Australis

It's been a very busy couple of weeks, and the coming weeks promise more of the same. For people who work on Capitol Square, the first six months of a legislative session are hectic. The Ohio Constitution mandates that a balanced two-year budget must be enacted by June 30 of odd-numbered years, and that process is well underway. With the federal government showering us with billions of dollars of aid, the stakes seem to be a little higher this year, and the politics are sure to get nastier.

But life goes on, and my older daughter is preparing for her trip to Peru. This is part of her MBA program at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State. She is going into the mountains to provide assistance to the local population with micro-financing and business development. The original plan was to go to Bolivia, but the U.S. government issued a warning about traveling there, so Peru became the destination.

She wants to get the most out of this trip and asked me about the southern skies. I've been an amateur astronomer for years, and one thing that I absolutely must do before I kick the bucket is see the southern sky at night. So I dug out some books and went online to help her prepare.


The Southern Cross is probably the best known southern hemisphere constellation, at least among northern hemisphere people. From what I've been reading this morning, it's not uncommon for northerners to express disappointment upon seeing it for the first time. It's not as predominant as, say, Orion is in the northern hemisphere. But it does serve as a good point from which to navigate the rest of the sky. We in the north are fortunate enough to have a relatively bright pole star, something that will not be found in the southern hemisphere.

And then there are the clouds...

The Magellanic Clouds

I have been fascinated by the Magellanic Clouds ever since I first learned about them as a child. They are not part of the Milky Way galaxy, as was once believed, but are independent irregular galaxies that happened to drift into our neighborhood. In the northern hemisphere, we can see the most distant object visible to the naked eye: the Andromeda Galaxy, which is more than 2 million light years distant. But it is visible only under ideal conditions, and even then it looks like little more than a smudge. The Large Magellanic Cloud contains perhaps a tenth of the number of stars in Andromeda, but it is only 160,000 light years away, so the view must be much better.

The Large Magellanic Cloud

Not far away, astronomically speaking, is the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is about a tenth the size of the LMC. But I'd be willing to bet that it is a more accessible object to view than Andromeda.

To any readers in the Southern Hemisphere: please drop a line if there are other "must-see" objects in the night sky. And while she's down there, I'm going to ask her confirm that water flows clockwise down a drain!