Moeraki Boulders

Today was mostly a travelling day, getting us from Dunedin all the way through to Lake Tekapo.

We did find some time to stop on the way.  Our main target was Moeraki Boulders.  These are some rocks on a beach that are spherical.  Some are complete, others have split and you can see the detail inside.

We then stopped for lunch at a cafe in Oamaru, before driving on and taking photos of a long bridge over the Waitaki River.

We then tried to find something marked on our road atlas as 'Maori Rock Art' which turned out to be completely unsignposted.  We asked at a nearby settlement ('Cave') and were sent to a farm up the road.  The nice lady there relieved us of four dollars and sent us walking up the hill side where we found a really large rock that had some paintings on it done by Maori many years ago (see extra).

This evening was one of the highlights of our trip.  (Thanks to The Boss from Tussock Tales for the tip!)  Lake Tekapo is in a dark sky reserve, and we were taken on a tour up to the telescopes on a university campus up the top of a nearby hill.  We took some photos of sunset (loved the cloud sitting on a nearby mountain - see extra) and then we were given a tour of the MOA Telescope which is looking for extra-solar earth-like planets.  We were fed chocolate brownies and shown some timelapse footage of the stars.  We then got to use one of the large telescopes to look at Saturn, a globular cluster and The Jewel Box cluster.  The evening finished with a star talk, including how to find south in the Southern Hemisphere.  It was an excellent evening!  We then were dropped off back at our hotel and did a bit of astrophotography in the hotel car park.