Dawn at the SAAO - South Africa

Due to Eclipse activities, Lolan Naicker, the Coordinator for the Development of Astronomy of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), only now had a little time to talk about his "Dawn" event, which was integrated in the Sutherland Star Party 2008:

"For Dawn of Astronomy 2009 we included a viewing of the first sunrise of 2009 into our Sutherland New Year Starparty program.
Around 30 attendees of the starparty on new years eve braved the cold Sutherland night on the top of the telescope plateau to see the sun rise for the first time over the Karoo Desert on IYA2009. It was a beautiful red orange sunrise - an awe inspiring experience on this very restricted plateau . We followed up the sunrise viewing with an observation at noon 1 January 2009 with the few remaining attendees - seen through a H-alpha filtered coronado PST.

The sunrise viewing pictures are located at http://astrocast.org/star_party_IYA2009/"

Here are some photos from the SAAO event: