So many pictures from so many trips. The only way to show them is to do them 4 at a time. Still, it will be a while before we go overseas again, so there is a slight chance of catching up. I love old buildings, and we saw some beauties on our New Zealand cruise in 2012. The top images are of the railway station in Dunedin. It was opened in 1906 and was NZ's busiest railway station for many years, but today it is pretty quiet apart from tourist trains. The station is now home to the NZ Sports Hall of Fame and the Otago Art Museum. Both inside and out, the architecture is spectacular and you should put it on your bucket list for NZ. In the Botanic Gardens at Wellington there are two observatories. The lower left image is of Carter Observatory, which was the main research observatory in NZ from 1941. Nowadays it's focus is more on public astronomy education as the lights of Wellington make the sky too bright for research work. The older observatory is the Dominion Observatory, built in 1907 for the task of calculating NZ Standard Time and tying it into the worldwide timekeeping network. The astronomical work finished early in the 20th century and the building is now private offices. From 1916 it has also been a seismological observatory, the seismometers being housed in one of the underground bunkers of the old Garden Battery. The building actually covers part of the battery and some of the guns are displayed nearby. The fun way to get to the gardens, observatories and battery is to take the cable car from central Wellington; search the blog for my photos of that ride.
Labels: astronomy, cruising, New Zealand
# posted by Bart Bear @ 12:20 pm
