The last couple of nights have been a bit cold and absolutely clear here in Northern California, and despite the bright moon that has made for a few nice nights of looking through the telescope.
I'm lucky enough to have a telescope that's much smarter than I am -- a so called "goto scope." Though I am slowly learning my way around the constellations, there is no way that I could approach this machine's ability to find faint objects through light-polluted suburban skies. Besides, this blog originates from the "heart of Silicon Valley," so no post would be complete without a bit of worshipping at the altar of technology.
And a bit of praise is indeed appropriate -- the Celestron NexStar 8SE is a wonder of a toy! In five minutes, I have it out in the backyard, leveled, powered up, and aligned to the sky. If I've done my job right (which is getting easier with practice), I can call up any of 40,000 objects with the press of a few buttons. Less if we discount those stars blocked by my neighbors' trees. The telescope's mount then makes some noise for a few seconds, the tube rotates, and then Mars is right there in the eyepiece.
With such a great tool at hand, it's easy to look at open clusters like M44 and M67, and find faint smudges through the haze that focus to be amazing views of distant galaxies like M51. But what really grabs my time and attention is Saturn. It is real. Not just a "yes it exists, it comes after Jupiter and before Uranus, has rings and moons" kind of real, but a right there and complex and in my eyepiece sort of real. It is both other-worldly and clearly of my universe -- a vibrant far-away place that I experience in a simple personal way. Thirty minutes of looking at a "live" image of Saturn through a good telescope has impressed me more than years of studying physics.
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