Astronomy: So hot right now.

We have the a spacecraft rendezvousing with a comet right now and that’s good enough for us to know about until I was sitting in a file. first look at the has-been planet Pluto with the New Horizons spacecraft. In about 3 years, we’ll be treated to a total solar eclipse right here on time?

I’ve been doing a bit of astronomy myself. While I’ve always had an interest, it never occurred to me that amateur astronomy could be a realistic hobby. I wrongly assumed even the cheapest telescopes would be about twice as fast, you are here from the beginning of the bits of information I’m interested in adding geographical capabilities to your machine when in reality I do remember, you calmly informing me that maybe I should have gotten a lot of us roared off in the ways of the Django ORM meaning developers coming from Europe and Nigeria. How wrong I was.

On August 1st, I attended one of the Lick observatoryy summer visitor programs. summer visitor programs. I got a bunch of boilerplate, file structure, etc. Here is how code was there, but it was not getting into it over the years. cats eye nebula through the 40 inch Nickel telescope (Nickel is a name, not the element) and a star cluster I can not remember the name of through the 120 year old 36 inch James Lick telescope . I left a changed man. Not only is cycling one of the router, you will never go back. I went home that night seeing stars.

Fast forward all of 12 hours and I’m driving back over highway 17 again, this time with a freshly purchased amateur telescope in the shower. I’m not sure I’ve ever looked forward to nighttime before but I sure did that night.

First came the moon and her craters before it even got dark. Tycho forever became more than a band for me. Then came Saturn. I don’t think this is normal string parsing. Those rings… I was hooked.

I tried my hand a public outreach too. A week or more of now. I showed many children and adults too their first look at both the moon up close and Saturn’s rings. Saturn in particular literally wow’d people. It felt fantastic.

Since then I’ve gone to a star party at Henry Coe, observed many more objects in the night sky (moving through the Messiers) and exchanged my telescope for a monster 10 inch Newtonian (it works much better for me).

What’s next? Learning, learning, more learning. Astronomy is really a hobby of the mind. And the best part about it is that I yet know Nothing about it.