SOUTH WAIRARAPA REBUS CLUB

The South Wairarapa Rebus Club’s AGM in February elected a new, widely-based committee. The new President is Kay Paget (Greytown), the Secretary and Vice-President is John Reeve (Carterton) and the Treasurer is Jo Laing (Martinborough). The committee includes the Immediate Past President, Perry Cameron (Featherston), Linda Gibbs (Greytown), Tricia Robertson (Carterton), Mike Laing and David Woodhams (Martinborough). 

The March meeting heard from Guest Speaker Dr Richard Dodd, a club member who spent much of his astronomical career in New Zealand, including serving as Director of Carter Observatory, Wellington. In the course of 40 minutes, Richard took us from the earliest known astronomical computer, the Antikythera Mechanism, an orrery thought to date from 205 BC, to the very latest astronomical mechanism, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas day 2021. He showed and discussed images of Earth from distances of 200,000 km (Apollo 17 in 1972), 400,000 km (Apollo 8, Christmas 1968), 50 million km (Mars Global Surveyor), 100 million km (Messenger in orbit about Mercury), 1500 million km (from Cassini in orbit about Saturn) and 6000 million km (the famous “pale blue dot”, from Voyager 1 on Valentine’s Day 1990). He followed this with a tour of the Solar System: Venus and the Sun in ultra violet light, Mercury from spacecraft Messenger, and the surfaces of Venus from Venera 14, the Moon from Apollo 11 and Mars from Perseverance. We visited the dwarf planet Ceres, the asteroid Bennu and saw Hubble’s Jupiter and its Galilean moons. Saturn with its rings was viewed from the Hubble Space Telescope and, spectacularly, from the Cassini spacecraft, with Saturn eclipsing the sun and showing the rings backlit. After visits to Uranus and Neptune, photographed from Voyager 1, we saw an enhanced colour slide of Pluto and a Plutonian landscape showing mountains named after Ed Hilary and Tensing Norgay, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. This craft also returned pictures of Arrokoth, in the Kuiper belt, the most distant asteroid yet visited by a human spacecraft, looking for all the world like a two-layer cottage loaf. The two nearly spherical lobes, Ultima and Thule, are joined at a narrow waist. Richard concluded his address first with a picture of two giant planets circling a sun-like star, 310 light years away, then by a photograph of the MOA telescope of NZ’s Mount John observatory, that has detected numbers of exoplanets over the last 20 years, and finally of the night launch of an electron rocket from the Mahia Peninsula. It was an inspiring presentation much enjoyed by the membership.

Earlier in the meeting, club member Linda Gibbs, who was born in Greytown in 1929, talked about her early experiences growing up in the town.

The South Wairarapa Rebus Club meets in the South Wairarapa Working Men’s Club on the fourth Friday morning of each month and organises an outing in those months with a fifth Friday. Anyone in the retired age group who may be interested in SW Rebus Club is welcome to come along to a meeting as a visitor.  Please contact David Woodhams 306 8319.