Koppie Werf

The lamp is on. Almost nothing is visible.

Staying

Four rooms and one telescope.

A working farmstead on the edge of the sand sea, and one of the darkest skies anyone has measured. Every room is described by what it offers an observer as well as by what is in it, because at 21.85 mag/arcsec² the difference between one door and another is measurable.

Low rocky hills and scattered thorn scrub on a dry plain in late evening light, one of the hills a bare cone against a pale sky.

Photographs on this page dim with the page. A screen is the brightest thing on a property like this one, so when the lamp is out these hold 16% of their light and none of their colour — the figure derived from this property’s own 21.85 mag/arcsec², and the colour because a dark-adapted eye is running on rods, which have none.

The rooms

Rates are per night, April to October. Minimum stay 2 nights.

What you look through

What the skyline costs you

The skyline from the stoep was measured with a clinometer at 72 azimuths and it is a file on this site, not an impression. It is also the reason the star counts here are lower than a planetarium would give you: tonight the skyline hides 355 of the 4,227 stars above the mathematical horizon.

10°The Shearing ShedThe Stoep RoomKoppie HideNESWN
Measured from the stoep with a clinometer at 72 bearings, and drawn from the same file the sky above is masked with. The highest point is 14.1° at bearing 245°, which is WSW. Everything under the line is sky this property does not have: 355 of the 4,227 stars above the mathematical horizon tonight, and 3 of the 12 objects on the house list — Omega Centauri, The Carina Nebula, The Jewel Box.

The highest point on it is 14.1° at azimuth 245° — the koppie the farm is named for. Everything behind it is below the horizon from here, whatever the almanac says is up.

Nothing on this site is a photograph of the sky, so nothing on it can flatter the sky. What the pages show is what the arithmetic gives, including where it is unflattering.