The Zeiss telescope at Stardome Observatory - once used to assist NASA with the moon landing - has reopened to the public after major upgrades.

The telescope is named in memory of its donor Mrs Edith Winstone Blackwell MBE who wanted to provide a telescope for public use.

The EWB Zeiss Telescope is one of only around 25 of its kind in use around the world, and is the largest publicly accessible telescope in the North Island.

It has been closed to the public for the last 18 months to allow for a major upgrade.

“The upgrade has fully computerised the Zeiss. Before this, we had to manually move a half-tonne telescope to the correct coordinates to find an object in the sky. Now I can type in ‘Neptune’ or ’Uranus’ and it will swing by and find it - I love that,” says Stardome telescope operator Daley Panthagani.

“This gives us much more time to actually look at objects in space, to research them, and explain them to our visitors,” he says.

For over five decades the telescope was operated as a “push-to" telescope. This meant astronomers had to physically rotate the telescope along an axis on its mount. Most of its early work, including assistance to NASA on the Apollo moon landing missions, was done this way.

When humans went to the Moon, the Zeiss was part of a network of instruments around the world used to manually track the missions during the time Houston did not have radio contact with its astronauts.

“Now the Zeiss is motorised we can easily take visitors through five or six objects in the sky in a single session, starting with the Moon, inner and outer planets, then moving into deep space,” says Daley.

“The Southern night sky is filled with points of interest. I can use the Zeiss to show and tell the entire life-cycle of a star – from nurseries where new stars are born, star clusters where siblings grow together before they move away, middle-aged stars like our Sun with its varied planets, end-of-life stars like Betelgeuse that’s ready to blow up and die, and finally remnants like Eta Carinae or the Ghost of Jupiter, a beautiful blue planetary nebula – in under an hour,” he says.

The farthest Daley has seen through the Zeiss himself was the Sombrero Galaxy, some 31 million light years away.

“It was just a smudge but the fact it’s there – and that I can actually see it using this instrument – is just incredible,” he says.

“To have this telescope accessible in the middle of a city is really special. Most people would have to go to a facility on top of a mountain or the middle of a forest to be able to do something like that.”

Public access to the Zeiss

There is ticketed access to the Zeiss telescope twice a week on Friday and Saturday nights at 7.30pm and 9pm, weather permitting.

Visitors get to see the Moon, planets, double-stars, nebulae, and globular clusters up close, including culturally significant stellar objects such as the Matariki cluster, depending on the time of year.

Zeiss experiences last between 50-60min for groups of up to 10 people. Typical themes for a show include:

• Life-cycle of a star
• Objects in increasing distance from Earth
• Southern hemisphere specials
• Objects that can only be observed at a particular time of the year

If weather conditions mean observers don’t see at least three objects in the duration of the show, Stardome offer a refund or a chance to rebook for another day.

Bookings can be made at: www.stardome.org.nz/movie/zeiss-telescope

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