'With the 1.9m we were looking at the spectra itself. Like looking at a prism, we used diffraction gratings where you could shift the light and look at different parts of the colour spectrum - from there you can tell from what stars were made of and so forth. Just doing star gazing, especially if you look at Jupiter and Saturn, it blows your mind away. If you look at Jupiter it looks like a solar system on its own. The big mother planet with a few small moons around it, and from time to time you see one of the moons disappear. Then you look at Saturn with the nice rings around it, it looks like a sombrero - that is just unbelievable.'
Francois van Wyk, Night Assistant and service observer, South African Astronomical Observatory, Sutherland.