Anglo-Australian Bowie

For a long time, I have been a fan of David Bowie, and have seen him in concert a couple of times. In the good old days (early 1980s), when MTV showed nothing but music videos, I would happily while away the hours on Bowie (and Queen, and just about everything else).

But as everyone knows, people grow-up and have to go to university, and MTV went the way of pathetic shows rather than showing videos, and so I didn't really watch music videos any more.

While holidaying last week, we happened to be chilling, and decided to watch a bit of Rage as they were showing a series of Bowie videos, and while watching Let's Dance, I had a "ehh - that's familiar" kind of moment. It was driven by this image
a sight what will be familiar to astronomers the world over. No, not the people in the foreground, or the nuclear explosion in the background, but the mountains!

Why? Because they are the mighty Warrumbungles, mountains in Northern(ish) New South Wales, near the town of Coonabarabran. Why would these mountains be familiar to astronomers? Well, Siding Spring Observatory, home of the Anglo-Australian Telescope (the largest optical telescope in Australia, a world-beater in surveys of the heavens, and where I used to work), overlooks the park.

The thing that caught my eye is not just that these are the Warrumbungles, but the mountains look virtually the same as seen from the catwalk of the telescope, or the look-out point at the edge of the observatory.

Here's a view from the base of the AAT
(the red thing is the case that the 3.9m mirror was carried to the observatory in), and here's another view
So, I got a little excited! What if David Bowie had visited Siding Springs (and the AAT); I know it's not really a lot to get excited about, but at least it was something to think about.

My hopes were a little dashed after a little detective work. The clip in the video was not filmed on Siding Spring mountain, but actually White Gum Lookout in the National Park.
But why are the views so similar. This map explains it all
The look out basically sits on the line joining Siding Spring Observatory and the lovely peaks of the Warrumbungles. Apparently Bowie visiting Coonabarabran in the early 1980s was big news at the time (but the person who told me this kept well away). Ah well, even if he didn't visit the AAT, David Bowie must have driven close by :)

Location: Sydney NSW, Australia

Comments

  1. Greg13 January 2012 at 13:48

    Can confirm that he visited Siding Spring Observatory. He was at the lodge.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cusp14 January 2012 at 08:37

      That makes me very happy! I hope he enjoyed the food :)

      Delete
  2. Phillip Helbig13 January 2012 at 19:43

    There was even a pop video shot in the bowl of the Lovell Telescope.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cusp14 January 2012 at 08:42

      There are a couple of media-loved telescopes, with (I think) the VLA and Arecibo. I remember the Lovell being in Dr Who many years back. Looking at the music videos at Lovell, I see one was Placebo (Yay!) and the other was D:Ream (is there any way to get away from Brian Cox??)

      Delete
    2. Adam D5 September 2017 at 17:11

      Hi Cusp. Great page! Just letting you know about the upcoming Bowie festival in this region and the Observatory Day which falls on the same weekend.

      Website:
      WWW.BOWIEDOWNUNDER.COM

      A link to your above story:
      https://www.facebook.com/bowiedownunder/posts/10155105976434613

      Cheers,
      Adam

      Delete
  3. Adam D5 September 2017 at 17:07

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Falling into a black hole: Just what do you see?

Image
Everyone loves black holes. Immense gravity, a one-way space-time membrane, the possibility of links to other universes. All lovely stuff. A little trawl of the internets reveals an awful lot of web pages discussing black holes, and discussions about spaghettification, firewalls, lost information, and many other things. Actually, a lot of the stuff out there on the web is nonsense, hand-waving, partly informed guesswork. And one of the questions that gets asked is "What would you see looking out into the universe?" Some (incorrectly) say that you would never cross the event horizon, a significant mis-understanding of the coordinates of relativity. Other (incorrectly) conclude from this that you actually see the entire future history of the universe play out in front of your eyes. What we have to remember, of course, is that relativity is a mathematical theory, and instead of hand waving, we can use mathematics to work out what we will see. And that's what I did. ...
Read more

Journey to the Far-Side of the Sun

Image
There was a movie, in the old days, Journey to the Far-Side of the Sun  (also known as Doppleganger) which (spoiler alert) posits that there is a mirror version of the Earth hidden on the other side of the Sun, sharing the orbit with our Earth. The idea is that this planet would always be hidden behind the Sun, and so we would not know it there there. This idea comes up a lot, over and over again. In fact, it came up again last week on twitter. But there's a problem. It assumes the Earth is on a circular orbit. I won't go into the details here, but one of the greatest insights in astronomy was the discovery of Kepler's laws of planetary motion , telling us that planets move on elliptical orbits. With this, there was the realisation that planets can't move at uniform speeds, but travel quickly when closer to the Sun, while slowing down as their orbits carry them to larger distance.  There has been a lot of work examining orbits in the Solar System, and you can  s...
Read more

Moving Charges and Magnetic Fields

Image
Still struggling with grant writing season, so another post which has resulted in my random musings about the Universe (which actually happens quite a lot). In second semester, I am teaching  electricity and magnetism to our First Year Advanced Class . I really enjoy teaching this class as the kids are on the ball and can ask some deep and meaningful questions. But the course is not ideal. Why? Because we teach from a textbook and the problem is that virtually all modern text books are almost the same. Science is trotted out in an almost historical progression. But it does not have to be taught that way. In fact, it would be great if we could start with  Hamiltonian and Lagrangian  approaches, and derive physics from a top down approach. We're told that it's mathematically too challenging, but it really isn't. In fact, I would start with a book like  The Theoretical Minimum , not some multicoloured compendium of physics. We have to work with what we have! ...
Read more