"Poyekali" for Yuri's Night in Wellington, New Zealand

The night has fallen over New Zealand, the first place in the world where we celebrated Yuri's Night.
The stars are twinkling in the distance on the April's sky. 50 years ago, Gagarin was launching into a journey around Earth aboard Vostok 1.

The historical flight connected the two hemispheres and all nations into a huge circle. He went around the Earth and just like Galileo Galilei on 7th of January 1610 looking through his telescope "for the first time in the history of humankind", Gagarin saw on 12th of April 1961 the Edge of Space.

To honour this event, KiwiSpace Foundation organised with the support of Carter Observatory, the public screening of the movie "First Orbit" in Wellington. This was done in conjunction with the launch of the newest planetarium show at Carter - "The Dawn of the Space Age".

We had the honour of having His Excellency the Russian Ambassador Andrey Tatarinov to open the night.

Ambassador Tatarinov also mentioned that at the initiative of the Russian Federation,
12 of April was declared by the General Assembly of the United Nations,
the "International Day of Human Spaceflight"

We watched a great planetarium show. It talked about the beginning of the space race and the very essence bringing the world together in our quest to get outside of the comfort zone: our human nature.
It talked about the first steps we made in space that gave us amazing advancements in science.
It talked about heroes who risked their lives, taking their first space walks or driving the rovers on the Moon, people like me and you with dreams, families and favourite books that some liked to read whilst orbiting our natural satellite.

After the show we all went to celebrate the evening in the reception room. There, we introduced the KiwiSpace Foundation, our goals and hopes for the future. The transmission from Commander Dmitry Kondratyev, currently on the International Space Station was next in line.
Our guests watched him sending his message to all of New Zealand at the anniversary of 50 years from the first flight into space. At the end, on this historical day, he congratulated KiwiSpace Foundation for our incorporation.
This was an outstanding broadcast from space that made its way through our hearts and minds.
Godspeed Commander Kondratyev as you watch over us from above! (And very special thanks to Mark Mackay, our Executive Director who made this communique possible.)

We asked Ambassador Tatarinov to give the signal to start the movie and he kindly accepted to make us this honour. 

"Poyekali!" he said and everyone in the audience applauded.

The night closed with a telescope viewing through my favourite telescope in the world, the historical 144 years old Thomas Cooke as in the good old tradition of any star party. We saw "the Jewel Box", an open star cluster observable only from the Southern Hemisphere and my favourite celestial object of all times, the planet Saturn; What a sight!

KiwiSpace Foundation Team at the Wellington event:
Vicki Irons, Elf Eldridge, Paul Moss, myself and Michael Capovilla.

"Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!"
Yuri Gagarin

Have a great start everyone in all your space endeavours and under the umbrella of the KiwiSpace Foundation and 

Clear Skies from Wellington

On behalf of the ground crew from here,

Haritina