It was a nice drive north as we heading into Coonabarabran where we would be spending New Year's Eve. It was a bigger town than I expected but they still didn't have anything on for the night such as fireworks.

We checked out the Crystal Kingdom which was free to look around at their mineral and gemstone collection. It was a good collection and a nice lady in store.



We then went back for a swim in the caravan park pool. There is only about 3 people camping here so it is really quiet.



That night we went to Warrumbungle Observatory which I was really looking forward to. It is actually set up on Peter Starr's property and yes that coincidentally is his real name. He also has telescopes housed on his front lawn that he hires out to people all over the world and they control them electronically. Although he wasn't the best presenter I understand as how many people could remain upbeat every night whilst repeating the same thing over and over.


It was cloudy when we arrived and Peter expressed concerns of not seeing much and gave us the option to leave. One group did but the rest of us stayed. It didn't start too well with me being underwhelmed viewing the singular stars through the telescope. To me it looked the same as looking at the sky. However, I am glad we stayed as eventually all clouds disappeared and we did see some good images including a million stars close together and Orion's Nebula. We were able to give Peter our camera's and he took this amazing photo for us.


Some things we learnt:
1) The sun is halfway through its lifespan and they predict it has 5 billion years left before it runs out of gas.
2) We saw sirius which is the brightest and one of the closet star to us at 8.5 light years away. It sounds a long way and even more so when Peter highlights that this means the light from this star that we are seeing left 8.5 light years ago!
3) Also found out that Australia is bigger than Pluto.