Bathstronomy: stargazing in an outdoor bath

Firstly, we are officially mad, according to those who wander though our acreage and come across our bath. We’ve had comments to ‘gee, you guys are motivated and clever’ to ‘what would the neighbours think’ to ‘it must be freezing'. But we smile secretly and know it's pretty much the best way to not only chill but to starwatch. Hence, bathstronomy.

I’ve always wanted an outdoor bath. I love our bathroom, and there’s a huge window looking out onto the garden, but it steams up, so you can’t really see much anyway. Hence this experiment. It's probably the most simple thing to do - take one cast iron bath, pop on some wooden legs, fill with water and light a fire underneath like so:

Now unless you surround the fire with bricks and mud, and make a chimney, you will bath in a fog of smoke unless you put the fire out. But if the fire keeps going, you will never get cold. We drag the hose over to cool it down when it gets too hot and use a bucket to empty it a bit. I keep a thermometer handy as you don't want it above about 38 to 40 degrees. We also made a slatted wood floor for it as seriously, your butt will burn on the bare metal above a certain temperature.

Note the chimney in the second shot, which takes away most of the smoke. We are still fine tuning it – eventually, all the smoke will go up the chimney.

There's some amazingly decorated firebaths around and I concede ours might not be one of then, but her beauty isn't in her immediate surrounds but the beauty that comes with nightfall. When she’s fired up and the sun sinks low as the moon rises, it feels like paradise. The darker it gets the more beautiful it becomes - the sky shifting from blue to shades of crimson, to deep indigo and then star struck black. The birds too swoop in for late evening play - the fiercely territorial Willy wigtail, honeyeaters swinging from kangaroo paws, pardalotes nestling in the birch, wedgetails soaring in the dusk.