For the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, I am enjoying the spectacle of the southern stars. I am visiting New Zealand and, apart from viewing constellations that never rise above far northern horizons, I am witnessing effects that come from being a long way south of the Equator.

For example, on my arrival it was amazing though entirely predictable, to see the crescent Moon upside down – an inverted view that UK and North American observers only get through their telescopes.

And it was slowly crossing the sky from right to left. So does the Sun, of course, and the planets. It seems odd to see Saturn at the moment above Leo, with the familiar lion’s pattern turned on its head.

That goes for all the well known constellations. As the stars appeared in the fading twilight over Wellington at latitude 41 degrees south, I spotted Orion the hunter standing on his head, with Betelgeuse to the lower right and Rigel upper left. Above them, really high in the sky was brilliant Sirius, a star that can never reach any dizzy heights from northern latitudes.

But, of course the real stars of the show were those denied to me from my home in London. Even from the back garden in my host’s home in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn, the stars of Crux, the Southern Cross, plus neighbouring “pointers” Alpha and Beta Centauri shone brightly.

I managed to record them nicely in a 20 second exposure with an old 28mm lens adapted to fit my Canon EOS 300D camera. Viewing the image later on a computer revealed the clear glow of the finest globular cluster in the sky, a tightly packed ball of stars so prominent that it was labelled like a bright star and so is known as Omega Centauri.

Picture: Stars of the suthern sky from Wellington, including Crux and Alpha and Beta Centauri, (Photo: Paul Sutherland).

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