Last night and my telescope

I spent last night at an astronomy meeting. I dragged out my telescope, barely knocked the dust off of it, and headed out to the meeting, a bit shy and not sure what to expect. My scope is big, but it's nothing fancy. Here's an old picture of us at Table Mountain Star Party a few years ago.

I shouldn't have worried. Everyone was really nice, and we all had one thing in common - a love of the heavens. Everyone enjoyed looking through my scope (yay - something new!) just as much as I enjoyed looking through theirs, most of which were as big as mine, and newer and fancier. But my old scope has excellent optics, which is all that matters, so even if it looks a bit funky, it still does the job just as good as the new scopes.

I have been out of it a long time because of my 'cold allergy' but now that I have that pretty well under control with Zyrtec I want to get the scope out more and enjoy the dark skies we have at our house. We also used to do lots of school science fairs and 'sidewalk astronomy' with it, and it's always great fun to give the general public a chance to look through a big telescope.

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No aurora for me :(

One of these days I will get to see an aurora, but not today. I got my hopes up because there was a big sun storm earlier this week scheduled to hit today, but as usual - nothing visible here. Luckily time spent outside with my telescope is never time wasted. I passed the time either relaxing in my tent and watching the stars, or scanning them up close with the telescope, and hunting down the interesting nebula and clusters that I remembered how to find without looking them up in a book.

I had some fun shooting pictures of stars too, but it's tricky to get the exposure right. This was a shot of the milky way, and I liked the color that came out in the tree, considering everything was black in the viewfinder, so I had to just point and shoot and see what came out.

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