Tele...scoping Out the Skies

Be it ever so Hubble...there's no place like home. Okay, so it's not the Hubble...but we did get a huge telescope the other day...a late Christmas present for my kids. Okay..I confess...it was for me as well...I've always been fond of space things. Space things, Greek myths and dinosaurs to be exact...but I digress once again.

Now I've seen enough space documentaries to know that there are certain things I just couldn't wait to see "in person"...and I'd been waiting in anticipation to see Saturn for some time. And time is what it took for me to locate it...even with skymaps and a stargazing CD program at my disposal. But what a literal high it was to see...in all its resplendent glory...rings and all...just like, well, just like in those documentaries. Altho I have to admit it did look fake...it looked like a drawing...one of those "NASA animation" things you've probably seen on television. And I had to sit and wonder just how incredible it must have been for the first person to find that thing...there amongst the multitude of white dots on the sky like so many polka dots on a sundress...each one looking exactly like the other...and then to realize it wasn't.

So I've deduced a couple things: Spying into the night sky and locating a pinpoint object, even with an 8" scope isn't as easy as it sounds...and darnit, even when you do hone in on it, thirty seconds later it's out of view and you have to find it all over again. It's rather odd to realize that we actually zoom thru the sky that quickly. Oh, sure, I could have gotten the "go to" telescope where you hit a few buttons and it will automatically go and "fetch" what you tell it to, but first off I thought that was "cheating", secondly, it rather costs a bunch more.

Altho I do fear that my ability to find a nifty nebula or a glistening galaxy is akin to looking for a needle in the proverbial cosmic debris haystack, I also believe the more I stick to it and learn what's out there and where, the easier it will become. I'm kinda banking on that, so please, please don't tell me this is totally futile...yes, you can snicker at me from afar, like so many of those twinkling spots of light out there. But for now I will be content to lug my 50 pound black tube outside of my home and scour the night sky like a celestial detective hoping to capture the elusive culprit...and to get some dirt on them...even if that dirt happens to reside literally light years away from me.