12 May 2012 - Charleville, WWII and stargazing

We booked in to do a tag along tour of the airfield and base that was built by  the Americans in WWII. Not much remains of the base as the Americans destroyed most of it at the end of the war. Charleville was used as a base for the B17 Flying Fortress. They were far enough away from the coast to be out of range of any of the Japanese planes. It was very interesting and the guide was very passionate about what they had so far uncovered. They have a group of Uni of QLD archeology students arriving later in the year to try and uncover more artifacts and remains of buildings.

We played a few games in the afternoon with the kids including kicking the football as high as possible into the air and have them chase it. Unfortunately the ball landed on some of the  nasty outback prickles and had to be thrown out a few days later.

I was booked into a session at the Charleville Cosmos Centre at 7.30 to do some stargazing. The centre is very new and was one of 16 tourist attractions built in Western QLD with state and federal funding. The original plans were for a 'Waltzing Matilda' style museum. The locals however thought this was a little 'parse' and requested an astronomy centre instead. This is certainly a bit different and the session I went to was full. We looked at some dying stars, new stars, Saturn and Alpha Centauri. It was a worthwhile session but it would have been good to spend some more time on the telescopes.