Of auroras and candlelight
What I didn't know as we rattled west out of Dunedin Friday afternoon was that the Sun — never one for observing public holidays — had exploded.
Not literally, but close enough: a giant solar eruption had sent a blast of charged particles careening towards Earth. By Saturday morning, my phone was buzzing with coded messages from my usual back-channel sources: geomagnetic storms incoming. Major aurora alert. Charge your batteries. Cancel your plans.
Now, I am an astronomer. A professional, as my accountant and increasingly weary family would attest. And so, on Saturday evening, while the rest of the household settled in with books and red wine, I was outside, deploying cameras like a man possessed. Across both paddocks. Tripods bristling with optics.
I had the look of someone trying to film an NHNZ documentary on migrating hedgehogs.
The trouble was, the house was ablaze. Every window shone with warm yellow light, leaking out across the section like a lighthouse designed to ruin astrophotography. Even the bathroom window glowed like a warning beacon from low orbit.
I went inside, said something that began kindly and ended with a phrase I now regret: "You're blowing out the histograms."
There was a silence. Then, one by one, they turned off the lights. My daughter lit a candle. Then another. Soon, the whole family was reading by flickering flame, the house aglow like some 19th-century Scandinavian lodge, with the aurora blazing behind it in shades of lime and crimson.
Someone passed around chocolate. Someone else found a blanket. The dog snored. Outside, the sky shimmered and danced, ancient and alive.
This week's photo shows that moment: Griffins around a table, each caught in the act of quiet rebellion — or possibly love — beneath a sky performing miracles.
Am I obsessive? Yes.
But sometimes, obsession lights the way.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
24-06-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Dame Alison as worthy as anyone
Arable industry leader Alison Stewart had a classic case of imposter syndrome when she received a damehood. Dame Alison admitted she felt undeserving over King's Birthday weekend until her partner told her she was just as worthy a recipient as any of the select group of talented women to hold the same honour. "You look at all of these amazing people who have been given this honour and think what on earth am I doing in the same space as them? I suppose sports people look at other people like politicians and scientists and think the same. You always tend to think people excelling in a certain area must be better than you. I've just decided to accept that everybody's really good, otherwise you end up with a serious inferiority complex and don't enjoy the honour." Emeritus Distinguished Professor Stewart was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to plant science and the arable sector in the King's Birthday Honours. In terms of damehoods, this is just a tier below a select group of women, including former prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who have been made a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Dame Alison is stepping down from her role of the past seven years as chief executive of the Foundation for Arable Research (FAR). She has been inundated with calls from wellwishers and plant science industry people from around the world. "If you have been in the system for 40 years you end up reconnecting with people you've worked with 20 to 30 years ago just to say hello and congratulations. It's like a trip down memory lane. Plant science rarely gets recognised at that kind of level and so there are all these plant scientists out there around the world who just think this is wonderful and it's like that too for the arable sector." She was happy to accept the honour as it raised the profile of both sectors and honoured the people inside them. "It has to be like that because in the type of job and the career I've had I've never worked in isolation and I've always been working fortunately with really good people, whether it was a university environment, a commercial company or FAR. You can't look at it in isolation because my success has been their success." Dame Alison only wished her late mother and father were alive to see her honoured. Born just outside of Glasgow, her parents were always in the garden propagating plants and trimming rose bushes, exposing her to a love of plants. Her father was a fine instrument engineer repairing mechanical microscopes which got her interested in micro-biology, while her initially stay-at-home mother was a creative woman into flower arrangement, calligraphy and gardening. "My brother was the chartered accountant who's retired back in Scotland so both of us had professional careers. My parents both left school when they were 14 and they basically sacrificed a huge amount to allow my brother and I an opportunity to get a higher education. It's just a shame my parents are no longer alive because they would absolutely love that I have been recognised in this way." At school she was inspired by a biology teacher to choose plant science and when she went to university lecturers instilled this interest in her further. After earning a PhD in plant pathology at the University of Stirling, just north of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the early 1980s, she became the first female professor at Lincoln University in 1998. She said it was nice to have students later come up to her to say they were inspired by her lectures, just as she had been inspired earlier by her teachers. Other accolades were earning excellence in research awards and becoming the founding director of the Bio-Protection Research Centre at the university from 2003 to 2011 and a distinguished professor of plant pathology. She was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of services to biology in 2009. The transition to becoming an executive in applied research after being in a university environment for so long was to find a new challenge, she said. On leaving the university world, she was head of the R&D unit at Marrone Bio Innovations in California in 2013, then became the general manager of forest science at Scion before accepting the chief executive role at FAR in 2018. She said going to a commercial company in the United States had been rewarding and encouraged her to deliver meaningful research to an industry in innovative ways to "time-poor" growers. She plans to spend a semi-retirement in science advisory or governance roles as well as building a new house in Governor's Bay and probably pursuing photography and landscape gardening hobbies. "That's what I've enjoyed about my career — I've been in academia, the commercial environment, in industry, linked in with government agencies and worked in all of the plant sector starting off in vegetables, then horticulture, forestry and a bit of pastoral work and now arable so it's been very broad-ranging. I've always liked governance and you get better with age because as much as you can go to governance workshops a lot of it is based on experience and having been around the block and learned from mistakes I feel that's how I can contribute now." Apart from the odd formal occasion, she would prefer to be called by her first name. "I don't think you will ever be hearing me introducing myself as Dame Alison. I've always just been Alison and don't tend to defer to people based on their title and don't expect people to do that with me."
Otago Daily Times
06-06-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Of auroras and candlelight
King's Birthday weekend saw the Griffin clan decamp to our new crib in Middlemarch. It was meant to be quiet. Slow. Reflective. Books, board games, and an experimental stew I'd prepped with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for museum board meetings. What I didn't know as we rattled west out of Dunedin Friday afternoon was that the Sun — never one for observing public holidays — had exploded. Not literally, but close enough: a giant solar eruption had sent a blast of charged particles careening towards Earth. By Saturday morning, my phone was buzzing with coded messages from my usual back-channel sources: geomagnetic storms incoming. Major aurora alert. Charge your batteries. Cancel your plans. Now, I am an astronomer. A professional, as my accountant and increasingly weary family would attest. And so, on Saturday evening, while the rest of the household settled in with books and red wine, I was outside, deploying cameras like a man possessed. Across both paddocks. Tripods bristling with optics. I had the look of someone trying to film an NHNZ documentary on migrating hedgehogs. The trouble was, the house was ablaze. Every window shone with warm yellow light, leaking out across the section like a lighthouse designed to ruin astrophotography. Even the bathroom window glowed like a warning beacon from low orbit. I went inside, said something that began kindly and ended with a phrase I now regret: "You're blowing out the histograms." There was a silence. Then, one by one, they turned off the lights. My daughter lit a candle. Then another. Soon, the whole family was reading by flickering flame, the house aglow like some 19th-century Scandinavian lodge, with the aurora blazing behind it in shades of lime and crimson. Someone passed around chocolate. Someone else found a blanket. The dog snored. Outside, the sky shimmered and danced, ancient and alive. This week's photo shows that moment: Griffins around a table, each caught in the act of quiet rebellion — or possibly love — beneath a sky performing miracles. Am I obsessive? Yes. But sometimes, obsession lights the way.
Otago Daily Times
05-06-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Stalwart stargazers' service honoured
A Lake Tekapo couple are among the seven people across South Canterbury named in this year's King's Birthday honours. Stargazers Alan Gilmore and Pamela Kilmartin have both been made Members of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM). The couple have both received honours for services to astronomy. Mr Gilmore and Ms Kilmartin were recognised for their contributions to furthering astronomy in New Zealand since the 1970s, particularly through research on hazardous near Earth objects. Ms Kilmartin said while they were both delighted to be honoured, they had a feeling there were others were more deserving in the district including volunteers and first responders. "We were doing work that we love doing, and it was its own reward really," Mr Gilmore said. The couple had been living at Lake Tekapo for 45 years. Ms Kilmartin grew up in Mananui, near Taumarunui, where the night sky was bright with stars. She later moved to Auckland where she joined the Auckland Astronomical Society and took courses organised by the society. Mr Gilmore was born in Greymouth. His father worked on the railways, and he was transferred to Otoko, north of Gisborne. "I think that was probably where I got a first inkling of an interest in stars, because we were walking home from visiting neighbours one night, and I saw a star fall. And my dad was very well read, and he explained that this was a rock falling from space," Mr Gilmore said. Their paths collided in Christchurch, where the two struck up a conversation. "We first met at an astronomical conference, which was very appropriate," Ms Kilmartin said. While she had been living in Auckland at the time, finishing a master's degree, he was in Wellington working at the Carter Observatory. After graduating — and studying further — Ms Kilmartin applied for a job at the same observatory. Mr Gilmore said the board was "a little bit diffident about it". "Pam was obviously the best qualified person, but they knew that we were sort of going round together, and they were not quite sure about it. Anyway, they took a gamble on it." When he had started at the observatory years earlier, his employers had been wanting him to find a scientific programme for a telescope purchased in the 1960s. "So after some experimentation, I built a gadget that allowed us to move the photographic plates, it was all photographic stuff in those days, in the telescope, so that it kind of tracked the movement of a comet or an asteroid against the background stars. "The two of us developed skills in both taking pictures of comets and asteroids and doing the measuring and doing all the tedious sums." They got very good at it, he said. "And then by an extraordinary stroke of luck, we heard about a measuring machine for this work that was going begging at Yale Observatory in the [United] States. "We were sort of invited to ask for it, which we did, and they very kindly sent it out to us. That transformed our work." The couple become observer technicians at Mt John Observatory for the University of Canterbury in 1980. They undertook a voluntary research programme on astronomy during their employment and have co-discovered 41 asteroids and a comet. Retiring in 2014 they have continued their voluntary research in retirement, making observations and sending data to the Minor Planet Center funded by NASA, helping observe asteroids to improve the safety of space missions and planetary defence.
