Preface

I love exploring the southern night sky. For much of my life, this large and lush celestial wilderness was a secret garden to which I hadn’t a key. I grew up observing the stars from a mid-northern latitude, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Back then, I could only imagine the beauty of objects such as globular cluster Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae, the Jewel Box open cluster, the Eta Carinae nebula, and, of course, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, to name but a few. These objects, though familiar to me by name, were among the many “invisible wonders” of the universe. I finally obtained a key to a large part of the garden when I temporarily resided in Hawaii for several months in 1981 and 1982 – before moving to Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1994.

Actually, I have been traveling to the Southern Hemisphere since 1982, and over the years I’ve accumulated impressions of some of the more prominent southern-sky objects through a variety of instruments. In August 1997, I traveled to New Zealand, where I used the Auckland Observatory’s 20-inch f/13.5 Zeiss rel ector and 4.5-inch finderscope to observe some of these objects. I also used the 9-inch refractor at Carter Observatory (in Wellington), as well as a Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope set up in the backyard of a friend’s house in Wellington, to view others. I’ve also observed deep-southern objects from the Australian Outback, from the Altiplano in Bolivia, from the plains of South Africa, and with friends in Central America.