During the last school holidays, Carolyn Green (who teaches Earth & Space Science at Hagley) had the once in a lifetime opportunity to go on a flight in the NASA SOFIA aircraft. Here's her story.

SOFIA is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infra-Red Astronomy. It's a huge plane that has been coming to Christchurch for about 6 weeks every winter for the last few years to study objects in the southern sky. This year is the first time that teachers have been taken for a flight.

The observatory is a modified Boeing 747SP with a 2.7m reflecting telescope that flies between 38,000 and 45,000 ft. At this height, it is above 99% of the water vapour in the atmosphere. It flies at this height because water vapour blocks infra-red light making it difficult to make observations at infra-red wavelengths on the ground.

My flight experience started at 3pm with a safety briefing. This was not just the usual briefing but one in which we had to learn how to evacuate the aircraft safely in an emergency, including how to open the doors as well as how to use a smoke hood. The smoke hoods had to be carried with us at all times on the aircraft. I was pleased not to have to use one though!

We then got to sit in on the flight briefing where they went through all the details like the flight plan, the weather, and what they would be observing that night. There was a risk that we would have to come back early or get diverted to Ohakea as fog was forecast for Christchurch that night. Luckily it didn’t happen. We were also warned that we needed to drink a lot of water on the flight and that there was going to be a fridge full of water for us. On the flight they were observing the centre of the galaxy, as well as the remnants of a supernova.

We took off just as the sun was setting over Christchurch and headed over the mountains to get set up. We then turned back across and flew over Dunedin, and around this time we got our first glimpse of the Aurora Australis. This was an amazing spectacle for about half the flight as it twisted and moved, showing a variety of green colours.

Once in the air we were free to move around and listen in to what was happening. It was very noisy on the aircraft so we wore earplugs when we were not wearing the headsets. I got the opportunity to speak to one of the flight directors whose job it was to co-ordinate between the people operating the instruments and the pilots. I also got to visit the flight deck and speak to the pilots, and while up there watch the aurora from the cockpit. We also spoke to all the scientists and technicians.

On one of the first legs of the flight they were observing the infra-red light in a section of the centre of our galaxy as part of a large project mapping the centre of the galaxy, and later in the flight the scientist working on this showed us the data he had got and how much more detailed it was than previous data. Using infra-red light for this is important as a lot of these details are unable to be seen at visible wavelengths because they are absorbed by gas and dust in space before they get to us, but infra-red is able to get through.

As the night wore on it became very cold on the aircraft. We also had to make sure we kept drinking the water provided. I found that even after drinking five bottles of water I still felt very dehydrated the next day. It really is very dry up there!

After about eight hours in the sky we landed back in Christchurch at 3.15am, tired but armed with a whole lot of new knowledge of this particular type of astronomy.