High Flying Roulettes Break New Altitude Records With Honeysuckles Astronomy Tours

Even At 370 Knots Per Hour The Nearest Star Is A Long Way Away

It was a pleasure to welcome members of the Roulettes team to Honeysuckles Astronomy Tours. Unrelated, it was only last week we received a call from an Australian commercial pilot asking if we had seen any strange bright objects in the sky to the south in recent days. Apparently for pilots flying at night, this is not uncommon. It’s not the first call we have received of this nature … Of late, contact with the aviation industry has been brisk!

Lindsay, had purchased a tour to see the stars for James and so we welcomed four pilots including part of the highly skilled Roulettes flying team for a close up view of the stars. Liv, Gus and Jason made up the balance of the tour group. Not experienced observers, all loved the diversity of objects they saw through the eyepiece. After admiring Jupiter’s bands and an obscure but visible polar “ice cap” on Mars, we swung to deep space for a fabulous view of the Great Orion Nebula. This relatively “close” object at 1,300 light years distance never fails to delight and because of its nearness to us, detail is visible not readily seen elsewhere. A number of superb deep space objects were observed including colourful stars, massive star clusters, nebulae and more.