Perth Observatory — Attraction in Bickley

Passionate volunteers, beautiful scenery, fascinating telescopes and storytelling.

Loved the moon tour we went on, and wish I could hang at a bar with the geologists afterwards.

They were clearly incredibly passionate and knew so much more than we could cover in the tour time!

🌱 A note on accessibility:

Unfortunately support for mobility and hearing access isn’t built into the tour experience by default.

My vibe was that this wasn’t out of neglect, but more a lack of funding, resources and training.

We found the reception and booking team were verbally supportive and understanding when I called up on the phone.

But there was limited information about seating, stairs, walking distance and captions online so we didn’t quite have the information required to ensure an easeful visit.

If you have trouble standing for long periods of time (20mins), I would reccomend bringing a lightweight portable chair to sit on.

Most of the telescopes don’t have any seating (or only 1 chair available). And two are up a flight of stairs.

The transitions between stations are also quite rushed, so you may need to do some self advocacy to ensure you don’t miss out if you have to go slower to keep up with the group.

Also a bit challenging in terms of audio processing at each station.

The presenters speak clearly and project well - but there is so much information that I found it hard to keep up, especially without visual aids (as the room had to be dark for night viewing of stars).

There will be 1x rumbly telescope engine as well (about the decibels of a loud bathroom fan in the background), so bring earplugs/headphones if you have ASD or have flares triggered by loud/repetitive noises.

Having said all that, the tour was still an incredible experience and reignited the most joyful wonder awe and connection with our magnificent universe that I have felt in a long time 😍🌈🌻

So don’t let it stop you if it’s something important to you! It’s definitely worth at least one trip. Just plan to have a crash day afterwards, and use this info to plan some supports to make it easier.

Best...

Very disappointing experience from this place. I had been observing a bright star with the unaided eye from my neighborhood for many weeks and, wanting to identify it, I thought I would contact this observatory and hopefully get an experienced astronomer to identify it from a good description that I sent. I gave a good, well written description of this star, including relative size, colours, movement in the sky and its locations at certain times.

But all I got back from the 'Tour Administrator' was a hastily and poorly written reply saying that it was probably something to do with the airport. This guy obviously wasn't an astronomer as that is the answer I would expect to get from a layman, someone with no astronomy experience. I thought a staff member from an observatory would have more interest and respect for my inquiry.

Rather lazy and dismissive, but still, I sent back a reply telling him I had asked the same question of members of an astronomy forum and had been told by several people there that it was most likely Canopus, the brightest star in the southern sky at that time from a position in WA. They also kindly told me about the shape and colours and why this occurred.

However this fellow, the Tour Administrator, did not even have the courtesy to reply...

The thing about looking through a telescope is it's fairly underwhelming for mister Joe Blow compared to the fantastic detailed sky photography that is presented as reality based on hundreds of exposures, each lasting many minutes, computer combined to a single image then artificial colour added derived from radiation sources we cannot see, what you'll see on the night through the telescopes is generally bright smudges. The night tour started at 19:30, the sky is impressively dark looking away from Perth's glow, the Milky Way, our galaxy, is truly amazing, Having never seen it before, too much city light pollution, it's an emotional experience. Groups are formed from attendees, named alpha, beta, delta, gamma etc - you get the drill, then admitted to each telescope in turn twice to view selected objects, nebulae, cluster galaxies - the most impressive through the 30" Obsession telescope. I would have preferred to have been given a list of the objects viewed, the volunteer staff vary in knowledge, some brilliant others just learning - the information provided is generally more interesting than the viewed objects. Go and look at the amazing Milky Way -...