Not an early night....

Monday ended up not being an early night, for those who were wondering. Neither was Tuesday. Went to bed about 6:00 a.m. on .. well, Tuesday, and 6:30 on Wednesday (I think that's today). So, that's the way it goes when you want to see the night sky. Ain't gonna see it during regular business hours!

Monday, SpikeTV was running a marathon of all six Star Wars movies. They had been running them in blocks over the weekend, so I had seen most of the prequels. Episode VI: Return of the Jedi was on about dinner time, so I watched it. Unfortunately, Spike is commercial-bloated, so the movie wasn't over until 11:00. Well, since I didn't have anything rented it was no big deal. I went out with my little 90 mm scope and binoculars and sketch pad after the movie. The sky was spectacular, as it has been since I got here (first night clouding over not withstanding). Since I had viewed so very many targets the night before, I was content to just look at the sky.

I wanted to capture something of the majesty of the Milky Way, and so attempted a sketch. It's pretty rough, and I may try to clean it up later, but here it is, for what it's worth.

As you can see it is blocky for one thing and mostly dark for another. That is one of the contradictions of this thing. In this section of sky, any way, the Milky Way is defined more by the dark dust lane that blocks our view of the galactic core than by the light of that core. (Oh, if you are trying to figure out where this is, the middle star at top is Altair in Aquila and Cygnus is on the right edge.) Now, it seems to me that if that dust lane weren't there, the center of the galaxy would be so bright that it would blot out much of the rest of the sky like the Moon does and our interest in and knowledge of the universe might be greatly reduced. We need that dark stripe to see the other faint (almost typed "faith" -- force of habit) objects that are so inspiring. Hmm... Maybe typing "faith" would have been just as appropriate. Hmm.... Bet that will preach....

As it happened, there was also a minor meteor shower peaking that night, so after doing the sketch, I stretched out on a picnic table and just watched. Now, any time you go out and can see a fair number of stars, if wait long enough you will see shooting stars. They happen all the time. If you happen to be in a place like this, you don't have to wait long to see one. So whether I was actually seeing a shower or not, I can't say. There were more than I have seen the other nights, but the other nights I've been looking through telescopes. That's like looking at the sky through a drinking straw. You only see a tiny bit of sky at a time. This night, looking up constantly, there were meteors aplenty! The shower was supposed to be radiating from Perseus, in the northeast sky at the time I was looking. Many more of the meteors I saw were radiating from Pegasus. As far as I know there wasn't a shower scheduled there, and Pegasus was at the zenith -- straight up -- so that is probably why they seemed to be coming from there. It was beautiful to see.

But you know, at my age you can only lie on a picnic table in the cold for so long before even the glory of the night sky can't compete with not lying on a picnic table. I came to the library and worked on email and facebook, and before you could say Zubenelgenubi, it was 5:00.

Okay, next, my experience of the JMI reverse binoculars. Stay subscribed!