Star Lost

I know this is hard to believe but I have only had one night when I was able to see the stars clearly the whole time we have been travelling throughout the southern hemisphere. Most nights were either too cloudy or the ship’s lights overwhelmed the skies. You’d think it would be easier on a boat in the middle of the ocean with nothing around it, but they do like their lights, does Holland America! Also, our cabin neighbours keep their balcony light on 24/7 so it’s hard to see starlight from the relative dark of our cabin too. But between Picton and Wellington there were clear skies and it was dark enough to see beyond. There was a glorious array of stars and an almost full moon….but even then, I did not get to see the Southern Cross. I am not sure where it is at this time of year and I suspect that either it is too low in the sky for me to see with the mountains in the way, or it isn’t seeable until much later at night than I am awake. Wifi is such that I am unable to turn on my trusty night sky ap. I have seen it before though so I know it exists. And there is something so lovely about seeing a myriad of stars, so many that they make shadows! Most places on earth provide this of course, but most people on earth live in cities and so rarely get the chance to see the cosmos more vibrant than the land. It’s a very personal thing, seeing so many stars that they cause reflections on the water – one could navigate with them quite easily.

Here’s something I didn’t know about the southern hemisphere. A sundial works in the opposite way here. But because sundials were originally developed in the northern hemisphere, time moves in what we now call a clockwise direction, as the sun moves to the right. If someone in the southern hemisphere had got to that invention first, it’s quite likely that all our clocks would work in the opposite way, counter-clockwise!

I sometimes wondered why some weathermen/women called storms hurricanes, cyclones or typhoons. Was there a difference? Does the hemisphere have something to do with it? Or is it an East/West thing? Technically, it seems they are all the same form of weather phenomenon. Synonymous you might say. Tropical Storm = Hurricane = Cyclone = Typhoon. The main reason we have different names for them is to indicate where in the world they take place. Storms in the Atlantic and the Northeast Pacific are referred to as Hurricanes. In the Northwest Pacific they are Typhoons, and in the Indian Ocean or South Pacific they are Cyclones. If it's a Tropical Cyclone, for example, it just means the storm started in the seas between the two tropics (Cancer and Capricorn).

But what’s also kinda cool is that the winds in these oceanic storms do swirl in opposite directions, depending on the hemisphere. In the north they swirl counter-clockwise, and in the south they swirl clockwise. This is due to the earth’s rotation, the Coriolis effect. There is not enough of a Coriolis effect between the equator and 5 degrees north or south and so there are no such storms in these areas!