A Little Bit Extra

When you book one of our AuthenticAs Starry Nights Adventures, you will notice that there is an option to add ‘A Little Bit Extra’. As we’re developing our tours, we’re starting to understand what you, our clients are looking for and what we can do to ensure you get the best possible experience of the Southern Night Sky.

Let’s first have a run through of what you’ll experience on the usual AuthenticAs Starry Nights Adventure. The first thing you’ll notice is that when we pick you up from your accommodation, or any other location in the Wakatipu Basin, it’s only you and your group on the tour. This is by design, and we believe this is one of the most important aspects of our tours and takes your experience to a whole new level.

Being under the stars is a way for us to connect to nature, to the past, the enormity of the universe and giving a perspective on where we stand within it. That’s some pretty hefty experience right there. We believe that this should be an experience that can shift around who you are as a person and the group, who all know each other. That’s the key. If you add in other people you don’t know, it’s impossible for us to cater in this way to each of you.

We understand it makes it a little more expensive if you’re a solo traveler or a small group, but experience has shown us along with feedback from our guests - especially the solo travelers, is that this really does add to the experience of your tailored AuthenticAs Starry Nights Adventure. We continually strive to deliver the best possible value for all of our guests.

When we arrive at the location we’ll base ourselves from, it takes five to ten minutes to get our gear setup. During this time, you’ll be starting to take in the beautiful night sky and allowing your eyes to adjust. Starlight is faint, that’s why we take you away from bright lights, and it takes our eyes and brain a wee while to adjust to working in low light. It’s amazing how well this works in allowing you to arrive, and slowdown. We invite you to take notice of what you see, after all, observation using all of your senses is the foundation of science.

It usually takes Simon around an hour to give you a tour of the universe. We’ll spend time using our eyes, our laser pointer helping show you the way. We can zoom in with binoculars then closer again using the telescope, and our camera will help us ‘see’ any auroral activity and some of the even darker features and structures shining down from above, such as the Magellanic Clouds and Milky Way. We’ve developed a slideshow to use on our iPad, along with a few other key apps to help you understand many basic concepts of how and where we exist and move within the Universe. We want to give you the skills so that you can further your stargazing journey every time you have the opportunity to look at the night sky, either in the Southern or Northern hemisphere.

As we pack down the equipment, it’s a perfect opportunity to warm you up with some Cadubry’s Hot Chocolate and a cookie. Whilst enjoying those, you can take in the full force of the Land Rovers heating if you’ve noticed it’s cold, or simply continue to brave the elements and soak up more of the incredible views.

Once you’re warm and toastie, we’ll take a few photographs of you all. From your perspective it’s really easy, all you have to do is stand still, so perhaps sometimes it’s not always that easy. But, essentially, we’ll be setting up the camera in one place so that we can capture you under the stars in a few different poses as single images. We’ll then spin the camera around on the tripod and capture images to enable us to insert the best photograph of you and your group into the panorama, an amazing 360 degree photograph of you all under the Southern Night Sky.

In terms of where we visit, we usually wait until nearer the time to decide, as the weather has a huge impact upon where we can go during your tour. If we think there is a chance of an Aurora, then we’ll head where we have a better chance of seeing it. When you place your booking you can let us know if you prefer Mountains or Lakes.

Now we’ve been through what happens on the regular tour, it’s the perfect time to introduce the ‘Little Bit Extra’. We created this when we realised that some people just want that little bit more. How we spend that extra time depends entirely upon you.

If for instance, you’re wanting to propose, this is absolutely perfect. You might have recently become engaged to marry, just married or or maybe now is the time in life when you’re expecting a child and would love a set of Starry Nights Photographs to celebrate and remember. This extra time allows us the opportunity to capture photographs that have that extra eye of the details. You’d like to have some photographs from different angles and even with a totally different background to them. It’s not just about couples, for our solo travelers, families and friend groups as well, if we’ve been in the mountains, you might like to have a different set of images from the Lakeside and vice versa. Or you just might want to spend some more time looking through the telescope and listening to stories.

You might be looking to improve your photography skills. We love to pass on our knowledge about astrophotography, and do our best to make it as simple as possible with the cameras you have with you. The little bit extra allows us extra time.

If you’re really into the photography aspect of what we do, being in or taking, then this extra can allow us to change location to create a beautiful set of images for you in a different setting. Exploring the Wakatipu Basin at night is such a beautiful experience.

When you arrive here in the Southern Lakes you will discover that you are indeed in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, so it makes total sense for you to invest in yourself and you memories to create a beautiful set of travel photographs. Whilst The Little Bit Extra works really well for adding more dark hours, you might also want to consider adding in some daylight hours into your tour.

The two tours that spring to mind are AuthenticAs Queenstown and the very popular Top & Back. We’d schedule your day time tour to start so it transitions from daylight, through golden hour into twilight, then fading away into the night time when we would get the telescope out and introduce you to the Southern Night Sky.

If you are thinking about adding on some daytime hours, we ask you to please emailus@authenticAs.org so we work out some options together. This is very much a bespoke experience rather than an off the shelf product and we want to ensure we craft something truly amazing for you all.

To get a really great feel for how this would work, why not have a read of ‘Day into night and the magical bit between’ - a bucket list adventure for sure.