Gonariu

Merry Christmas to you too and to all subscribers to this forum.

True, I did not remember that Newton was buried in Westminster, I remembered the queens Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart. The Greenwich observatory is also worth seeing, glorious pages of astronomy have been written there. We hope that you too have some summer temperatures and good weather, I saw that in September the temperature in London can even reach 28º; I can tell you that when it rains continuously here for about ten days I get bored and I begin to grumble! A 127 mm refractor like yours deserves to be used, I wish you really nice weather in this last month of summer, on the contrary we are waiting for next month to start raining after three months that it only did a few drops! Take care and above all clear skies !!!

Agostino.

Surely your great-great-grandmother went to live in the United Kingdom for work reasons with her family of origin, Southern Italy is still an economically depressed area today. My great-grandfather had emigrated to the USA with his brother, they had a bar in El Paso, he came back but his brother didn't and nothing more was heard. Surely the Sicilian cuisine is worth trying, the "cassata" is quite famous!
We have gotten used to hot summers for some time, the problem is when it rains little in winter (as in Sicily, here too the rains are winter with even a long summer drought), sometimes they ration us water because the dams they are half empty ... ..... The fires have done great damage in the Montiferru area, where I am, they have not touched us, but it is a chronic problem that we have here every summer. Unfortunately, the lands of the Mediterranean this summer were an immense brazier.
The warm sea gives us winters that are quite mild, in Cagliari, my hometown, it snows every 30 years; when I was a child my dream was to see snow, then in 1985 (I was 17) it snowed at the beginning of January (10 cm of snow!) and the city literally went crazy with joy, I hadn't even gone to school ( here we are not equipped for snow and in these cases everything stops)! However believe me, I don't feel like taking a bath in January!
I saw some satellite photos, the Sahara is really dark, saving up the money it is better to spend the Christmas holidays there with a small travel telescope, achromatic or apochromatic like the 80/400 for example. I did not know that in New Zealand they had a great sky, you are also lucky enough to have the same language and in addition the climate is always mild, at least in the North Island. The problem is that it is the antipodes, the flight by plane is long and certainly costs.
Surely there is a lot to see with you as far as art is concerned, I did not know about East Anglia. When I was a kid my father bought a book about Westminster Abbey, I watched it several times, live it must be much more beautiful.
Take care, clear skies and good observations: Jupiter is making furore at the telescope!

Agostino.

Hi George, here in Sardinia and especially in Cagliari in the south of the island we are not used to the cold. In Cagliari in winter the sea water has a temperature of + 14º C, I have never considered swimming in that month, some “brave” do it. Surely it takes a nice bathrobe to wear in a rush as one comes out of the water! Having done it at Christmas means that you can stand the cold well. If you happen to come to Sardinia bring a travel telescope with you, in 24,000 km2 we are 1.6 million inhabitants (the classic 4 cats, as they say in Italian) so there is little light pollution; think that I was a few years ago in a farmhouse in the countryside near the village of Dorgali and I will tell you that I have never seen a sky so full of stars, I was lost in it to the point of not recognizing the constellations! I have traveled very little, it would be very nice to take a trip to the UK during the summer holidays both for the coolness that we envy you here (this summer was fiery) and for the art (your gothic churches, Stonehenge, to do some example).

Regards and clear skies.

Agostino.

The North Sea must be a bit cold to dive without a wetsuit. It is certainly like swimming in Cagliari by the sea (south Sardinia) in January; I have never entered the water before May.