Places · Impact site
Hoba meteorite
Sixty tonnes of iron lying flat in a field — the largest single meteorite ever found, and the largest naturally occurring piece of iron on the surface of the Earth. It has never been moved.
The sky from here
This is a zone 3 sky — rural transition on the nine-grade scale, Bortle 3–4, reaching roughly magnitude 6.2–7.0 unaided. The Milky Way is clearly there but loses its detail near the horizon. Light domes are obvious in several directions.
That grade puts 106 of the catalogue within easy reach of 10×50 binoculars and 106 within a 130mm — 38 of them need no instrument at all. Genuinely dark sky — zone 2 or darker — starts about 22 km west.
There is no season here in which the sky fails to get properly dark — the Sun clears eighteen degrees below the horizon on all 365 nights.
The centre of the galaxy climbs to 81° at its best — high enough that the summer Milky Way is genuinely three-dimensional rather than a band low in the south. Of the 110 Messier objects, none are circumpolar and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
Of everything in the catalogue, Omega Nebula, Trifid Nebula and Lagoon Nebula are the best served here, climbing to within a few degrees of straight up — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Read at 19.59°S 17.93°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Hoba meteorite?
Everything north of declination +70°. From 19.6°S that is a cap 20° in radius centred on the north celestial pole, which is 2.9% of the whole celestial sphere. That part of the sky is not merely a winter object or a difficult one; it is geometrically unavailable from this latitude. The equivalent cap around the south celestial pole is the compensation, and it never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Hoba meteorite get?
Between 7 hours 54 minutes on the shortest night of the year, around 21 December, and 10 hours 26 minutes on the longest, around 21 June. Astronomical darkness is the Sun more than eighteen degrees below the horizon, which is a stricter thing than the Sun being down. The sky here reaches it on every night of the year, which is not true much further from the equator.
When is the Milky Way best from Hoba meteorite?
June and July, and the timing is the whole point. The core transits at midnight around 17 June everywhere, but at 19.6°S that is the depth of winter: the longest nights of the year, sitting underneath the galaxy at its highest. Northern sites get the same transit date during their shortest and least dark nights. It is the single biggest structural advantage a southern observatory has.
How far is Hoba meteorite from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is H.E.S.S., about 435 km to the south. The nearest other impact site is Vredefort Dome, 1,280 km to the south-east. Distances are great-circle, so they are what a signal covers rather than what a road does.