Starstruck

I was listening to RTE Radio 1 on Saturday morning while having a very late breakfast. The Marion Finucane show was on, and there was a feature on holidays. The first piece in the feature was about holidays where one works on a farm in return for board. Granted, the farms in question were in Tuscany but, as I know myself from working a summer job on a farm in Canada many years ago, farming is farming regardless of the view or the weather.  And a sunny summer in Tuscany is not quite the same when you are working from dawn to dusk, doing hard physical labour that you are not used to [I assuming that you’d have to be a soft townie to fall for such an offer in the first place]. Still, there is surely an opportunity for farmers in Connemara to offer a similar holiday – spend your days footing turf, mending fences, shearing sheep and cutting hay, and you won’t even have the energy to complain about the weather.

The other article was about astronomy tourism. The ‘expert’ – Joan Scales of the Irish Times – mentioned that South Africa was a great destination for astronomers to combine a holiday and some star-gazing because of the clear skies and also the chance to see starts that are only visible in the southern hemisphere, such as the Orion constellation. Hmm…I wonder if the rest of her information was as well researched. Orion, of course, is perfectly visible in the northern hemisphere, including from Gort, Inishbofin and even across the bay on the Flaggy Shore. Just in case she gets confused again, here is a video of Orion over Lough Inagh in Connemara at sunrise.

A star that can be very difficult to see in Ireland is the sun – particularly in summer – but we had clear skies in Connemara all day today (along with a bitterly cold easterly wind) – picture taken at the summit  of Corcóg in the Maumturk mountain range.