My first glimpse of the southern sky was from the airplane window, 39,000 feet above the South Pacific. I saw two very bright stars a few degrees apart pointing to a medium-sized cruciform asterism, which turned out to be the Southern Cross. The two bright stars, called the "pointers" for their orientation relative to Crux, are Alpha and Beta Centauri. Alpha, of course, is famous as the brightest member of the closest star system to the Earth.

Once on the ground in Auckland, I headed for the Auckland Observatory, where I was shown some sights through their 20" Zeiss telescope, including 47 Tucanae, one of the brightest globular clusters in the sky. I couldn’t find the Magellanic Clouds, however, and the telescope operator told me that they are generally impossible to see from Auckland, which is New Zealand’s largest and most light-polluted city. I also learned that while Kiwis will agree that Orion is "upside down" when viewed from New Zealand, it is best to let them volunteer this information, rather than betray one’s northern-hemisphere bias by announcing it oneself.

The next portion of our trip was on a cruise ship, and I had a couple of clear nights in the Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands. After finding the few square feet of the ship not illuminated by blinding white lights, I was able to use my binoculars on the Southern Milky Way, and the experience was just stunning.

I have read that one’s first experience stargazing in the southern hemisphere should be with a low-power, wide-field instrument because the interesting deep-sky objects there are big and bright. It’s quite true; the sky around the Southern Cross is just littered with nebulae, star clusters and multi-colored double stars.

Near Crux is the tiny (in binoculars) Jewel Box, a rich open cluster with over 100 stars. Also nearby is the Coal Sack, a large, naked-eye dark nebula, as the name suggests. On the opposite side of the Southern Cross, the nebulae and clusters are too dense to enumerate, apart from the very bright and conspicuous Eta Carinae nebula.

Overhead, I could make out the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds easily, and my binoculars showed the Tarantula Nebula located in the larger of these two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. The globular 47 Tucanae is adjacent to the Small Magellanic Cloud.