It was the day that everyone at the Australian Astrononomical Observatory surely knew might eventually come.
This was the Anglo-Australian Telescope at the Australian Astrononomical Observatory, taken by a Rural Fire Service reconnaissance aircraft yesterday, just before the bushfire hit the Observatory:
That is an astonishing image, which is destined to be an iconic photograph for many years to come. It was taken and published before the blaze hit and astronomers all feared the worst.
Here is part of what happened yesterday, image taken from a webcam at the Observatory:
This facility is the jewel of Australian optical astronomy, yet vegetation goes right up to and passes through the Observatory grounds. Despite calls by some to clear it away (it's gone now anyway), I wonder how much bush clearing would have been needed to stop such a ferocious fire passing through the facility. The fire was colossal, it was fast and it surpassed 100 degrees as it swept over.
They obviously learnt lessons from the Mt Stromlo fire: Brian Schmidt said that "measures taken to minimise the risk from bushfires had helped save the SSO from wholesale devastation. It was going through and cleaning out some of the trees, putting fire safe springs on every window, using fire retardant paint everywhere, a whole range of measures,” he said.
The lower graph shows the temperature spike of 100+ degrees (yellow) outside temperature as the fire swept past. Amazingly, inside the AAT dome, the temperature only rose five degrees (magenta); and the 3.9 metre diameter mirror temperature (green) stayed flat at 25 degrees!
This is my own image of the AAT, taken during a Macarthur Astronomical Society tour of the facility in August 2010:
At least the big telescope survived the inferno and no-one died.
The best descriptions of the event were:
1. Blog posts published in real time by Amanda Bauer, AAO astronomer at:
2. Twitter posts, mainly by Brad Tucker @btucker22 but also by others using the #sso hashtag. Brad works for the SSO but was in the US at the time, tapping into the AAO resources to establish what was happening and tweeting the results, with realtime images. I've often doubted Twitter as a medium but this experience has now shown me the extraordinary power this particular social medium has. The mainstream media and other social media were way behind!