We left Perth on Friday 24th October at about 12.00 p.m. Our plan was to have lunch in Mundaring, whilst doing some shopping for the weekend. It rained most of the way until we reached Meckering, where we had sunshine and the rose garden was in full bloom.

Whilst we were driving to Tammin Matt went to an astronomy exhibit at the museum and posed for a photo. He was keen to move on to the cafe, of course.

It remained cloudy for the rest of the way, including at Tammin. We had to trust the more experienced people in the ASWA group who knew that the clouds often clear after sunset. Stephen set up his telescope on the main platform with the others and I went to see if I could help with preparing the evening meal. As members, the meals were free, but took a fair bit of preparation. Myself and one of the men ended up cooking on the BBQ. I just did the onions, he was in charge of the sausages.

We ate just before sunset so that the people on telescopes could take advantage of the night sky from as early as possible. Of course, the Milky Way doesn’t rise until later, and we had a crescent moon that was casting quite a lot of light.

Stephen did not have much success with his telescope that night, fortunately others were generous in sharing as they located different planets (Saturn in particular as it was a good time for it), plus some galaxies. It became extremely cold and I gave up when, despite being well rugged up, my teeth were chattering. We packed up the telescope (we don’t have a dew cover) and went to bed.

The next day we slept in until about 9.00 a.m. and had a fairly lazy day. We were parked fairly near to the shipping container and the main viewing platform, but Stephen loses orientation in the dark and found it difficult to negotiate even that distance. So, we set up our telescopes and an action camera to do a timelapse near our van.

I went to help with the evening meal, consisting of roast beef, roast lamb and roast chicken, with roasted veggies, peas and gravy. It was a huge task to get it all ready, but very good for eating and there was very little leftover at the end. We had some older children there and they helped with washing up, much to the relief of Jan who organises the food and finds it very tiring, even with helpers.

After dark it wasn’t as cold as Friday night and the clouds cleared again for good viewing conditions. Stephen was able to do the calibrations and find Saturn, we were thrilled as we had been contemplating having to buy a new telescope (Stephen dropped the cylinder a few days after buying this one and we thought the damage was fatal, but not so). I had set up the SeeStar and had a stacked image with a falling star across one side and a timelapse that didn’t work at all, despite following Youtube provided settings.

On Sunday morning we packed up to leave, then drove about 20kms northward to Yorkrakine Rock. There was a short walk to one of the summits and that was enough, considering we didn’t arrive until the middle of the day. Fortunately there was good cloud cover. I enjoyed flying the drone, including taking a Mastershot, so much better than when I fly manually.

We had lunch at the Cunderdin Pub afterwards, arriving at about 1.00 p.m. After lunch we drove home, with a stop at the Northam roadhouse for coffee. Stephen had driven back from the Rock to Cunderdin, so it wasn’t as tiring for me as it might have been.