Saturday February 25, 2023
Today we took it very easily as there was a fire drill for all staff, so services were minimal during that time. An interesting lecture by Charles Barclay, a Royal Astronomer spoke of the southern sky and what to see. A few interesting points he mentioned were that to see the stars clearly, not only do you need a dark place and cloudless sky, but the light from stars is dim as it has taken hundreds or thousand of light years to get here, is very faint, So you don’t need magnification, you need something large to capture as much light as possible -thus the big arrays of telescopes. However the bigger the pupil, the better one can see. During the day the eye closes down the pupil to let less light through, but at night it is wider open to let more light through. So when you go out into the dark to look at the sky, wait 16-20 minutes for your pupils to fully dilate to get the best vision. Also, the back of the eye has rods and cones in the retina. Cones are in the center and rods around the sides. Cones are used during the day but rods at night. So don’t look directly at what you want to see, but at an angle, so the light goes onto the rods. He showed pictures of the southern cross and other interesting phenomena like in the northern hemisphere Polaris star tends to stay above the North Pole so can be used for navigation, but this does not exist in the southern hemisphere, so one has to triangulate to get one’s position in the sea.
The second talk was by the Geographer – Dr. Christine Drake who spoke of Bali and made it very clear that Bali is a Hindu (from India) island surrounded by a country that is predominantly Muslim. It is the only predominantly Hindu part of South East Asia, as the northern part is predominantly Buddhist. Lots of facts and figures about Bali and it seems like an amazing place. We look forward to seeing some of it tomorrow.
We skipped the show as we had seen “Symphony” twice before.
Our cabin wall getting filled up with magnets from visited locations.
Roger & Anne Travels 