Last week’s post was admittedly hurried because it was just so pretty out, I couldn’t stand being inside any longer. For those of you in East Tennessee, or perhaps other parts of the world that have experienced a long grey winter, you can relate I’m sure when a nice day rolls around. This week’s I’d like to spread a little more of that warm weather cheer with two photos from Busselton in Western Australia.
I mentioned last week that my good friend Nico and I set out on an adventure while I was visiting him in Perth. We headed out to see the Pinnacles of Nambung National Park, which I featured last week, and stopped in a small town called Busselton on the way there. Like many towns in Australia, Busselton has a very “beachy” feel to it, and is famous for it’s giant jetty. As it turns out, this jetty is the longest wooden jetty in the world, and stretches out 1.1 miles long… it’s really incredible! As you can see from the photo below, the water there is absolutely gorgeous as is the beach. Nico and I had initially planned to drive around further, but decided to just hang out and enjoy this spot, with a nice swim in what turned out to be VERY icy waters (it looks warm though, doesn’t it?).
I had another goal in mind as we were bumming around, and that was photographing the Milky Way in Australia. For us here in the Northern Hemisphere, the core of the Milky Way (that bright part in the center of the picture above) disappears below the horizon of the night sky in November as the band of stars are oriented vertically. In the Southern Hemisphere, however, it is still visible for another month or so because there, the band of stars stretches out horizontally. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Milky Way will then begin to set around the time the sun does, so it never actually gets dark enough to see it before it’s gone (you can see from my photo above that the sky was even still blue –to the camera anyway– as I was trying to capture the Milky Way’s last fleeting moments). Neat huh? I’m honestly still trying to wrap my head around the celestial mechanics of it all, but in any case, it was fun to see the Milky Way horizontally, because we never see it completely flat like this in the Northern Hemisphere (the closest we get is diagonal, which is how it looks right now in February, just before the sun rises).
More from Western Australia next week!
–Dan Thompson
