good time to go have a look at the night sky. At the moment Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all visible.
 |
| Daejeon Observatory. |
At 10pm they started turning off the lights and I was startled to discover that I was the last visitor in the building. While the staff got into their cars and drove away, I stayed to get some pictures of the building in the dark; I love night photography. Then I walked back down the icy hill back to the road only to find that I was in the middle of the quiet, non-residential science part of town on a freezing cold, spectacularly clear night and there wasn't a taxi to be seen.