Stargazing Live at Nant yr Arian
Following on from the BBC Stargazing Live programmes, there was an event at Nant yr Arian yesterday organised by the Physics Department at the university, so we booked onto it and had been looking forward to it for a while.
Our plan was to get there mid afternoon, have a mountain bike ride / walk around Nant yr Arian, stop for a hot chocolate in the cafe and then off to the Stargazing Event at 5pm. We got there at 3pm and Morgan and I headed off to do a bit of mountain biking whilst Anna went for a walk around the lake. Morgan still isn’t great at going up hills so we only went to the top of the first climb out of the car park and then onto the ‘High as a Kite’ section back to the Visitor Centre. Morgan was a bit tentative coming down this too, but he’s getting there and it was the first time he’d ridden it.
We met back with Anna and I went off for a quick spin around the Pendam Trail on my own whilst they headed off to the cafe for hot chocolates and to meet Jackie, Cameron and Eva. My back is still sore, my right knee hurts and I’m just recovering from a cold so I’d planned to have an easy ride around the trail. However, I’ve been uploading my rides to Strava.com lately and had noticed that there were a couple of ‘King of the Mountain’ awards up for grabs on the Hippity Hop climb and the top of the Legburner climb, so I did push fairly hard up these despite not wanting to. I did the trail in just under 39 minutes which is nowhere near a record for me, but not too slow either.
Back at the car park I met the others, only to find that the cafe had closed just as they tried to go into it, so no one had managed to get a hot chocolate. It seemed a shame really, I know they were setting up the planetarium in the cafe but I’m sure they could have continued serving drinks and cakes at the very least. I was certainly looking forward to a hot chocolate and a flapjack and the Planetarium showing was sold out all night long so they would have made loads of money off everyone and it seemed as though most people had been for a walk first and were hanging around – probably hoping for a warm drink – like we were.
The planetarium itself was good and the children enjoyed it. We then went onto the balcony where they had some telescopes set up for us to look through. Unfortunately it was a little cloudy which couldn’t be helped, although we did have some good naked eye views of Jupiter and Venus. What could have been helped though was the fact that there were three huge great big security lights shining onto the balcony. These blinded us and ruined any chance of a view of the stars. Silly really to have an astronomy event in such a good dark sky location only to ruin it with huge security lights. If the lights couldn’t be turned off then they would have been better setting the scopes up in the car park. The skies up there could be spectacular and without the Visitor Centre there would be very little light pollution, but that just wasn’t the case last night.
The telescopes weren’t actually set up when we first got out there either, so the ten minutes that Jupiter and Venus were visible for before the clouds rolled in were spent with students from the Physics dept fiddling with the scopes. Really that should have been done before we got out there so that people could have had a look through them straight away. Unfortunately by the time they were set up, the clouds had rolled in and there was nothing to see so we headed home without looking through the scopes. A shame really as they had a nice 10″ Meade LX200 scope that I would have liked to have a look through.
Despite this, it was a nice evening out, finished off with a meal in the White Lion in Talybont.
