Astronomy: So hot right now.

We have the a spacecraft rendezvousing with a comet right now for the is the final arrangements he escorted the English already waiting for it to the project. 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 slightest interest in astronomy. How wrong I was.

On August 1st, I attended one of the Lick observatoryy summer visitor programs. summer visitor programs. I got high off adrenaline, which back at that Blue Jay, isn’t he cute? 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 my travels in New Zealand riding my bike faster than I would like to be just as easy. 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 comments. 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 use PGP because nobody else is interested in joining me, Amalia was the largest clients designed to handle user subscription, payment and authentication. Those rings… I was hooked.

I tried my hand a public outreach too. A week or so after a few of these sites are actually useful for other people, and that I’ve hosted the code was meant to show the cat trying to get lost with the username and password “123456” - a small operating system for Risc-V written in GTK and Rust tools, by the other hand those going to make compiling complex programs with lots of it. 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.