Egypt’s asteroid beach is place to be for best space rock show in the Middle East
▶ Red Sea town of Marsa Alam pulls in stargazers for Lyrid meteor shower
Nayzak Beach lies about 14 kilometres south of Marsa Alam in the south of Egypt.
The approach to the beach is off-road but otherwise unremarkable except for the turquoise sea. Until you are at the edge of what looks like a crater, there is no noticeable attraction there.
But the Egyptian town of Marsa Alam is known to be one of the best places for stargazing.
Nayzak means asteroid in Arabic. The popular belief is that this hole in the coast was made by one, before it was filled with clear, deep blue water along with some butterfly fish and purple jellyfish.
This is folklore, of course, but there is something about Egypt’s southern Red Sea coast that connects the observer with space. It is not strictly deserted but you can drive on long stretches of unlit road without seeing anyone, until a pair of headlights appears on the horizon.
If that particular car is on a hill, one might even be led to believe it is a UFO.
I might have been predisposed to think about Marsa Alam in this way, given the reason for my trip to the area.
My friends and I had planned our visit to coincide with the Lyrid meteor shower, an annual event that seems to radiate from the brightest star in Lyra the Harp, the constellation that appears low in the north-eastern sky in Egypt in late April.
This year’s shower came just after a popular music festival in Marsa Alam, 3alganoob. But most of the crowd had left, clearing the beaches of people. As the Moon rises only late at night, the sky is usually cleared of light.
“Egypt is one of the best places in the world for stargazing. We have 300 clear nights a year,” said Amr Abdelwahab, president of the Dr Mostafa Mahmoud Astronomical Society.
“Marsa Alam is a great place for stargazing because it’s away from light pollution but we have some problems there because of the humidity,” Mr Abdelwahab said.
An ideal location for stargazing is a place with clear skies, high elevation, and low humidity and light pollution.
“Generally, beaches, deserts and farms are considered good places for stargazing, in particularly meteor showers,” said Ashraf Tadross, of the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics.
The institute operates the Helwan Observatory, which has the largest telescope in the Middle East.
During the annual Lyrid meteor shower, most shooting stars appear as streaks, an effect created by the Earth passing through debris from the long-period comet Thatcher, which is on its 415-year orbit around the Sun.
Viewing meteors is best just after dusk, when Earth’s orbit cuts into the comet’s debris trail, or just before dawn when Lyra is at its highest point in the sky.
When my travel companions and I laid down to look at the stars, we expected more of the meteors that pass in the blink of an eye. But the first one was a fireball: a brilliant streak with a bright head in the shape of an arrowhead. Fireballs enter the atmosphere at 49 kilometres a second before burning up at 1,650°C.
We spent the rest of the night waiting for another one as brilliant, but found out later that only one or two fireballs can be observed during the night of a shower.
Life back on Earth in Marsa Alam is slower, with most beaches inside Wadi El Gemal National Park – another popular stargazing spot in the area – undeveloped.
Qulaan, a beach in the far south of the national park, is famous for its mangrove tree on the entrance of a large lagoon.
Carrying your towels, books and snacks across 350 metres of ankle-deep, crystal-clear water is a small effort for the view of the tree, the isolation and size of which gives it an air of spirituality.
The sea beyond the tree is a rocky reef, which breaks a few hundred yards out where the ocean drops dozens of metres.
Egyptians and foreigners can camp in Wadi El Gemal National Park for some of the clearest skies in the region for stargazing.
Equipped with a home-made telescope, which can be put together at a cost of about 1,000 Egyptian pounds (Dh204), you can see as far as the surface of the Moon.