Places · Impact site
Wolfe Creek Crater
Known to the Djaru people as Kandimalal long before it was surveyed from the air in 1947. Nearly 900 m across and remarkably well preserved by the desert.
- Where
- Kimberley, Western Australia
- Coordinates
- 19.17°S 127.80°E
- Age
- 120,000 years ago
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- dbca.wa.gov.au
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 15 km north.
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 80° 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 19.17°S 127.80°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 Wolfe Creek Crater?
Everything north of declination +71°. From 19.2°S that is a cap 19° in radius centred on the north celestial pole, which is 2.8% 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 Wolfe Creek Crater get?
From about 7 hours 56 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 December, up to 10 hours 25 minutes around 21 June. That counts only proper astronomical night, with the Sun eighteen degrees down; the merely-dark hours either side of it are longer. Unlike sites further from the equator, no part of the year here is written off entirely.
When is the Milky Way best from Wolfe Creek Crater?
Midwinter — around 17 June, when the centre of the galaxy is on the meridian at local midnight. South of the equator that date brings the longest nights of the year rather than the shortest, so the best part of the sky is highest exactly when there is most darkness to see it in. Nothing about instrumentation compensates for that; it is why the serious optical telescopes went south.
How far is Wolfe Creek Crater from the other sites on this map?
SKA-Low is the nearest thing to it here — 1,410 km to the south-west. The nearest other impact site is Sikhote-Alin fall, 7,300 km to the north. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.